While different in scope and intent, both books offer a refreshing and uplifting sense of the capacity and willingness of people to protest conditions in society, or the world, which they deem unjust. The authors may not have set out to highlight idealism in political activism, but they ended up doing so.

The question of the impact of political protests is still a murky area. Such impact is difficult to show, and the authors of these two important books have not come up with a magic formula to convince us that public protests change public policy. But they do offer useful insights into how protestors operate and what seems to motivate them. The contribution of both works is that they add fresh insights and examples in support of two current trends in the study of social movements and political protest: 1) an increasing focus on cultural explanations of activism, and 2) growing evidence that activists are willing to forge ahead even in the face of major obstacles, including repression. The two trends are related.

It Was Like a Fever offers yet another challenge to the straitjacket of self-interest analysis, by examining passion, emotion, excitement—and just plain fun—as other motivating factors that can lead to political protest. The debate over whether culture or material conditions lead to change in society is an old one, going back at least as far as Max Weber's cultural rebuttal to Karl Marx's materialistic arguments. But it has never been entirely an either/or debate. To her credit, Francesca Polletta makes it clear that her cultural argument is not to be taken as the only way to see things, declaring that she does not want to replace a “structural fundamentalism” with a “cultural fundamentalism” (p 5). Weber (1922) took more or less the same position in responding to Marx in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Polletta's particular contribution to the debate lies in her argument that analyzing narratives can help explain why some politically contentious issues get attention, why people take action, and why they choose particular tactics and strategies. There are cultural elements in the arguments of Donatella della Porta and her coauthors, but their main contribution lies with the second trend in social movement studies.

Globalization from Below, in describing new forms of political protest at the international level, also shows that these international activists forged ahead despite lack of what much of the literature on social movements refers to as political opportunities: “The movement for globalization from below … grew quickly at a time when political opportunities were diminishing” (p. 198). The authors include in the diminishing opportunities the lack of divisions within governments that might have made it easier to push those governments to make reforms.

Activists also faced forceful resistance from police at the international forums in Italy, on which della Porta and her colleagues focus. Yet it did not deter them from demanding a greater public voice in the making of international policies affecting world trade terms, the environment, and, in their view, the very nature of democratic government. Polletta similarly points out how activists overcame police and public resistance to carry out the sit-ins to integrate lunch counters in the 1960s.

Both books prod social movement theorists to pay more attention to the voices of the nonpowerful, the nonelite, and to examine their role in politics. Polletta makes a subtle and useful point regarding a process that may begin with stories and end with policy changes. Stories, she argues, can challenge the status quo by showing how some people are hurt by certain policies; and stories can “serve as a kind of check on values that are assumed to be universal and standards that are assumed to be neutral” (p 108). Della Porta et al. focus on activism by the victims of globalization as well as by their supporters over issues of perceived injustices of globalization.

Globalization from Below documents, through hundreds of interviews among protestors at two international summit meetings in Italy (2001 in Genoa, 2002 in Florence), the diversity of activists' backgrounds, affiliations, and choices of tactics. While emphasizing the importance of diverse individuals and not just organizations, the authors argue that the effectiveness of such protestors lies in how successful they are in “recognizing the role of individuals but at the same time [being] able to sustain collective action” (p 247). One of the principal contributions of their book is the data it provides, which offer one of the first detailed portraits of activists and the networks they form. These activists share a general distrust of international institutions, such as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. They constitute a diverse movement of international protestors who shun a collective identity but seek a collective process to make their voices heard more effectively (p. 247).

It Was Like a Fever has a much narrower scope and is a subtle work that builds on previous scholarship about the importance of storytelling and politics (e.g., see Charles Tilly, Identities, and Political Change, 2002; Joseph Davis, ed., Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements, 2002). Effective stories, Polletta argues, can motivate people to action, especially in the early stages of a protest movement before it is well organized. Her prime example is the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s that spread “like a fever” (p. 32) in the words of some students. Within 10 weeks, sits-ins grew from four college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, to some 50,000 participants in nine states with a sense of spontaneity, “fun,” and a “giddy sense of excitement (p. 41).

Polletta, whose focus is intentionally not just on protest politics, also examines whether storytelling can help or hurt victims—especially women—of social injustice. She also discusses the apparent disconnect between annual storytelling in Congress to memorialize Dr. Martin Luther King and the failure of such rhetoric to generate legislation that would help the people Dr. King tried to help. She also challenges those who would classify narratives or stories as only personal and emotional phenomena, rather than political and authoritative (p. 28), insisting that narratives are a crucial kind of data for political science analysis.

What is missing in both works is convincing evidence that political protests change policy. Political scientist della Porta and colleagues focus on the actors and only slightly on the impact—not impact on policy but impact on police and how police respond to tactics of the protestors. They also note media coverage of the protests. Sociologist Polletta, whose explanations are not always easy to follow, does not explain why some people are motivated to action by stories but most are not. Nor do her examples provide strong empirical evidence of the link between storytelling and action, much less between action and policy outcomes.

To point this out, however, is not to detract from the value of the two works. Clear evidence of the impact on policy of protests or storytelling would be hard to come by. Social movement theorists as a whole have a hard time coming up with compelling linkages between protests and policy changes. Even scholars who address this issue directly struggle to do so (e.g., see Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter, 1999). But social movements can raise public awareness of an issue and that can lead to a variety of pressures for political change.

One reason that demonstrating clear causal links between social movements and policy is so difficult is because of the array of pressures or factors involved in any change of policy. There were, for example, massive protests against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, yet the war continued for a number of years. There was no major protest movement against the U.S. involvement in Somalia in the early 1990s, yet the televised image of one American soldier being dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu so shocked and revolted the American public that within a few days, President Bill Clinton initiated steps to withdraw all American troops.

As with any works, some questions remain unanswered, which is good because it leaves open a rich terrain for future researchers. Global activists are demanding a new type of politics. But are mass protests or mass concerts more effective in bringing about the changes they seek? (After a mass concert and a protest march organized by U2's Bono and Bob Geldof in 2005 to pressure leaders at the G8 summit, the G8 leaders agreed to double aid to Africa from $25 million to $50 million.) If narratives are important in protests and politics, then researchers should be able to come up with additional cases, and good stories, that support this claim. Those interested in such questions will find that these two books offer a good starting point for their research.