Strange Bedfellows: How an Anticipatory Countermovement Brought Same‐Sex Marriage into the Public Arena

Since the 1980s, social movement scholars have investigated the dynamic of movement/countermovement interaction. Most of these studies posit movements as initiators, with countermovements reacting to their challenges. Yet sometimes a movement supports an agenda in response to a countermovement that engages in what we call “anticipatory countermobilization.” We interviewed ten leading LGBT activists to explore the hypothesis that the LGBT movement was brought to the fight for marriage equality by the anticipatory countermobilization of social conservatives who opposed same‐sex marriage before there was a realistic prospect that it would be recognized by the courts or political actors. Our findings reinforce the existing scholarship, but also go beyond it in emphasizing a triangular relationship among social movement organizations, countermovement organizations, and grassroots supporters of same‐sex marriage. More broadly, the evidence suggests the need for a more reciprocal understanding of the relations among movements, countermovements, and sociolegal change.     

Who pays for entering Europe? Sectoral politics and European Union accession

Abstract.  This article analyses the effects of sectoral political lobbies on the Romanian and Bulgarian governments' efforts to reform their economies for European Union accession. The progress of restructuring and retrenchment is crucially dependent on the coincidence of which groups are adversely affected by accession-motivated reforms, and which groups are sufficiently mobilised at the domestic level to block international-level deals. In turn, the political power of the agricultural and industrial sectors is determined by workplace-level and national-level variables. At the workplace level, it is easier to organise people in a small number of large firms than a large number of small firms, and to organise employees in public-owned or insider-privatised enterprises compared to other types. At the national level, monopolistic sectoral associations whose members have no exit option may be bought off by government side payments to the leadership, while representation that is overly fragmented will be ineffectual.     

Interpersonal and self-critical dysphoria and behavioral problems in adolescents

Clinical evidence suggests that various problem behaviors in adolescence can be expressions of dysphoria that have not reached threshold for the diagnosis of depressive disorders. Formulations of two major types of dysphoria distinguish between disruptions of interpersonal relatedness (e.g., feelings of loss or abandonment) and diminished self-esteem (e.g., feelings of self-criticism, failure, or guilt). Adolescents in a suburban high school were given the Achenbach Youth Self-Report, the Adolescent Depressive Experiences Questionnaire, and the Community Epidemiological Survey of Depression for Children (CES-DC). Even after level of depressive symptoms (CES-DC) was partialled out in hierarchical multiple regressions, interpersonal dysphoria significantly accounted for additional variance in predicting internalizing disorders, while self-critical dysphoria added significantly to the explained variance of both internalizing and externalizing disorders, specifically delinquency and aggression in both males and females.Ph.D., 1957, University of Chicago. Research interests: The development of mental representations, their differential impairment in various forms of psychopathology (especially depression), and their change in the therapeutic process.Ph.D., 1981, Yeshiva University. Research interests: adolescent pregnancy, depression, and ego development.Ph.D., 1968, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Research interests: cognitive processes in schizophrenia, dependency and self-criticism in depression, and cognitive structural models of development and psychopathology.Ph.D., 1986, Columbia University, New York. Research interests: adolescent development.Ph.D., 1988, State University New York—Buffalo. Research interests: Language and self-representation and narcissism and borderline disorders.