Do movements matter? In particular, can they extract policy concessions from state actors? And if so, how? These questions have been the focus in recent years of a burgeoning and exciting literature. For Frances Fox Piven, the answer to the question “Do movements matter?” is an emphatic yes. Indeed, she argues that the principal surges in egalitarian social change in American history can be traced directly or indirectly to the intervention of disruptive protest movements. For Edwin Amenta, the answer is also yes, but in a more qualified fashion. Together, these two works are brimming with insights regarding how movement impact might be understood.

In Challenging Authority, Piven argues that the fundamental basis of movement power is disruption, broadly construed, and its impact upon electoral politics. In their ability to interfere with the routine realization of elite interests, social movements can compel their unwilling targets to make concessions in order to assuage the grievances of insurgents. For Piven, elective officeholders (Democrats and Republicans alike) are basically conservative, and seek to maintain their electoral majorities through the use of broad, inoffensive appeals, rather than providing policy concessions that might fragment their coalition. In general, elites make concessions to movements because of their direct or indirect capacity to reduce the cohesion of the dominant political coalition.

By my count, Piven suggests four main routes by which this is accomplished. First, movement disruptions heighten the salience of particular issues and remedies among mass constituencies. Second, to the extent that movements actuate voters directly, this electoral leverage may be sufficient to elicit favorable attention from elective officeholders. Third, movement activists may insinuate themselves within party organizations to produce responsiveness from within. Finally, Piven suggests that disruption can indirectly produce disequilibria in political coalitions that necessitate overtures in the form of new policy benefits for disaffected constituencies. Thus, she implies that the basis of movement leverage depends variously upon supportive public opinion, fear of electoral reprisal, leverage from within the dominant party organization, and unintended consequences.

To demonstrate her argument, Piven traces a breathtaking historical arc from mob activity in the Revolutionary period, to abolitionism, to the movements of the Great Depression era, and eventually to Civil Rights agitation in the 1960s. Her argument is audacious. Without revolutionary era mobs, abolitionist agitation, and the unruly disruptions from the unemployed, workers, African Americans, and others, bursts in egalitarian social change simply would not have happened. In the section addressing the twentieth century, her formulation might be put bluntly as follows: no disruptive protests, no New Deal nor Great Society. Her argument, which no doubt is meant to be provocative, challenges those approaches that dismiss or minimize the contributions of social movements in their explanations for egalitarian political change. Too, Piven argues that the cessation of disruptive protests contributes to the retrenchment of previous policy victories. With the decline of disorder and a reduction in the threat of electoral division, officeholders reset public policies to be consonant with the new balance of political leverage in the electorate. This pattern, she maintains, provides further proof that major policy reforms depend upon the presence of insurgencies.

Whereas Piven describes social movement outcomes in broad historical brushstrokes, Edwin Amenta's When Movements Matter depicts in meticulous detail the impact of the Townsend movement upon old-age social policy, particularly from 1934 to 1950. Firmly based on social movement theory, Amenta's analysis will be more immediately appreciated by those seeking to discern precisely the conditions under which movements make a difference in policy outcomes. His close attention to the nuances of the legislative process in old-age policy offers an astute and subtle analysis of the interaction between movement and discrete policymakers. For Amenta, movement impact is “politically mediated” such that mobilization is likely to win policy concessions only if the broader political alignment is favorable and the movement uses tactics suited to its political-institutional circumstances. The posture of elected officials and state bureaucrats toward the demands of the social movement define the salient political conditions within which movements select their strategies. Under highly favorable circumstances, in which the movement has support from both elected officials and bureaucrats, new benefits may be obtained by using only limited protest and an effective demonstration of mass support through widespread mobilization. By contrast, less favorable conditions necessitate more assertive strategies, including electoral threats against officeholders and sanctioning bureaucrats. More assertive behaviors are more demanding for social movements and, therefore, as political conditions turn less favorable, the prospects for winning new collective benefits diminish accordingly. In this way, Amenta's approach neatly combines structure and agency to account for variation in movement impact.

To evaluate his theoretical perspective, Amenta carefully delineates the influence over time of the Townsend movement, which pushed for generous old-age pensions, on social policy at both the national and state levels. At its peak, the Townsend movement encompassed two million supporters, nearly a fifth of Americans over 60 years of age. However, the author demonstrates that the movement's impact was variable, depending upon both real or anticipated electoral clout and the use of effective strategies.

Amenta suggests that before the onset of Townsend mobilization, the Roosevelt administration in early 1934 already had plans for old-age assistance. That said, he argues that the wildfire mobilization of Townsend clubs induced the administration to move old-age policy higher on the agenda and to boost the proposed old-age benefits. In 1935, as Congress hammered out the specifics of the Social Security Act, the Townsend movement came out against the bill, preferring only their own measure, and failed to push for greater generosity in Old-Age Assistance (OAA) benefits. Thus, despite movement mobilization, strategic ineptitude allowed the House Ways and Means Committee to cut benefits to levels below the administration's request. Throughout the following three years, the movement lacked the leverage to place old-age policy back on the national political agenda. Then, exogenous circumstances intervened to do so. This time around, the Townsend Plan, as well as other pro-pension challengers, won higher benefits under OAA. Although the movement was incapable of passing the Townsend Plan or dictating the contents of the final legislative product, this outcome depended heavily on the electoral leverage in numerous congressional districts that the movement had carefully cultivated. In the next wave of legislative consideration, subsequent organizational expansion in key electoral territory, particularly the East and Midwest, meant that the movement had greater electoral leverage than ever before. Amenta maintains that only the attack on Pearl Harbor thwarted the adoption of a universal old-age pension. Armistice and the ascendance of the conservative coalition in Congress kept the movement from winning further victories. Nevertheless, the movement continued to have an indirect affect upon old-age policy. By the late 1940s, the organization's prior achievements in enlarging old-age benefits under OAA produced fiscal arrangements that indirectly fostered political support for a shift toward Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI). These changes, in the absence of effective organized demands, led to the birth of the modern Social Security program.

With Piven and Amenta both offering accounts of the New Deal surge in social policy, a juxtaposition of their approaches is instructive. While in some ways complementary, their analyses diverge on key points. First, the Townsend movement hardly appears to be disruptive in the fashion to which Piven often alludes, that is, engaging in rallies, strikes, rioting, or other unorthodox political behaviors. Rather, this movement appears to be a quintessential pressure group operating fully within the norms of electoral politics. True, as the movement grew and became capable of threatening electoral disruptions, it acquired greater leverage over old-age policy, but these disruptions were of a quite conventional variety. Second, Piven seems to argue that in the absence of mobilization to disrupt electoral politics, the Social Security Act would not have been enacted. Amenta disagrees and suggests that old-age policy was already on the administration's agenda before Townsendite organization, and that some measure was likely to be enacted irrespective of the movement. Furthermore, instead of assertive mobilization automatically boosting generosity, Amenta's analysis indicates that the movement's tactical blunders actually allowed congressional conservatives to reduce OAA benefit levels below the administration's original recommendation. Finally, while Amenta's analysis indicates that greater Democratic control in Congress furnishes movements seeking enlarged social policy benefits with better prospects for success, Piven treats these circumstances as analytically insufficient. Her argument nevertheless points to the hypothesis that disruptions have the effects she identifies only during moments in which center-left coalitions are dominant, a situation which may well be exogenous to social movement agitation.

Despite significant disagreements, both narratives converge in the proposition that movements matter under the right circumstances, and they clarify what those circumstances are. While there are sure to be challenges to the specifics of her analysis, Piven's argument should stimulate a lively debate and provoke further research on the specification of movement impact during the fleeting moments of egalitarian public policymaking. The propositions that she offers in this regard are bold and suggestive. For his part, Amenta's sharp theoretical analysis of Townsend mobilization and his rigorous excavation of the historical evidence sets a high standard for future research and makes an exceptionally significant contribution to the literature on movement impact. For those interested in how social movements shape politics and policy, especially in an egalitarian direction, both studies warrant attention and careful consideration.