Insult, injury and impact: Social movement impact on public policy in the context of recognition and redistribution

This study is motivated by a simple question that has a complex set of answers: Do social movements impact social justice? To answer this question, I draw on social movement theory to build a model with US Congressional bills from the 109th Congress as my dependent variable, and (a) social movement industry (SMI) strength, (b) interest group strength, (c) public opinion, (d) political elite support and (e) media coverage as my independent variables. I also draw on contemporary critical theory, utilizing Nancy Fraser's distinction between recognition and redistribution, to split my data into two distinct datasets: one built around redistribution-based bills and one built around recognition-based bills. I analyze these data using rare events logistic regression (relogit) to see if SMI strength is correlated with bill passage. The results suggest that SMIs do influence the passage of recognition-based bills but do not affect redistribution-based bills. This finding has profound implications that span from practical politics and political theory to social theory and moral philosophy.