Why movements succeed or fail

In comparison, the American suffrage movement, with its alliances to the abolition, temperance, and progressive movements, overcame beliefs in local autonomy and engaged in a wider array of confrontational tactics in the struggle for the vote. Drawing on interviews with sixty Swiss suffrage activists, detailed legislative histories, census materials, and original archival materials from both countries, Banaszak blends qualitative historical inquiry with informative statistical analyses of state and cantonal level data.

The book expands our understanding of the role of political opportunities and how they interact with the beliefs and values of movements and the societies they seek to change. Each of Banaszak's summaries demonstrates an enviable conversancy with the available literature, and scholars looking for succinct precis will welcome these essays. Banaszak uses statistical tools to test successive hypotheses to explain the difference in timing between Swiss and American suffrage.

Possibilities she discounts include membership of suffrage organizations and money. More potent indicators of success are the extent of national organizing, efforts devoted to lobbying, the role of political parties, and the use of confrontational tactics.

Her examination of the influence of each of these factors is carefully and intelligently conducted and contributes to the debate about the relative utility of demonstrations compared with insider politicking. As Banaszak explains, Swiss women declined to organize nationally, to recruit members, to target anti-suffrage legislators or parties, or to employ lobbying or confrontation, all tactics American women had employed to good effect.

Banaszak attributes this reticence to a variety of factors specific to Swiss culture. Among the most important were religious, political, and language differences, which divided activists and impeded the transmission of ideas and strategies among suffragists; Swiss commitment to localism, which both inhibited national action and prevented organizers moving from one canton to another; the remarkable stability of the Swiss political system, which easily rebuffed challenges from new outsider parties; and a strong preference for consensus-building rather than achieving goals by exercising political leverage.

Such an environment created a social order unusually resistant to change. Banaszak observes that these factors also created a weak anti-suffrage movement.

She brings to all of these discussions extensive familiarity with local differences, and she offers ample documentation to support her contentions. But Banaszak leaves some tantalizing international comparisons unexamined.

For example, in her discussion of cultural variations, she emphasizes Swiss linguistic divisions 65 percent German; 20 percent French; 10 percent Italian. At the end of the day, however, a social movement is only as effective as its leaders, and the most effective leaders, writes Cructhfield, are those willing to share power and "lead from behind.

According to Crutchfield, leaderfull movements share three traits: they empower local grassroots leaders to step forward; they are built around coalitions of like-minded and "unusual suspects"; and they are filled with people who have a "lived experience" of the problem and are empowered to speak and act on behalf of the organization.

Indeed, we can see the idea in action in recent movements like BlackLivesMatter and the gun control advocacy work propelled by the students from Parkland High School in Florida.

All this sounds good on the theoretical level, but young people and activists are looking for more than theory. Fortunately, each chapter of How Change Happens offers practical advice, tactics, and long-term strategies designed to help movement leaders and participants advance their cause.

In the chapter on reckoning with adversarial allies, for instance, Crutchfield stresses the importance of forging consensus, building trust, and settling on concrete goals. She also warns readers about the traps of policy disagreement, personality conflict, and arguments over who gets credit. It will be interesting to watch BlackLivesMatter and the student-led gun control movement — both strong at the grassroots but without a unifying policy objective — wrestle with these traps as they continue to advance their respective causes.

So what do the findings in How Change Happens mean for social change? According to Crutchfield, it depends on where you sit. Foundations and high-net-worth donors, policy officials and agency heads, business leaders, and citizen activists all bring specific assets and have different roles to play in the process.

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