Further reading resources

At the beginning of our research, we set out to see what general resources were out there on the topics of measuring movement impact and public opinion about movements of several forms. The following list of academic studies, articles, books, and other resources for each movement was the product – and many of the pieces led us to new sources through their citations. We read most of these pieces, even if their content was not incorporated into the final pages of this site or the forthcoming report; they helped us understand what kind of research was easily accessible on these topics and what kind of limitations may exist for our work. We publish this list with the hope that others can use this as a jumping-off point for their exploration of these movements and concepts.

Click through to jump down to any category:

1. On funding social movements
2. On Civil Rights & movement dynamics
3. On Black Lives Matter & movement dynamics
4. On Occupy Wall Street & movement dynamics
5. On LGBT rights & movement dynamics
6. On immigrants rights movements & movement dynamics
7. On social movement study methods & social media
8. On movements & public opinion

On funding social movements

Reports for funders on funding social movements

• Funding Social Movements: The New World Foundation Perspective (2003)
  • The New World Foundation
• Making Change: How Social Movements Work and How to Support Them (March 2009)
  • Manuel Pastor and Rhonda Ortiz, Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, University of Southern California
• Pathways for Change: 6 Theories About How Policy Change Happens (2009)
  • Sarah Stachowiak, Organizational Research Services
• Social Movements and Philanthropy: How Foundations Can Support Movement Building (2010)
  • Barbara Masters, M.A., and Torie Osborn, M.B.A., in The Foundation Review
• Transactions, Transformations, Translations: Metrics That Matter for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements (October 2011)
  • Manuel Pastor, Jennifer Ito, Rachel Rosner, Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, University of Southern California
• Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Climate and Environment Funders (February 2012)
  • Sarah Hansen, for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
• Funding Movement Building: Bay Area Approaches (2013)
  • Bay Area Justice Funders Network
• Many Hands, More Impact: Philanthropy’s Role in Supporting Movements (2013)
  • Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO)
• Real Results: Why Strategic Philanthropy is Social Justice Philanthropy (2013)
  • Niki Jagpal and Kevin Laskowski, for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
• Moving Forward on Racial Justice Philanthropy (2014)
  • Maggie Potapchuk and Lori Villarosa, Philanthropy Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE)
• Solidaire Annual Reports (2014-2016)
• Building Capacity to Sustain Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER) (2014)
  • Melinda Fine and Lauren Jacobs, NEO
• The Case for Funding Black-Led Social Change (2017)
  • The Black Social Change Funders Network, a project of ABFE and the Hill-Snowdon Foundation

Academic papers about funding of social movements

• Critical Consciousness Development Impact on Social Justice Movement Giving Among Wealthy Activists (September 2016)
  • Laura J. Wernick, Social Work Research, Vol 40. No. 3
• Funding for Social Movements (April 2016)
  • Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Sociology Compass, Vol. 10 Issue 4
  • *Available for online rent or purchase from Wiley Online Library

Articles about funding social movements

• Top-Down, One-Issue Funding is Not the Way to Support Social Movements (May 30, 2014)
  • Lori Bartczak, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations
• Inside NEO Philanthropy: An Unusual Funding Group Works to Unify the Social Justice World (June 30, 2015)
  • David Callahan, Inside Philanthropy
• Is Too Much Funding Going to Social Entrepreneurs – and Too Little to Social Movements? (July 22, 2015)
  • David Callahan, Inside Philanthropy
• Always Playing Catch Up? Philanthropy and Social Movements (July 31, 2015)
  • David Callahan, Inside Philanthropy
• Strength in Numbers: the New Fund Resisting Trump (December 22, 2016, Inside Philanthropy)
  • David Callahan, Inside Philanthropy on The Emergent Fund started by Women Donors Network and Solidaire
• White Money vs. White Privilege: Philanthropy and Civil Rights from Selma to Ferguson (January 19, 2015)
  • David Callahan, Inside Philanthropy

On Civil Rights & movement dynamics

Academic papers about Civil Rights & movement dynamics

• The Impacts of Social Movements on the Political Process: the Civil Rights Movement and Black Electoral Politics in Mississippi (October 1997)
  • Kenneth T. Andrews, American Sociological Review, Vol. 62
• Protest Campaigns and Movement Success: Desegregating the U.S. South in the Early 1960s (2015)
  • Michael Biggs and Kenneth T. Andrews, American Sociological Review, Vol 80(2)
• Local Protest and Federal Policy: The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the 1964 Civil Rights Act (June 2015)
  • Kenneth T. Andrews and Sarah Gaby, Sociological Forum, Vol 30 No. S1

Articles about Civil rights & movement dynamics

• Public Opinion on Civil Rights: Reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (2014)
  • Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
  • Shows delay of several decades on positive attitudes towards Civil Rights Act
• Elite Philanthropy, SNCC, and the Civil Rights Movement (November 1, 2010)
  • Michael Barker
• The Stunning Economic Impact of the Civil Rights Movement (February 2013)
  • Bloomberg News
• Never Forget That MLK Jr. Was Hated by White America (January 19, 2015)
  • Daily Kos
  • At that time, polling showing Americans strongly disliked both King and the aims of the Civil Rights movement
• 50 years ago: Mixed views about civil rights but support for Selma demonstrators (March 5, 2015)
  • Pew Research
  • Both black and white Americans strongly supported black demonstrators in the Selma riots but were more lukewarm about the pace of implementation of the Civil Rights Act (polarization at work)
• What Trump protesters can learn from the Civil Rights movement (March 30, 2016)
  • Waging Nonviolence
• Americans are as skeptical of Black Lives Matter as they were of the Civil Rights movement (July 27, 2016)
  • Vox
• Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.(October 1, 2015)
  • Washington Post

On Black Lives Matter & movement dynamics

Books

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery (November 2016)

Reports about Black Lives Matter & movement dynamics

Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice (February 29, 2016) – “This research report examines the movement’s uses of online media in 2014 and 2015. To do so, we analyze three types of data: 40.8 million tweets, over 100,000 web links, and 40 interviews of BLM activists and allies.”

Academic papers about Black Lives Matter & movement dynamics

• Social Media Participation in an Activist Movement for Racial Equality (2016)
  • Munmun De Choudhury, Shagun Jhaver, Benjamin Sugar, Ingmar Weber
• The Measure of a Movement: Quantifying Black Lives Matter's Social Media Power (March 2016)
  • Deen Freelon at American University

Articles about Black Lives Matter & movement dynamics

• Congress just passed a bill addressing police killings while no one was looking. (December 13, 2014, Mic)
• Black Lives Matter deserves credit for NYPD officer indicted in fatal stairwell shooting (February 12, 2015, Waging Nonviolence)
• Here’s Proof That Black Lives Matter Protests Are Working (August 5, 2015, Gawker)
• This One Chart Shows How Black Lives Matter Changed America (August 5, 2015, Mic)
• Has justice come to Ferguson since Michael Brown’s death? (August 8, 2015, Fusion)
• Let’s be generous when we measure the impact of Black Lives Matter (August 13, 2015, Fusion)
• Activists come up with a plan to end police killings. Here it is. (August 15, 2015, LA Times)
• From Hashtag to Strategy: the Growing Pains of Black Lives Matter(September 13, 2015, In These Times)
• September 2015 article by Cassandra Fairbanks for US Uncut outlining BLM gains (US Uncut is now shut down; maybe there’s another way to get the content of the article); sourced from teaching module on BLM by Mark Engler
• Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too. (October 1, 2015, Washington Post)
• How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power (October 2015, WIRED)
• A Year of Black Lives Matter (December 31, 2015, The Atlantic)
• Here’s how to make the government care about black lives (December 1, 2015, Washington Post).
• How is Black Lives Matter winning? (December 5, 2015, Dissent)
• The Matter of Black Lives (March 14, 2016, New Yorker)
• Black Lives Matter was Gaining Steam. Then a sniper opened fire. (July 5, 2016, New York Times)
• How Americans View the Black Lives Matter movement (July 8, 2016, Pew Research)
• Black Lives Matter Founders Describe ‘Paradigm Shift’ in the Movement (July 13, 2016, NPR)
• Black Lives Matter Co-founder Alicia Garza on the Movement’s First Three Years (July 16, 2016, Occupy.com)
• As the movement for Black lives shifts policy, several options emerge (February 8, 2016, Waging Nonviolence)
• Black Lives Matter Co-Founder to Beyonce: ‘Welcome to the Movement’ (February 11, 2016, by Alicia Garza for Rolling Stone)
• The Disputed Influence of Black Lives Matter (July 25, 2016, The Atlantic)
• Attitudes Toward Racism and Inequality are Shifting (June 23, 2015, FiveThirtyEight)
• A year after Ferguson, 6 in 10 Americans say changes are needed to give blacks and whites equal rights(August 5, 2015,Washington Post)
• Americans’ Worries about Race Relations at Record High (March 15, 2017, Gallup)
• Majority of Americans Think Racial Discrimination is a Serious Problem: Poll (July 12, 2016, NBC)

On Occupy Wall Street & movement dynamics

Academic papers about Occupy & movement dynamics

Not many to be listed – most academic papers focused on observation of intergroup dynamics at Occupy or how news framed the protests, rather than looking at other forms of impact.

• Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement (November 9, 2012)
  • Kevin DeLuca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun. Communication, Culture, and Critique 5.
• Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street In New York City (2013)
  • Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis.

Articles about Occupy & movement dynamics

• The “Battle of Seattle”at Ten (November 30, 2009, Mark Engler for Democracy Uprising)
• Can Occupy Wall Street Match the Tea Party’s Online Effectiveness? (November 17, 2011)
• Why Imperfect Occupy Still Had Lasting Effects (September 16, 2013)
• The Triumph of Occupy Wall Street (June 10, 2015, The Atlantic)
• Occupy Wall Street: Four Years Later (16 September, 2015, The Guardian)
• Undoing the Politics of Powerlessness (December 17, 2015, Yotam Marom)
• The Lasting Effects of Occupy, Five Years Later (September 16, 2016, Time)
• The Enduring Impact of Occupy Wall Street (November 7, 2016, Stanford News)
• What search trends tell us about Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party (October 27, 2011, Google Politics & Elections Blog)

On LGBT rights & movement dynamics

Reports about LGBT rights & movement dynamics

• At the Crossroads: the Future of the LGBT Movement (2013, Building Movement Project)

Academic papers about LGBT rights & movement dynamics

• The Study of LGBT Politics and Its Contributions to Political Science (Gary Mucciaroni, PS: Political Science and Politics Vol 44 No 1, January 2011)
• National Trends in Public Opinion on LGBT Rights in the United States (Andrew Flores at The Williams Institute, UCLA, April 2014)
• What to Do When "I Do" Is Done (Winter 2015, The American Prospect)

Articles about LGBT rights & movement dynamics

• How the Gay Rights Movement Won (a review of a book) (June 7, 2012, The American Prospect)

• Lessons from the LGBT equality movement (June 2, 2013, Waging Nonviolence)

• 5 Winning Strategies Feminists Can Learn from the Gay Rights Movement (July 2, 2013, Mic)

• A Sea Change in Less Than 50 Years as Gay Rights Gained Momentum (March 25, 2013, New York Times)

• A look inside 4 important goals of the LGBT movement (July 31, 2016, The Daily Signal)

On immigrants rights movements & movement dynamics

Books

Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy

Academic papers about immigrant rights movements & movement dynamics

• The Immigrant Rights Marches (Las Marchas): Did the "Gigante" (Giant) Wake Up or Does It Still Sleep Tonight?

  (Summer 2007, _Nevada Law Journal _by Sylvia R. Lazos Vargas)

• Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition (February 2010, American Political Science Review)

• Public Attitudes Toward Immigration (May 2014, Annual Review of Political Science)

• Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes (April 2014, American Journal of Political Science) [on 2006 protests]

Articles about immigrant rights movements & movement dynamics

• Immigrant rights at a crossroads (May 2009, International Socialist Review)
• The US Immigrants Rights Movement: 2004 - Ongoing (April 2009, Nonviolent Conflict by Paul Engler)
• Undocumented and unafraid: the immigrant rights movement (June 2011, Waging Nonviolence)
• The immigrant rights movement: then and now (December 2015, Mobilizing Ideas)
• Resisting Trump: What’s Next for the Immigrant Rights Movement (November 17, 2016, Truthout)

On social movement study methods & social media

Books

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells (2012)

Academic papers about social movement study methods

• Sampling Social Movement Organizations (2016, Mobilization: An International Quarterly)
• The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action (2004, Annual Review of Sociology)
• Emerging Trends in the Study of Protest and Social Movements (2002/03, Research in Political Sociology)
• Methods of Measuring Public Opinion (Russell G. Brooker and Todd Schaefer)
• Are young people who join social media protests more likely to protest offline too? (October 27, 2012, ScienceDaily)

Articles about social movement study methods

• Measuring Movement Outcomes(blog post by Gamson, January 1, 2014)
• Introduction to Sociology: Chapter 21: Social Movements and Social Change (open textbook from Canada)
• Social Media for Social Good: What role does social media play in creation of and sustainability of social movements? A Social Movement Case Study Examining Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. (January 4, 2014)
• The Political Power of Social Media (January/February 2011, Foreign Affairs)
• #BlackLivesMatter and the Power and Limits of Social Media (December 2, 2016 - Emily Parker and charlton mcilwain)
  • “Before social media, the public might have been more likely to perceive a string of police shootings as isolated events. McKesson said hashtags can serve as a kind of ‘paperclip’ that link events together.”
• Left rising on Facebook (April 2017, Axios article on NewsWhip data)

On movements & public opinion

Books

Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics, by James A. Stimson (2004) -- Referenced by Nate Silver in a 538 post on immigration polling.

Academic papers about movements & public opinion

• Public Opinion, Demonstrations, and the Passage of Antidiscrimination Legislation (1979, Political Research Quarterly, Paul Burstein)
• Bringing the Public Back in: Should Sociologists Consider the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy? (1998, Social Forces, Paul Burstein)
• The impact of public opinion on public policy: A review and an agenda (2003, Political Research Quarterly, Paul Burstein)
• Why Estimates of the Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy are Too High: Empirical and Theoretical Implications (2006, _Social Forces, _Paul Burstein)
• Amplifying Public Opinion: The Policy Impact of the U.S. Environmental Movement (2007, _Social Forces, _Jon Agnone)
• Making the News: Movement Organizations, Media Attention, and the Public Agenda (2010, American Sociological Review, Kenneth T. Andrews and Neal Caren)
• Social Movements and Processes of Political Change: The Political Outcomes of the Chilean Student Movement, 2011-2015 (2015, Yelena Margaret Bidé at Brown University) -- this is an undergraduate thesis that has done the work of explaining & citing a lot of the studies above, esp. by Burstein, on what scholars think of the link between public opinion and policy outcomes
• Public Opinion as a Movement Outcome: The Case of the U.S. Women's Movement (2016, _Mobilization: An International Quarterly, _Lee Ann Banaszak and Heather L. Ondercin)
• The Contextual Dependence of Movement Outcomes: A Simplified Meta-Analysis (2009, Mobilization, Katrin Uba)

Articles about movements & public opinion

See more topic-specific articles on movements & public opinion in each category.

Purple America Has All But Disappeared (March 2017, FiveThirtyEight)

On movements & framing

Academic papers on movements & framing

What a Good Idea! Ideologies and Frames in Social Movement Research (2000, Pamela E. Oliver, Hank Johnston)

Articles on movements & framing

• A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed and What the Majority Can Do (November 22, 2016, George Lakoff)
• George Lakoff: ‘Conservatives don’t follow the polls, they want to change them...Liberals do everything wrong’ (February 1, 2014, The Guardian)

On general movement impact

Academic papers about general movement impact

• The Impact of Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Social Movement Organizations on Public Policy: Some Recent Evidence and Theoretical Concerns (2002, _Social Forces, _Paul Burstein and April Linton)
• Social Movements, the Rise of New Issues, and the Public Agenda (2004, Frank R. Baumgartner and Christine Mahoney, Penn State University)
• Introduction: The Outcomes of Social Movements (2009, Mobilization, Lorenzo Bosi and Katrin Uba)
• The Political Consequences of Social Movements (2010, Annual Review of Sociology, Edwin Amenta, Neal Caren, Elizabeth Chiarello, Yang Su)
• Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page)
• How to Analyze the Influence of Movements (2014, Edwin Amenta, Contemporary Sociology)

Articles about general movement impact

• Measuring the Impact of Mass Movements (November 28, 2011, Dissent, Mark Engler)
• A Winning Strategy for the Left (May 18, 2015, Jacobin)
• When the next crisis comes, which movements will seize the opportunity? (August 11, 2015, Waging Nonviolence)
• Gandhi’s strategy for success - use more than one strategy (March 17, 2017, Waging Nonviolence)
• Why campaigns, not protests, get the goods (October 29, 2016, Waging Nonviolence)
• Resource on different evaluation strategies from the Foundation Center