Contextualizing Institutional and Extra-Institutional Strategies: A Comparison between the Spanish Indignados and French Yellow Vests

This work aims to understand the evolution of social movement trajectories by examining the interplay between extra-institutional and institutional political strategies. I understand social movement trajectory as a result of multi-dimensional interactions evolving through strategic choices made by collective action actors. Using a processual approach combined with a most-similar-case comparison strategy, I analyze the trajectories of the French Yellow Vests and the Spanish Indignados movements to understand the dynamics of (extra)institutional strategies employed by these two movements. Both began with participatory and horizontal organizational structures, initially distancing themselves from institutional politics. Despite their shared non-institutional structure, criticism of institutional politics, and common extra-institutional repertoires of action, their trajectories diverged over time. Podemos emerged as a movement party in Spain in addition to local election coalitions such as Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comù, channeling the Indignados' demands and several activists into institutional politics and causing an electoral turn within the movement. This change altered the strategic options for the activists by opening up the institutions for them. However, a similar change in strategic choices did not emerge in France.

By examining these similarities and differences, I seek to explain how these two movements developed different trajectories forcing the actors to make different strategical choices despite their similarities at the outset. For this, I resort to political opportunity structure and resource mobilization theories to frame the structural factors of social movement trajectories while leaning on cultural approaches to define the internal factors affecting movement trajectories over time. On this basis, I demonstrate that the structural and internal factors affecting social movement trajectories evolved in different directions in these two contexts over time despite their similarities at the outset of the two movements, leading to differentiated movement trajectories and strategic shifts in the repertoires such as institutionalization.