CONTENDING THEORIES OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS AND THE STRUCTURE-ACTION PROBLEM OF SOCIAL ORDER

To understand protest in America, one must understand protest and one must understand America. More generally, the study of resistance against authority may adopt two foci: authority (structure) and resistance (action). The leading practitioners of the structuralist approach to contentious politics—McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly—have jointly systematized their ideas. This synthesis, which I call Synthetic Political Opportunity Theory (SPOT), exerts domination and hegemony over the field. Its upstart rational action challenger is the Collective Action Research Program (CARP). I outline the basic presuppositions of SPOT and CARP and describe their different approaches to the structure-action problem of constituting social order. I then explore the potential of a CARP-SPOT consortium. I conclude that synergisms of the perspectives are possible but that trade-offs are inevitable: strong on action, weak on structure and vice versa; strong on resistance, weak on authority and vice versa; and strong on protest, weak on America and vice versa. Hence, we need creative confrontations, which should include well-defined combinations rather than grand syntheses, of rationalist and structuralist approaches to contentious politics.