Excerpt: Kolb, Felix (2007): Causal Mechanisms of Political Change. In: ibid.

: Protest and
Opportunities. The Political Outcomes of Social Movements. Frankfurt/M., New York:
Campus, pp. 72-94.

On this chapter the author introduces and explains five possible mechanisms of
political change that would explain why and how social movements are thought to be able to
cause political change. The mechanisms are: disruption, public preference, political access,
judicial and international politics mechanisms. The author highlight that the three first
mechanisms were already described before, but here, he tries to bring the judicial and
international politics mechanisms as a novelty on this analysis.

The disruption mechanism is one of the most discussed mechanisms. It provides

political crisis which will possibly lead to a response from policy makers. Nevertheless, as
the author argues, this mechanism can only be activated and successful under two conditions:
social movements must engage on potential large-scale disruptive tactics and it must exist a
favourable environment such as elite conflict and electoral instability.

The second mechanism is public preference. This mechanism is described by how

public opinion can shape public policy through rational expectation by policy makers and
through electoral turnover. In doing so, social movement are able to modify policy makers
perceptions of public attitudes. According to the author, the mechanism can only be activated
if political elites are divided over a specific issue and if its salience is high. In the way the
author puts it, I understand that this mechanism seem to be more effective in countries where
there are more popular initiative because in those countries social movements would have the
chance to succeed in triggering and winning a referendum.

The third mechanism is political access. Political access refers to the involvement of
movement activists on the policy making process by occupying important institutional
positions and to electoral empowerment. These two aspects of political access are important,
but they are more effective if there is a large number of activists occupying those institutional
positions and also if there is a large number of adherents to influence elections outcomes.

The last two mechanisms are the judicial mechanism and the international politics
mechanism. The judicial mechanism is described by the author as a resource that social
movements can call upon, but only under specific circumstances. Therefore, the author points
out three main constraints that would obstruct the accomplishments of the social movement
and the circumstances that are necessary for the accomplishment of political change. The first
constraint is the limited nature of rights. Therefore, legal precedent would be a necessary
circumstance to accomplish political change. Another restriction is the lack of judicial
independence. According to the author, the path to overcome this problem would be elite
support. The last restriction is the lack of implementation powers. To overcome this last
problem the author points out that is necessary to implement court rulings through other non-
court social actors or even by market mechanisms. It is also important to mention that the
judicial mechanism would be more effective on certain contexts such as countries with an
open political institutional structure and with strong-and more politically independent- courts.
 Finally, the international politics mechanism refers to the possibility to achieve local
political change by calling upon the influence of international institutions. In this case, the
larger is a countrys dependence on the willingness and support of other countries or
international organizations the higher is the chance that the social movement can activate this
mechanism.

1- What is exactly the role of the elites on the mechanisms mentioned by the author?
2- How can non-court social actors (citizens) be able to solve the problem with lack of
implementation powers?
3- Is there any example of other social movements that were able to cause political
change and did not use these mechanisms?