Protest and Politics

How does the blurring of social movements and mainstream politics change our understanding of democracies?

Protest and Politics examines the blurring of contentious politics and mainstream politics to argue that, in an era of social movement societies, our understanding of the boundaries between politics and protest needs to be reconfigured.

The Tea Party. The Occupy Movement. Idle No More. Around the world, social movements have taken to new media and the streets to challenge the status quo. At the same time, most democracies have witnessed a sharp decline in voter turnout. Protest and Politics examines this seemingly contradictory shift in political participation, as well as the blurring of social movement and mainstream politics, through the lens of the social movement society (SMS) thesis.

Drawing on the long history of social movements in Canada, in comparison to the US and the transnational sphere, the contributors revisit the SMS thesis to determine whether it still applies, to see what insights can be gleaned from Canadian social movements, and to clarify the relationships between movements and mainstream politics. They argue that the SMS thesis must be recalibrated to reflect changes in political participation, to embrace broader political and historical contexts, and to consider the emergence of social movement societies, plural, over a single polity within and across countries.