Examining Endogeneity in Social Movement Protest and Public Opinion: The Case of the U.S. Women's Movement

Abstract

In this paper we examine the inter-relationship between public opinion, feminist and anti-feminist activities in the United States between 1945 and 1985. The social movement literature suggests that movements and countermovements as well as movement events and public opinion are deeply entwined. Political protest can alter the mass public’s attitudes on a particular issue by providing crucial information about problems that exist in what might otherwise have been an underdeveloped issue area. On the other hand, changes in mass political attitudes are an important precursor to the rise of political protest. In this paper, we examine the endogeneity of two sets of variables using Granger causality: movement and countermovement actions as well as between public opinion and movement events using both yearly and quarterly data, as well as focusing on the specific campaigns concerning abortion and Equal Rights Amendment. We find evidence for an endogenous relationship between movement and countermovement events when we look at the abortion and ERA campaigns at the quarterly level. We also find that movement effects appear to lead public opinion. However, we find mixed evidence that public opinion leads movement events; only in the case of the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment does public opinion lead movement events. We argue the results have implications both for how empirically we should measure social movement activity as well as for our theoretical understanding of social movements.