Social movement scholars have long faced a methodological dilemma familiar to social scientists. We refer to the stark choice between two research methods that are, in their respective strengths and weaknesses, mirror images of one another. The choice is between “thin” large N studies that allow researchers to generalize to broader populations versus “thick” case studies that yield a rich, holistic understanding of the phenomenon in question, but without being able to tell us anything about the representativeness of the specific case on offer. These two options do not exhaust the methodological strategies available to movement researchers, but a broad scan of the extant empirical work on social movements would, we are convinced, show that these two approaches have been broadly modal in the field throughout the past thirty years.

The single case study has been especially popular with social movement scholars. A partial list of classic studies of single movements would include Adam (1987) on the gay and lesbian movement; Jenkins (1985) and Ganz (2009) on the farmworkers movement; Morris (1984), McAdam (1999 [1982], Luders (2010), and Andrews (2004) on the U.S. civil rights movement; Costain (1992), Rupp and Taylor (1987), Banaszak (1996), Evans (1979), and Mansbridge (1986) on various “chapters” or movements in the history of U.S. feminism; Amenta (2006) on the Townsend movement; Parsa (1989) and Arjomand (1988) on the Iranian Revolution; Meyer (1990) on the nuclear freeze movement; Smith (1991) on liberation theology; Schwartz (1976) on the Southern Farmers’ Alliance; McVeigh (2009) on the resurgent Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s; Gould (2009) on ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power); and Walder (2009b) on the Beijing Red Guard movement. The fact that we could easily double or triple this list of citations only serves to make our point: it is probably fair to say that the case study has been the central arrow in the methodological quiver of social movement scholars.