The Success of Sustainable Mobilization the Embeddedness of Movements Among Voluntary Organizations and Their Success in Mobilization

There are many studies explaining protest-participation generally, but much less are trying to explain the stability and steadiness of mobilization of particular movements or protests. Resource mobilization theory suggests that this success depends on the movement’s embeddedness in organizational networks. Thus, we examine how contemporary movements are embedded in organizational networks and how this factor influences their success in sustainable mobilization.

During the past years, a number of critical and pro-government movements have emerged in Hungary. Given that the organizing-actors show great stability, thus often the same actors appear as organizers, one would expect that they are able to mobilize a similar number of participants from time to time. But this is hardly the case: While pro-government rallies are able to mobilize tens of thousands each time, the number of participants in critical movements is waving from a couple hundred to 50.000.

Therefore we examine how the capacity for mobilization depends on these movements’ embeddedness in different types of voluntary organizations, (e.g. religious and environmental organizations or trade unions) and social movements Based on Baldassari and Diani’s work (2007) we assume, that this mobilization capacity depends on the structure of the network of organizations. The more hierarchical a network is, the more stable the mobilization capacity will be, while movements embedded in less hierarchical networks are less capable to mobilize the same amount of people. On the other hand, in less hierarchical networks, we will find more actors who are able to organize protest events, thus the number of such events will be higher. Moreover, we expect that the different types of protests are embedded in different networks of voluntary organizations. We examine this embeddedness through a survey conducted in 2014 among the Hungarian adult population inquiries their participation in certain protest events and their affiliation to voluntary organizations.