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Postwar Protest Movements in Britain: A Challenge to Parties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Anthony M. Messina
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Extract

This article asks why new protest movements have recently emerged in Western Europe by focusing on the British postwar race and anti-nuclear movements. Contrary to “subjective” propositions which have attributed their emergence to inter-generational value change, this article instead proposes a “structural” explanation. It is argued that the failure of the major British political parties to articulate citizen concerns on a number of salient issues has generated extra-party initiatives whose willingness to “voice” citizen anxieties primarily explains their popular support. Once in existence, these groups further politicize the conflict over public policy through various unconventional activities.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , Summer 1987 , pp. 410 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1987

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Inglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Baker, Kendall, Dalton, Russell J., and Hildebrandt, Kai, Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Barnes, Samuel H., Kaase, Max et al. , Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979).Google Scholar

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21 Ibid.

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41 Along these lines CND threatened a “voters' veto” of pronuclear parliamentary candidates during the 1959 general election.

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47 The trade unions influence Labour party policy through their large bloc votes at the party's annual conference.

48 Indeed, just as a Conservative government can coopt the political right on race so, too, is it easier for a Labour government to coopt the political left on nuclear disarmament.

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53 Approximately 30 percent of the German electorate in 1981 believed that an environmentalist party was needed in Germany. Conradt, David P., The German Polity (New York: Longman Inc., 1982), p. 128.Google Scholar