Political Opportunity Structure Analysis

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Political Opportunity Structure Political opportunity structure majorly explains linkage between political environment and social movement. Meanwhile, POS admits influences of resources and grievance. The major argument of POS is political structure decides social movements' fates. McAdam concluded four major dimensions of POS theory: openness of institutional structure, division and alliance from elite groups and state power for repression. (1996, p27) For each stage, author will briefly evaluate the POS separately. For this analysis, the historical backgrounds and divisions are extremely important. In this section, author attempts to connect opportunity structure and development of movement. At preface stage, as post-colonial countries, …show more content…

(Snow & Benford, 1986,p464) More specifically, how social movement organizations mobilize and recruit members. There are four steps of frame alignments: frame bridging, frame amplification, and frame extension and frame transformation. Three tasks framing theory regarded as most important ones are diagnostic framing, prognostic framing and motivational framing. Based on three tasks, author will try to interpret movement via framing analysis. Diagnostic framing aimed to recognize the major problems and present the reason behind the problem. (Benford & Snow, 1988, p200). Considering the division of stages, author concludes three major topics of indígenas movement: Salaries and working condition, agrarian land and equal civic rights and identity …show more content…

The first challenge or limitation is about theories' implementations, especially for POS. The POS was strongly influenced by the differences between American social movements. In this case, the instability and dictatorship affected the analysis of POS. This could be a lurking variable influence the analysis. One other limitation of this study is that the long time frame of the subject. In fact, author disagrees with the idea of analyzing a series of movements lasting for eight decades as one grand movement. Many details were ignored and oversaw, which author believed were influential in the process. The study analyzed the indígenas movement by three perspectives. RMT can explain the indígenas movement's emergence stage, especially the legitimacy and alliance resources. For money, labour and facilitates, more details are needed. For POS, in spite of possible distortion by author's division, it supports growth of indígenas movements. For framing, except diagnostic framing, prognostic and motivational framings are influenced by lack of details. However, framing analysis did provide more detailed strategies of how indígenas movement