Chapter 26 — Exercises

These exercises ask you to apply the chapter's analytical frameworks to real movements, contemporary and historical, across the American political spectrum. The grading rubric for each exercise emphasizes institutional analysis, primary-source citation, and the discipline of treating movements you sympathize with by the same standards as movements you do not.

Exercise 1 — Map a movement's organizational infrastructure

Pick a movement currently active in the United States. Suggested options across the spectrum:

  • Left of center: Sunrise Movement; the Working Families Party network; an active immigration-rights coalition in your state; the Movement for Black Lives.
  • Right of center: Turning Point USA; Moms for Liberty; an active Second Amendment advocacy group in your state; the Federalist Society's chapter at a nearby law school.
  • Cross-cutting or non-traditional: Yang Speaks Forward / Forward Party; an active local YIMBY housing-policy group; a regional climate-and-faith coalition.

Produce a map (text outline or actual diagram) of the movement's organizational infrastructure. Identify:

  1. National-level organizations — name them, find their stated mission, and note their reported budget if disclosed (501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups file IRS Form 990; the Form 990 is publicly available via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer or directly from the IRS).
  2. State and local affiliates — where are they located? How many chapters?
  3. Allied media outlets and intellectual institutions — what publications, podcasts, think tanks, conferences are part of the broader ecosystem?
  4. Major funders, where disclosable — for 501(c)(3)s, donor names are not public, but Schedule B is sometimes leaked or reported on, and many funders disclose their own giving.
  5. Strategic posture — protest? litigation? legislative? primary challenges? institution-building?

Submit a 1,000-word analysis. The deliverable is the institutional map, not a defense or critique of the movement's goals.

Exercise 2 — Trace a recent policy change to a specific movement

Select a federal, state, or local policy change in the last ten years and trace its lineage to a specific social movement. Suggested options:

  • The Inflation Reduction Act's climate provisions (2022) → climate movement / Sunrise / progressive-wing Democrats.
  • State-level constitutional carry / permitless concealed carry expansion (2010s–2020s) → gun-rights movement / state firearms-rights organizations.
  • State-level abortion restrictions following Dobbs (2022–) → pro-life movement / state legislative coalitions.
  • State-level shield laws and abortion-access expansions (2022–) → reproductive-rights movement / state coalitions.
  • The CHIPS and Science Act (2022) → an interesting case where movement attribution is contested.
  • State-level legalization of recreational cannabis (varying years by state) → cannabis-reform movement.
  • Federal child tax credit expansion in the 2021 American Rescue Plan → anti-poverty advocacy and progressive policy networks.
  • Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun provisions (2022) → gun-violence-prevention movement and law-enforcement coalitions.

Your analysis should address:

  1. What did the movement want? Cite a specific organization's stated demand.
  2. What did the policy actually do? Read at least the summary section of the bill or rule.
  3. How well does the policy match the original demand? Where are the compromises?
  4. What inside-system actors (legislators, executive officials, courts) were necessary partners?
  5. Could the policy have happened without the movement?

Submit 1,200 words.

Exercise 3 — Analyze the violent / nonviolent question with Chenoweth

Read at least the introduction and one substantive chapter of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011). Then write a 1,000-word essay applying the framework to two American cases of your choice. Pair them by approximate political valence:

  • A primarily nonviolent movement in your sympathies vs. a primarily nonviolent movement out of your sympathies.
  • A movement that incorporated some violence vs. a movement that disciplined out violence — pick cases from across the spectrum.

Address: Did the empirical pattern Chenoweth identifies hold in your cases? Where did your cases depart from the central tendency, and why? What would Chenoweth predict for movements you see active today?

Avoid the temptation to say "violence was justified in our case but not theirs" or vice versa. Chenoweth's empirical claim is about success rates, not about justification. Engage with the empirical question on its own terms.

Exercise 4 — Steel-man movements across the spectrum

Pick three movements that you do not personally sympathize with — one to your political left, one to your political right, and one that does not fit neatly on a left-right axis. For each, write a 400-word steel-man: the movement's goals as its smartest, most reasonable adherents would describe them, the strongest version of their factual and normative arguments, and the legitimate political traditions on which they draw.

Constraint: you may not include any rebuttal in this exercise. Your steel-man is graded on whether a sympathetic reader of the movement would recognize your description as accurate and fair.

This exercise is about a discipline, not a position. The discipline of describing positions you disagree with as their best advocates would describe them is the foundation of productive political conversation.

Exercise 5 — Democracy Audit: movements active in your area

For your congressional district or metropolitan area, identify three currently active social movements and document them:

  1. Movement A: Identify a movement primarily associated with the political left in your area (e.g., a tenants' rights coalition, an abolitionist-aligned police-reform group, a climate-justice coalition, a labor-organizing campaign).
  2. Movement B: Identify a movement primarily associated with the political right in your area (e.g., a Second-Amendment advocacy group, a parental-rights coalition, a tax-reduction coalition, a religious-liberty advocacy group).
  3. Movement C: Identify a movement in your area that does not fit a left-right axis or that crosses it (e.g., a YIMBY housing coalition, a local-business advocacy group, a regional environmental coalition with bipartisan board, a public-transit coalition).

For each movement, document:

  • Founding date and current size (members, attendance, social-media following).
  • Three specific policy demands (cite their own materials).
  • The most recent action they took — meeting, rally, lobbying day, statement.
  • One inside-system ally and one inside-system opponent.

Submit 800 words. The Democracy Audit deliverable is the documentation; you are not asked for a normative evaluation.

Exercise 6 — The movement-becomes-faction transition

Compare the institutional transition from movement to faction in two cases:

  1. The Tea Party (2009–2014) → House Freedom Caucus (2015–present).
  2. Either the Sanders movement → "Squad" Democrats, OR a case from earlier American history (e.g., the antiwar movement → McGovern Democrats, the Religious Right → Reagan Republicans).

Write 800 words on:

  • The features of the original movement (decentralized, grassroots, etc.).
  • The features of the faction (formal organization, internal voting rules, leadership).
  • What was gained and what was lost in the transition.
  • Whether the original movement still exists outside the faction.

Exercise 7 — Cultural change vs. policy change

Some movements achieve substantial cultural change before — or instead of — policy change. The MeToo movement is a recent prominent case; the LGBT-rights movement before Obergefell is another; many would argue the contemporary climate movement has been culturally more successful than legislatively.

Write 800 words analyzing one movement's cultural and policy outputs. What did the movement change in attitudes, language, behavior, or institutional practices, separately from formal law? How permanent are those changes? What does the relationship between cultural and policy change in your case suggest about how movements should sequence their efforts?

Exercise 8 — Movement failure analysis

Pick a movement that did not, by its own stated criteria, succeed. Suggested cases:

  • The Equal Rights Amendment campaign (failed at three states short of ratification, 1972–82).
  • Occupy Wall Street (dispersed within 4 months of launch).
  • The post-1973 antiwar movement against subsequent American military interventions.
  • The 2017 Women's March's electoral and policy goals (mixed record).
  • The Arizona Republican Party's 2020 election-overturn efforts (rejected by courts).
  • The 2010s charter-school expansion movement (substantial in some states, blocked in others).

Write 1,000 words on what factors — political-opportunity, mobilizing-structure, framing, tactical-discipline, persistence — best explain the failure. What would the movement have had to do differently to succeed? Be honest about the limits of counterfactual reasoning.

Exercise 9 — The role of pre-existing infrastructure

The chapter argues that movements' "famous moments" are typically activations of infrastructure built over years or decades. Pick a movement and trace the infrastructure backward from the moment that brought it to public attention. Suggested cases:

  • The Montgomery Bus Boycott (December 1955) — what existed in Montgomery, in the broader civil-rights ecosystem, in the Black Baptist church network, and in NAACP litigation history that made the boycott possible and effective?
  • The 2015 Obergefell decision and the LGBT marriage-equality movement — what state-level wins, what cultural shifts, and what legal-litigation strategy preceded it?
  • The 2022 Dobbs decision and the pro-life movement — what 50 years of Federalist Society work, what state legislative groundwork, what strategic litigation, and what political coalitions made the decision possible?
  • The 2017 women's marches and the MeToo wave — what feminist organizing of the previous half-century made the rapid 2017 mobilization possible?
  • The Federalist Society's transformation of the federal judiciary by 2020 — what 38 years of network-building made the staffing capacity possible?

Write 1,000 words. The deliverable is the institutional history, not a normative evaluation. Address: which actors and organizations did the patient unphotographed work that made the visible moment possible?

Exercise 10 — Movement persistence and burnout

Movements typically face an attrition problem: enthusiasm at the founding moment must be sustained for years or decades to produce institutional results, and most participants are not willing to sustain it that long. Pick two movements you have studied — one that successfully managed the persistence problem, one that did not — and write 800 words on:

  • What recruitment and retention mechanisms did the successful movement use? (Training programs, leadership pipelines, social networks, cultural rituals?)
  • What broke the unsuccessful movement's ability to sustain itself? (Burnout? Internal factional conflict? Diversion to electoral campaigns? Successful absorption into a party that left the movement organization without a purpose?)
  • What does your comparison suggest about how today's active movements should design their long-term retention strategies?

Be specific about which movements you compare, and ground your analysis in primary sources and serious historical or sociological work, not generic claims.

Submission notes: All exercises require primary-source citation (organization websites, news coverage with bylines, government documents, peer-reviewed academic work, or primary archival material). "Some people say" is not acceptable. The Balance Guide rules apply: steel-man, distinguish empirical from normative, and pair examples by party.

Total word count for full set: approximately 2,000 words of exercise prompts plus reading.