Cross-national Analysis of Social Movements :

Efffectiveness of the Concept of Political Opportunity Structure

Abstract

     In recent social movement studies, there are animated discussions about political opportunity strucuture(POS). But the concepts are ambiguous and the former discussions do not answer if and how POS affects social movement in West European countries. This paper will classify POS in three dimensions and analyze the eighteen West European countries by a Boolean analysis to solve the above problems. The results shows that (1) social movements frequently occur when open and closed POS are mixed, (2) in a protest cycle, former movements is differrent from later movements about the effect of POS.