New social movements: the role of legal opportunity

The article seeks to introduce the idea of legal opportunity into social movement theory. It suggests that while lobbying, litigation and protest have all been studied by political scientists as strategies for policy change, they have tended to consider the three in varying degrees of isolation. The article aims to remedy this by providing an integrated analysis of all three types of strategy, in a domestic and EU context. Four social movements - the women's movement, the environmental movement, the lesbian and gay movement, and the animal welfare movement - are used as examples in this respect.