Political Science and the Study of Social Movements

Social movements have been studied from the perspective of several disciplines—sociology, anthropology, social psychology, economics, and political science. When we conceive of social movements as political phenomena we need to take seriously their relations with the political context in which they act. Clearly, many, if not most, social movements are embedded in political institutions (Tarrow 1994). For this reason, the discipline of political science is of importance in understanding the close link between political institutions and social movements, and how politics matters in shaping social movements in different contexts.