[movimenti.bicocca] Explaining Participation in Regional Tra…

Dawn Wiest and Jackie Smith
Explaining Participation in Regional Transnational Social Movement
Organizations
International Journal of Comparative Sociology 2007 48: 137-166.
Dawn Wiest
Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, USA,dwiest@???

Jackie Smith

University of Notre Dame, USA,

Since the late 1980s, governments have focused intensely on
formalizing political and economic relationships within regions.
There has also been a concurrent rise in transnational, regional
level organizing among social movement activists globally, suggesting
the regionalization of `global civil society.' However, opportunities
for participation in transnational associations vary widely across
countries. In this article, we examine the influence of international
(both global and regional) institutional contexts, citizen
participation in international society, and national level factors on
varying levels of participation in regional transnational social
movement organizations (TSMOs). We use negative binomial regression
to examine relationships among these factors at three time points:
1980, 1990, and 2000. We find that in the early time period, citizen
network connections to international society facilitated the
formation of and participation in regionally organized TSMOs. Over
time, however, regional and global institutional contexts were more
predictive of participation in regional TSMOs than were international
network ties. Our analysis also uncovered how qualitatively different
forms of regionalism translated into significantly different levels
of TSMO regionalization. In Europe, where the regional institutional
structure is more elaborated than elsewhere in the world, the number
of regional TSMOs in which citizens participated greatly outpaced
that found elsewhere. Irrespective of international, institutional
factors, however, state-level features remained crucial to explaining
the development of regional TSMO sectors and the variable levels of
participation in them. Citizens in states with restrictions on
political rights and civil liberties had significantly lower
participation in these organizations in 1990 and 2000. Even so, over
time, citizens in states with more ties to global and regional
multilateral processes found more ways to overcome this disadvantage
and strengthen their participation in regional, transnational civil
society.



Key Words: global civil society • regional transnational social
movement organizations