People regularly advocate on behalf of their attitudes. They post online reviews of hotels and restaurants, they recommend new apps and movies to friends, and they share their opinions on political candidates and social issues. What drives advocacy behavior? In this chapter, we review a fast-growing literature on the antecedents of advocacy – including attitude strength, compensatory motives, perceived efficacy, emotions, attitude framing, and more – and we consolidate this literature into a set of core insights. In addition, we discuss two promising directions for ongoing work. First, when people advocate, what do they say or do? Second, what other actions do people undertake to advance their views (e.g., censorship)? We review the nascent literature on these topics and chart new directions for research in this area.

An account of the course and development of the Irish Land War itself is provided in this chapter. It examines the political and social role of the Land League alongside its particular diagnoses of Ireland’s economic and political malaise. The role of radical language, particularly discussion of the right to life and self-preservation, on Land League platforms is analysed. This is looked at in conjunction with the responses to the varying solutions to the Land question, such as peasant proprietorship and the ‘Three F’s’, as well as Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act. Labourers, both rural and urban, and their relationship to the Land League are considered. Finally, the chapter assesses the implications of the different forms of collective resistance to the institutions of landed proprietorship in Ireland, particularly boycotting, and considers these as examples of political ideals in action. It argues that such practices reinforced the same principles as those expressed discursively.

Antislavery agitation spread through reformers with American contacts, but Britain’s movement to abolish the slave trade became the largest social movement of the era. Publishing damning exposés of the traffic, lobbying Members of Parliament, and forming vibrant locals across the British isles, the movement sponsored massive petition-signings that (unlike preceding reform movements) mobilized across social class, while women were also mobilized for boycotting against slave-produced products. The movement only failed to produce immediate results due to a countermovement centered in the slave ports that raised counterpetitions and lobbied for British economic self-interest, particularly once war against Revolutionary France began in 1793.

Whereas Americans had quickly won redress amid the Stamp Act controversy, over the following decade the use of similar, affiliated social movement organizations exacerbated rivalries with Britain and eventually mobilized the War of Independence. First, colonists responded to the hated Townshend Acts of 1767 with boycotting associations that sought to overturn the measure through economic warfare – that only led to partial changes. American rights became a partisan issue with Britain, as colonial patriots increasingly allied with the Wilkes and Liberty movement. The enduring tax on tea and the colonial resistance it inspired in 1774 motivated British passage of the Coercive Acts, that militarized the colonial networks and led them to prepare for war. Committees of Safety and Security seized power in many locales and proved integral in mobilizing the civil war against the British.