In person icon Integration or Cooptation? Dynamic Interactions Between Social Movements and Institutions

Citizens’ political activism via social movements or advocacy organisations often involve in conflicts with power holders. The ways in which these groups interact with established institutions are manifold – from cooperation to demonstrations and civil disobedience, or from repression and cooptation to acceptance and responsiveness. This workshop addresses the dynamic interactions between social movements and institutions with a focus on strategies of and against cooptation. While cooptation is a prominent strategy of institutions to cope with critique and much has been written about cooptation in the research on authoritarian regimes or social movements, we still know little about its dynamics or implications. The workshop focuses on movement-institution interactions and their consequences for movements’ strategies and aims as well as institutions’ political decisions. The goal is to clarify what cooptation entails and in how far it may, in fact, allow for a (symbolic) integration of movements’ claims in established institutions? We invite papers that look at social movement cooptation from both the institutional and from the social movement perspective. We especially encourage empirical studies that apply a relational perspective on movements and institutions in one country, at transnational level, or in comparative perspective and that utilize qualitative, as well as quantitative methodological approaches. Welcome are papers addressing one or more of the following questions: Concerning social movements: What effects do cooptation strategies have on social movements? To what extent do they change their goals and/or organizational forms? Why do social movements get coopted? Do they reflect on the danger of cooptation? With regard to the institutions, core questions are: (How) do these try to coopt social movements? With what mechanisms is approximation reached? What are the effects on the institutions