The Weakness of Organization: A New Look at Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest

In The Strategy of Social Protest William Gamson asserted that the organization and tactics of a social protest group strongly influence the group's chances for successes. This assertion was based on an analysis of the rates of success of 53 social protest groups arising in America between 1800 and 1945. This article shows frist that Gamson's results are based on a series of very weak assumptions and on frequently spurious zero-order correlations. When data on the rates of protest group success are reanalyzed, no effect of organizational or tactical parameters is evident. Additional data on the timing of social protest group success are then introduced, and a stochastic model is presented which closely fits the data (r > .95). With the help of this model, the timing of success is also shown to be substantially independent of the organization and tactics of the protest group. Finally, a new interpretation of the probability of protest group success, based on the incidence of broad national crises, is suggested.