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New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, by Hanspeter Kriesi, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 310 pp. $54.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-2760-7. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8166-2761-5.
In the aftermath of the student revolt of the 1960s, a cluster of protest movements with a leftist and libertarian leaning has emerged and flourished in many countries. Unlike the labor movement, which can be seen as the paradigmatic model of an "old" movement, these "new" movements are recruited from the middle class and focus on problems of reproduction and identity. Few attempts have been made to study these movements across time and national borders. This is the starting point of the Dutch-Swiss team of authors. They attempt to present "an empirically grounded theory about the impact of national political context structures on the mobilization patterns of social movements in general, and new social movements in particular" (p. xxiii). The core of this study consists of a large set of data on protests based on newspaper reports in four countries (France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) over a considerable span of time (1975-9).
The first part of the book ("General Concepts and Basic Results") discusses the impact of the relatively stable elements of the political context on movement mobilization,...