ABSTRACT
How do authorities respond to social movement tactics, campaigns, and demands? Early research on social movement outcomes typically focused on the characteristics of the challengers (e.g. the size of protests, the number and type of tactics adopted, the goals and ideologies of protest campaigns, etc.) to address this key question. This strand of research aimed to analyse the strategies adopted by authorities to deal with protesters, from symbolic concession and co-optation to resistance and outright repression, by examining mostly movement-centric variables (for an early review of this literature, see Giugni 1998). This relatively static and reactive view of states responses, however, has been recently challenged by various scholars (see Bosi, Giugni, and Uba 2016). A growing wealth of scholarship is now inspecting the strategic interactions between social movements and systems of authority (e.g. Duyvendak and Jasper 2015; for a review, see Bosi and Uba 2016), attempting to unpack the decision-making processes within movements and authorities alike. In The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change, Joseph Luders further expanded on how to assess social movement outcomes by focusing on target action motivations. While not the first scholar to note the lack of target-centric theorizing (e.g. Burstein and Linton 2002; Andrews 2004), Luders was the first one to explicitly detail how to analyse targets’ role. Examining the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s, he argued that social movement success could be predicted by estimating target perception of disruption and concession costs (Luders 2010: 1-5). He contended that both movements and third parties, like countermovements and the media, should be examined to determine the perception of costs by movement targets, differentiating between movement demands. Based on these assessments, targets are predicted to act according to one of four ideal typical responses (detailed below).
