Carriers of Change: Conceptualizing Outcomes of Contention over the Long-Term

This article proposes a framework to understand how contentious politics can influence outcomes in the long-term. The literature on social movement outcomes argues that the capacity of social movements to produce outcomes depends on the reactions of public opinion, allies, and political parties, which act as mediating factors that shape the range and depth of the potential responses of the state to activism. Accordingly, causality is mostly indirect and easier to find in shorter temporal frames, i.e., when there are fewer iterations between the original causes and the outcome of interest. However, the literature is more ambiguous when it comes to the long-term. While important works in this field have covered long periods of time, this article argues that a better understanding of the temporal dimension of contentious politics is required to clarify how contention produces long-term outcomes. The core argument is that social movements will be more consequential when they can produce outcomes that produce outcomes. When such outcomes emerge in early phases, social movements can extend and amplify their influence in later phases. Drawing on the metaphor of time-travelling, the article theorizes the concept of carriers of change. Carriers can be understood as time-machines that convey demands, ideas, and actors from one moment in time to another. But unlike time-machines, demands, ideas and actors change in the journey. Conceptually, carriers represent typical-ideal pathways that allow an event that occurred in t1 to navigate through t2 and produce impacts in t3. Four such carriers are identified and discussed: coalitions, organizations, (sub)cultures and collective identities, and policy agents. The framework is illustrated with contention politics in Chile between 2006 and 2022.