Research On Doug McAdam's Political Process Theory

In modern human political life,with the development of political democratization objectively and the germination and awakening of citizens' political consciousness subjectively,the channels and mechanisms of citizens' political participation are becoming more and more diversified and more perfect.Through various legal ways to participate in political life,citizens can influence the operation of political power that bears the function of social resource distribution to a certain extent.The most important thing is to express their own political tendencies and opinions through political participation,so as to realize their own interests.However,under certain circumstances,or due to the urgency of the situation or the lag of conventional political participation channels,citizens may instead adopt unconventional,bottom-up ways to express their interests,so as to correct some social injustice and promote the interests of a certain group.The sixties and seventies of the last century witnessed the outbreak of social movements around the world,so that some scholars summarized its characteristics as "social movement society".Up to now,social movements have become an important and extensive activity in modern democratic society,such as France's "Mobilisation des Gilets Jaunes " in recent years,Korea's "National Movement against the deployment of Thaad" and the United States' s "Me Too Movement".In the face of increasingly frequent social movements,academic circles have also tried to explain this.However,American sociologist Doug Mc Adam is not satisfied with the explanation of the existing Collective Behavior theory and Resource Mobilization theory.He thinks that the former denounces social movements as irrational psychological phenomena,while the latter ignores the possibility of aggrieved population initiating social movements independently.Therefore,on the basis of critically inheriting the two theories,he puts forward the Political ProcessTheory to explain social movements according to the historical investigation of the American civil rights movement.This theory is different from the Collective Behavior theory which only pays attention to internal factors,and it is also different from the Resource Mobilization theory which only pays attention to external factors.On the one hand,the Political Process Theory takes into account the external factors generated by social movements,that is,the structure of political opportunities,thus paying attention to the political attributes behind social movements,thus making it possible to carry out dialogue between politics and sociology.On the other hand,it also attaches great importance to the influence of internal factors—indigenous organization and cognitive liberation—on social movements.Moreover,Mc Adam regards social movement as a continuous process,so the theory also studies the mechanism of social movement development/decline,in which the level of social control is added as its explanatory variable,and the social movement itself changes from the explanatory variable in its production model to an explanatory variable.However,once Mc Adam's Political Process Theory was put forward,it soon became the dominant paradigm in the field of social movement research,causing heated discussions in the academic circle.Some scholars further improved it in the process of using the theory for research,while others criticized the theory mercilessly,and their supporters also responded to these criticisms.In these controversies,Mc Adam began to reflect on and correct the deficiencies of his theory.He put forward a new theory of Political Process by integrating the relevant achievements of culturalism and rationalism in domestic and foreign academic circles.In the new theory,his research object has been expanded to contentious politics,which include social movement,revolution,democratization and so on.His theoretical form has also changed from static and one-way to dynamic and interactive mode.His theoretical approaches are not only limited to structuralism,but also add the considerations of culturalism and rationalism.The greatest contribution of Mc Adam's Political Process Theory to the academic circle lies in that it goes further than the Resource Mobilization theory,not only acknowledging the rational attribute of social movement,but also revealing that socialmovement is politics through other ways.Its political attribute breaks the dividing line between institutionalized politics and non-institutionalized politics,and the academic circle begins to pay more attention to the connection and mutual influence between the two.Moreover,the Political Process Theory has condensed the academic consensus.Although scholars studying social movements belong to different theoretical factions in name,they all begin to pay attention to the influence of political opportunities,mobilizing structures and framing processes on social movements.These three factors are all differentiated from Mc Adam's original Political Process Theory.Of course,the theory also has inherent limitations.First of all,its core concept "political opportunity structure" is difficult to reach a consensus in the academic circle,so the concept cannot escape the suspicion of opportunism and circular argumentation in use.Secondly,the structuralist bias of the theory has not disappeared due to the considerations of culturalism and rationalism.