Great post, James. There are some solid—though underused—research methods that can help systematically measure the impact of specific movements or tactics e.g. Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which is useful when you have too many cases for in-depth case studies, but not enough for traditional statistical methods like regressions. I'd like us to explore this at Social Change Lab. I found this post interesting on that topic: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/activism-influence-change/2025/03/13/can-we-systematically-uncover-activists-recipes/
Great article, James. I very much agree with Sam's comment. Given what's at stake and how much energy goes into various social movements, it's flabbergasting that there isn't a comprehensive systematic analysis of what approach has worked best when and in which context. I'm in favor of starting there and am happy to support such an effort however I can.
Love the suggestions of the "scout mindset" : Holding your identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than as a central source of pride and meaning in your life. It's a description, not a flag to be waved proudly. AND Engage with people you disagree with.
Even if it sounds like obvious "easy-to-follow" advice, it is harder to do than it seems. Still, it's absolutely possible! And I'm grateful for the reminders too because it's not something once-and-done.
Really good points. I have a ways to go in terms of being more objective and less motivated in my reasoning.
I'm curious about your reference to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as an example of a "local legal battle which leads to national legislation opposite to what you want." That year marked one of the most rapid and dramatic shifts in the history of public opinion polling — 68% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage in 1996, which flipped to 67% support for gay marriage by 2018.
Evan Wolfson, a leading gay rights attorney and advocate, has cited DOMA as an example of the value of "losing forward" in which backlash can raise awareness for a movement, energize its supporters, and refine its strategies. DOMA was part of a wave of decades of legislative backlash, including California's Prop 8 ban of gay marriage in 2008, before a massive reversal of SCOTUS federally legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015.
This doesn't imply to me that all legislative backlash against one's movement is good. Bad legislation can be bad — and I should be careful of picking individual examples to support my beliefs. But the DOMA case seems to me as an example of how backlash isn't necessarily something to avoid, and may have been something that the gay rights movement, in a way, should have wanted.
Yeah I think the DOMA case is not clear cut so thanks for challenging / pushing back on this!
On this, I think my main point is that the Baehr case in Hawaii led to DOMA and around 22 state consitutional amendments against same-sex marriage in the following years. It wasn't until the advocacy which happened from the 1996ish onwards that public opinion on the issue seemed to turn around and they actually won some initiatives/policies and reversed earlier bad legislation. So basically my position is that it's not clear if marriage equality turned it around in spite of earlier unstrategic efforts like Baehr or because it actually helped the cause (and we'll never know because we don't have a counterfactual universe and smart people argue both sides).
In Engines of Liberty (great book btw), David Cole also talks about Wolfson's approach as saying backlash can be counterproductive. I agree that again we can find some examples of this working, but also plenty where it's not good (e.g. see UK climate movement being decimated by government repression, jail time and bad public opinion towards climate activists). I think you need to consider other factors like:
1) Will our base see this as unjust and get more mobilised or will they think we tried something ridiculous so of course we lost
2) Do we have enough power in our movement to resist the opposition and fight back
3) How long-lasting will the consequences of the backlash be (e.g. new negative legislation that sticks for decades)
and my guess is that in some cases it will be worse overall to invite backlash.
Finally, I'm also generally a bit sceptical of this "losing forward" approach as it can be used to basically justify anything which doesn't work, which seems clearly wrong.
I think there's some value in looking deeply into past social movements that worked to figure out *why* their method worked. Why was Ireland successful in using a Citizen's Assembly? Was it something about Irish politics? Was that particular Citizen's Assembly just extremely good at politicking? We know the NAACP did a great job at base-building, but what were its techniques? What material conditions did it take advantage of, that made base-building a particularly suitable strategy?
It's important not to be dogmatic about our methods and tailor our approach based on the optimal conditions of the situation at hand; but looking at how successful movements have done it in the past may give us clues about how we should tailor our approach. For example, if we notice that the NAACP took advantage of a particular set of material conditions, and those conditions also exist in our movement - maybe we should build some bases.
Coming back to this, as I'm offering some remarks tomorrow at the Birmingham Animal Law conference on the intersection of research and activism.
First, great post - love it and think you should post more. There should be more evidence-based and hard hitting conversations like this on important movement phenomena. And I agree with taking the Scout Mindset. I haven't read the Galef book mostly because from what I've read about it, I already agree with almost everything in it!
Second, there is a significant difference between "using a historical movement" to justify a belief, and using the movement in a way that's empirically justified. There are many propositions that have stronger evidence than others, and I think it's important to distinguish. (Social change lab did a great job of this, for example, with its survey of movement experts!) The evidence on nonviolence v violence, for example, is much better than the evidence on inside v outside. The examples you give above of movement's citing social movements strike me as vastly different in their evidentiary basis. (e.g., evidence for nonviolence is much stronger than evidence for [planned] technological disruption.)
Third, I wonder if we'd both agree that the more fundamental problem with social movements is not that people mis-use the cases and evidence, but that there's little engagement with the evidence or history at all? I don't think it makes sense to reflexively use historical evidence to justify your beliefs. But I think that's better than not looking at the evidence at all, and I would sy that should be the higher priority. I would follow this up with another blog with the title:
"We should provide some justification for our activism with historical social movements, even if that's inevitably biased"
Great post, James. There are some solid—though underused—research methods that can help systematically measure the impact of specific movements or tactics e.g. Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which is useful when you have too many cases for in-depth case studies, but not enough for traditional statistical methods like regressions. I'd like us to explore this at Social Change Lab. I found this post interesting on that topic: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/activism-influence-change/2025/03/13/can-we-systematically-uncover-activists-recipes/
Great article, James. I very much agree with Sam's comment. Given what's at stake and how much energy goes into various social movements, it's flabbergasting that there isn't a comprehensive systematic analysis of what approach has worked best when and in which context. I'm in favor of starting there and am happy to support such an effort however I can.
Love the suggestions of the "scout mindset" : Holding your identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than as a central source of pride and meaning in your life. It's a description, not a flag to be waved proudly. AND Engage with people you disagree with.
Even if it sounds like obvious "easy-to-follow" advice, it is harder to do than it seems. Still, it's absolutely possible! And I'm grateful for the reminders too because it's not something once-and-done.
Really good points. I have a ways to go in terms of being more objective and less motivated in my reasoning.
I'm curious about your reference to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as an example of a "local legal battle which leads to national legislation opposite to what you want." That year marked one of the most rapid and dramatic shifts in the history of public opinion polling — 68% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage in 1996, which flipped to 67% support for gay marriage by 2018.
Evan Wolfson, a leading gay rights attorney and advocate, has cited DOMA as an example of the value of "losing forward" in which backlash can raise awareness for a movement, energize its supporters, and refine its strategies. DOMA was part of a wave of decades of legislative backlash, including California's Prop 8 ban of gay marriage in 2008, before a massive reversal of SCOTUS federally legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015.
This doesn't imply to me that all legislative backlash against one's movement is good. Bad legislation can be bad — and I should be careful of picking individual examples to support my beliefs. But the DOMA case seems to me as an example of how backlash isn't necessarily something to avoid, and may have been something that the gay rights movement, in a way, should have wanted.
Yeah I think the DOMA case is not clear cut so thanks for challenging / pushing back on this!
On this, I think my main point is that the Baehr case in Hawaii led to DOMA and around 22 state consitutional amendments against same-sex marriage in the following years. It wasn't until the advocacy which happened from the 1996ish onwards that public opinion on the issue seemed to turn around and they actually won some initiatives/policies and reversed earlier bad legislation. So basically my position is that it's not clear if marriage equality turned it around in spite of earlier unstrategic efforts like Baehr or because it actually helped the cause (and we'll never know because we don't have a counterfactual universe and smart people argue both sides).
In Engines of Liberty (great book btw), David Cole also talks about Wolfson's approach as saying backlash can be counterproductive. I agree that again we can find some examples of this working, but also plenty where it's not good (e.g. see UK climate movement being decimated by government repression, jail time and bad public opinion towards climate activists). I think you need to consider other factors like:
1) Will our base see this as unjust and get more mobilised or will they think we tried something ridiculous so of course we lost
2) Do we have enough power in our movement to resist the opposition and fight back
3) How long-lasting will the consequences of the backlash be (e.g. new negative legislation that sticks for decades)
and my guess is that in some cases it will be worse overall to invite backlash.
Finally, I'm also generally a bit sceptical of this "losing forward" approach as it can be used to basically justify anything which doesn't work, which seems clearly wrong.
Nice catch! I agree with your assessment.
I think there's some value in looking deeply into past social movements that worked to figure out *why* their method worked. Why was Ireland successful in using a Citizen's Assembly? Was it something about Irish politics? Was that particular Citizen's Assembly just extremely good at politicking? We know the NAACP did a great job at base-building, but what were its techniques? What material conditions did it take advantage of, that made base-building a particularly suitable strategy?
It's important not to be dogmatic about our methods and tailor our approach based on the optimal conditions of the situation at hand; but looking at how successful movements have done it in the past may give us clues about how we should tailor our approach. For example, if we notice that the NAACP took advantage of a particular set of material conditions, and those conditions also exist in our movement - maybe we should build some bases.
Coming back to this, as I'm offering some remarks tomorrow at the Birmingham Animal Law conference on the intersection of research and activism.
First, great post - love it and think you should post more. There should be more evidence-based and hard hitting conversations like this on important movement phenomena. And I agree with taking the Scout Mindset. I haven't read the Galef book mostly because from what I've read about it, I already agree with almost everything in it!
Second, there is a significant difference between "using a historical movement" to justify a belief, and using the movement in a way that's empirically justified. There are many propositions that have stronger evidence than others, and I think it's important to distinguish. (Social change lab did a great job of this, for example, with its survey of movement experts!) The evidence on nonviolence v violence, for example, is much better than the evidence on inside v outside. The examples you give above of movement's citing social movements strike me as vastly different in their evidentiary basis. (e.g., evidence for nonviolence is much stronger than evidence for [planned] technological disruption.)
Third, I wonder if we'd both agree that the more fundamental problem with social movements is not that people mis-use the cases and evidence, but that there's little engagement with the evidence or history at all? I don't think it makes sense to reflexively use historical evidence to justify your beliefs. But I think that's better than not looking at the evidence at all, and I would sy that should be the higher priority. I would follow this up with another blog with the title:
"We should provide some justification for our activism with historical social movements, even if that's inevitably biased"