DOI: 10.7910/dvn/xcwzls
title: Transnational Social Movement Organization Dataset, 1963-2003 (Global)

description: The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and subsequent resistance to global trade and investment liberalization highlight the growing centralization of economic and political power in entities that transcend nation-states. These protests also challenge traditional approaches to the study of social movements, which portray movements as bounded by national or sub-national political arenas. Globalization, or the expansion of social interactions across national borders, leaves few areas of social life untouched, and sociologists are beginning to pay closer attention to how it affects our understanding of social and political processes. While globalization is not new, its relatively recent acceleration and expansion to new social domains calls for greater sociological attention. This project builds upon existing sociological research and brings new data to the investigation of relationships between globalization, social movements, and political change. While many Americans were surprised by the size and vigor of the recent protests against the global trade regime, these events should be seen as part of a long and growing stream of protest targeting global policies. This resistance has been most visible in the global South, where the effects of global financial policies have triggered the most militant responses. The protests have broadened geographically and gained momentum since the late 1970s (see, e.g., Keck 1998; Fox and Brown, 1998; Wal ton and Seddon 1994). They also build upon a more extensive network of transnational organizational and informational ties among activists in a wide range of countries (Khagram, Riker and Sikkink 2002; Smith 2001a). This organizational infrastructure began to expand in the latter half of the 20th century, and its roots took hold and generated more rapid transnational organizational expansion in the 1970s and 1980s (Smith 1997a; Sikkink and Smith 2002). This project seeks to enhance our understandings of the organizational foundations for transnational social movement activism, namely the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). While not all transnational activism depends upon the existence of formal transnational organizations, social movement research suggests that SMOs (and in this case, transnationally organized SMOs) play important roles in developing movement frames and strategies, cultivating activist identities and commitment, and in sustaining movements through periods of abeyance (McCarthy 1996; Rupp and Taylor 1987). We also know from national level studies that social movement activity both shapes and is shaped by political institutions (McCarthy, Britt and Wolfson 1991; Minkoff 1995; Clemens 1996). Therefore, understanding this organizational population will contribute to our ability to both explain and anticipate global changes. This project will contribute to the process of accumulating social scientific knowledge about political mobilization and its relation to globalization. Existing data on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) tells us that people have been organizing across borders more frequently to address a changing array of problems during the past four decades, but especially since the 1970s. It also suggests that participation in transnational SMOs from the global South, or periphery, has been on the rise, despite a continuing majority of Western European and North American participants. But while we know the broad make-up of this organizational population, we have yet to assess how the shape of the population is related to other features of global integration, such as levels of state integration into the global economy, participation in international treaties, variations in states’ regime types, or changes in the transnational social movement sector itself. By addressing some of these questions at a macro-level, this study will provide an empirical basis for more narrowly focused case-study and comparative research on particular instances of transnational political mobilization. The various aspects of globalization, in short, touch upon social dynamics that social movement scholars have found crucial to explaining national level social movement emergence and impact, namely the structures of political opportunities and resources available to potential challengers (McAdam 1982; McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996). Nevertheless, systematic efforts to understand how these global economic, institutional, and social transformations affect possibilities for social movements remain relatively under-developed (for further discussion, see Tarrow 2001a). In particular we need to understand better the specific mechanisms that connect changes in the global political and economic system with new forms of collective political engagement (cf. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Tarrow 2001b; McCarthy 1997). By providing longitudinal evidence about transnational organizing, this study will help us begin to assess relationships between globalization processes and an important component of social movements, that is the formal organizations that serve as social infrastructures for transnational political mobilization.