ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is fourfold. Three goals concern a partial refashioning of the widely used concept of opportunity structures. First, while analyses of political opportunity structures (POSs) are now commonplace in studies of contention, few if any focus on the law and legal systems. Here I argue for a broadening of analyses to include the law. Second, recently the concept has been substantively critiqued, both by skeptics and by its leading practitioners (Goodwin and Jasper 2004; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), for its static and overly structural nature for analyzing the dynamics of contention. 1 Below I suggest that the concept continues to have analytic utility if we view it more specifically as sets of embedded relations sometimes activated by a critical event. Third, I propose that we refine our understanding of how opportunity structures can operate in distinct ways at different levels of analysis. Much of the work done on POSs and contention has concentrated on the macro level of the nation-state, to the exclusion of meso and micro levels at which contentious relationships occur. I claim that large-scale structural fissures—in the case discussed here, that of class—can have distinct dynamics at each of these levels. Finally, I take this analysis itself as an opportunity to explore how the writings of one of the concept’s leading practitioners, Charles Tilly, provides us with some analytic tools for these revisions, though he himself has not necessarily made links between these tools in his own writing.
