A Learning Theory of the American Anti-Vietnam War Movement

Since the end of the Second World War, radical and revolutionary movements have played prominent roles in domestic and international politics. Research on these movements has focused on two separate dependent variables, why individuals join a movement, and why individuals or movements engage in civil strife (cf. Keniston 1968 and Gurr 1970). This dual focus tends to overlook the fact that there is usually a time lag between the formation of a movement and its use of civil strife as a political strategy. This paper will try to fill this gap in the literature by developing a theory that will explain how movements learn to adopt and reject different political strategies. The intention is to provide a complementary explanation to the work cited above, rather than a competing theory. The theory will be derived by searching the learning theory literature to discover basic insights that might be useful in explaining political behavior. These insights will then be formalized into a model, and applied to the American anti-Vietnam war movement. The use of a single case to inductively generate a set of propositions means that the analysis is strictly theoretical and does not attempt to systematically test the theory.