A feedback view of theories of contentious politics

In political science, several theories of contentious politics hold that political action results from complex dynamic interactions between political groups and other stakeholders, such as their governments. This dissertation creates an integrated feedback view of three such theories of contentious politics (Relative Deprivation, Resource Mobilization, and Political Opportunity Structures) as well as three recent attempts to integrate these theories (Collier & Hoeffler, 2000; Regan & Norton, 2005; Wimmer, Cederman, & Min, 2009). This integrated feedback view provides a better understanding of the link between these theories' causal structure and behavior..;The dissertation accomplishes the following: 1. Represents three social science theories of contentious politics and three integrated statistical models of contentious politics as causal loop diagrams. 2. Combines these causal representations of theory into a dynamic hypothesis that provides an integrated explanation of the feedback structure of contentious politics. 3. Generates idealized reference modes of behavior implied by the dynamic hypothesis using a system dynamics model as the reference mode-generating tool. 4. Creates an empirical dataset from MAROB, a database of contentious political behavior. 5. Compares the reference modes of behavior to the empirical dataset. The results show that the data is broadly consistent with several of the reference modes..;The contribution of the dissertation to the scholarly literature on contentious politics is theoretical. The dissertation explores, maps, and integrates three political science theories and three integrated statistical models. The result is a theoretical model of contentious politics driven by feedback loops that integrates mature theoretical models of contentious politics. In this way, the dissertation provides a foundation for possible future work in building, testing, and using quantitative methods to further explore contentious politics. The dissertation links existing theories with an integrated structural (dynamic hypothesis) and behavioral (reference modes) view of the feedback loops implied by those theories. The dissertation does not attempt to create an empirically or theoretically testable quantitative model. The work of model formulation, testing, and policy design/testing of any sort of quantitative model is suggested as future work.