Economic Development, Inequality and Dynamics of Social Movements in the United States: Theory and Quantitative Analysis

How have social movements in the United States been impacted by simultaneously evolving economic realities such as episodes of development and inequality across time? This paper empirically examines how the structural forces of the economy such as growth (income per-capita) and decline (income inequality) interact with the regional characteristics to derive patterns of social movements in United States from 1960 to 1995. I suggest that—unlike the arguments found in popular social movement theories such as relative deprivation and economic grievances that the society will express resentment against lack of financial resources through protesting and riots—there will be less collective action formations during heightened inequality even when there is growth in per-capita income. This paper provides novel application of methodological approaches in social movement studies such as the Generalized Additive Models with smoothing functions and Synthetic Control Method to extract micro-level inferences on the relationship between economic factors and social movement formations. I gauge the implications of the main argument with a new dataset that is a composition of aggregated levels of social movements per-capita, real per-capita personal income, income inequality index, labor unemployment laws, social policy liberalization index and equal pay laws among other variables. The empirical exercises reveal that when accounting for the full range of socio-economic variables with fixed effects and instrumental variables, the dual impact of economic growth and decline on social movements is non-linear and U-shaped in the US states across time.