The student movement in social movement studies: an introduction

The research that this volume reports upon analyzes four episodes of student contestation over higher education (HE) reforms, which have recently taken place in Chile, Quebec, England and Italy. More notably, the book explores the institutional and political context in which such episodes occurred, their dynamics and trajectories of mobilization, and their political impacts on HE and on the political arena at large.

The authors argue that, to explain the evolutions and effects of social movement campaigns – how and why they obtain concessions – we must look at the relations between the state and the market in the policy field of HE, and how these relations shape mechanisms and processes that promote or hinder alliances and oppositions in the policy field and the political system at large. In doing so, the interplay among social movements, political parties and public opinion is examined. Drawing on an extensive literature on the consequences of social movements (for example, Bosi et al., 2016b), we explore the ways in which actors such as vice-chancellors, intellectuals, personalities and public figures react to (and interact with) student actions; the extent to which students modify or align with specific dynamics of competition in the party system; and how student movements and the public opinion interact over the course of an ‘eventful’ episode of contention.

The authors observed that, in both Chile and Quebec, as student demands were supported by significant social constituencies and the government proved unable to appease the protests, the opposition parties presented themselves as allies. These parties committed themselves to delivering reforms that would (at least partially) meet student demands, while students attempted to gain influence in decision-making bodies by joining political parties and/or participating in elections. Tuition fees and the costs of HE became central issues of electoral debate in the forthcoming elections in these countries. These processes led these new administrations to deliver reforms (concessions) that were somewhat aligned to the protestors’ demands. By contrast, in England and Italy, the student campaigns had (at least in the short term) lesser impacts on public opinion and the party system, which remained relatively indifferent to their demands.

Introduction

Although differences between countries continue to be pronounced, national HE systems are becoming more alike in the sense of being more market-oriented, even in countries with a strong welfare tradition. Fighting back against these processes, student protests arose unexpectedly – to a certain extent – in several countries across the five continents, with particularly intense waves in countries such as South Korea and India in Asia, Chile and Mexico in Latin America, Canada and the United States in North America, South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and Italy, England, and Germany in Europe. Thus, recent years have witnessed the rise and proliferation of student mobilizations as a collective response to the expansion of neoliberal capitalism and its policies in the field of HE (Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017; Cini, 2019b).

Historically, students constituted the fundamental segment of various political movements, ranging from the nationalist European movements in the 19th century, to the environmental, urban, anticolonial, and peace movements in the second half of the 20th century, until the more recent mobilizations associated with the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movements. Students have often played a clear political role in modern society (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015).

However, it is with the 1968 wave of global contestation that the collective power of students fully materialized in HE institutions (HEIs) in the form of activism. The 1968 protests marked the era of the politicization of the student condition, as such (Altbach, 1991). While university systems in many parts of the world had expanded significantly over the 1960s, taking in larger and more diverse student bodies, university policies and practices remained elitist and traditionalist. Contesting the authoritarian and hierarchical way in which universities were organized and governed, student protesters around the world demanded a more democratic and accessible HE, more rights and freedom on campus, greater involvement in university governance, and a more coherent and relevant curriculum. Through such mobilizations, students aimed also at putting forward an alternative conception of society based on values of equality, solidarity and social justice (Breines, 1989). The greatest impacts of 1968 mobilizations were a general democratization of university institutions, with more student involvement in governing bodies, the development of new curriculum areas, and greater attention paid to ensuring student rights and freedom on campus (Cockburn and Blackburn, 1969).

Introduction

The idea that we must look at political contexts to understand the emergence, dynamics and outcomes of contention dates back to the first developments of what is now known as political opportunity structure theory (Eisinger, 1973; Tilly, 1978). Since then, much scholarship has adopted the assumption that environments – those factors in the ‘world outside’ social movements – can explain mobilizing activities, demands, strategies, alliances and the influence of social protest (Meyer, 2004). Taking distance from the rather deterministic character of such an approach, more recent developments call into focus the interactions between institutions and protestors, focusing on the ways in which these interactions shape and influence each other (Goldstone, 2003; Jasper, 2015; Tilly and Tarrow, 2015). Most agree however that contexts matter for social movements. Yet the specific questions that scholars must specify are: how and to what extent do they do this, which aspects of the political environment are more relevant, and for what kind of outcomes? (Uba, 2009; Bosi et al., 2016a).

When studying the policy impacts of protest movements, we should distinguish the policy field from the broader political system. Policy fields configure the immediate structure of opportunity and constraints of social movements attempting to advance alternative policy proposals. These fields usually define the legitimate actors of the relevant policy discussions and the mechanisms through which these discussions take place. Policy fields are embedded in the broader political system, which in turn shapes the constraints and opportunities that protesters face (Kriesi et al., 1995).

Yet, this does not mean that the same opportunities and constraints at the level of the political system can be replicated in the specific policy field. Within the HE field, there might be variation in the opportunity structure at the level of campuses, as recent research has pointed out (cf Reger, 2018; Cini, 2019b). For instance, Reyes (2015) adopts the concept of academic opportunity structure to explain differences in activism across colleges. Specifying a structure of academic opportunity, Cini (2019b) argues that the type of university leadership affects the strategies and tactics that student activists adopt in their mobilizations on campuses. Although cross-campus variation in student activism is important, we focus here on cross-national differences in the capacity to produce policy outcomes.

Status of the interviewees and codes, per country

Introduction

When activists plan a mobilization campaign, decide the timing of their actions, prepare their public discourses and design the modes in which they will attempt to involve their constituencies, among other crucial aspects of all protest movements, they show how agency is at the centre of resistances and struggles. But protest movements are situated historically. Activists do not decide in a vacuum. History, institutions and cultures leave an imprint on the contemporaneity of social movements, not only as structures that condition and limit but also as sources of creativity and agency. To understand what student activists do and how they do it, we must look at the characteristics of the organizations in which they act, where these organizations come from, their connections with the party system, and the traditions of activism that feed and shape the new generations of students.

In this chapter, we focus on two dimensions to explain the ways in which students react to changes in the HE sector. First, the extent to which the student body has access to decision-making instances, at levels that include university governance and the governance of the HE sector, is examined. The question to be answered here is: how do students relate to state and educational institutions? The recognition of students as counterparts, stakeholders or customers signals different ways in which the state regulates students’ access to key instances of decision making. Similarly, access can be regular (institutionalized and regulated by law) or exceptional (dependent upon the willingness of university or political leaders to include students in their decisional bodies). It is maintained that the degree of institutionalization of student representation within HE fields shapes the ways in which students access HE decisional bodies, organize their claim-making and other activities, and helps form their interests and demands. The kind of relations between student organizations and authorities constitutes an important component of the structure of opportunities available to students.

The second dimension, which we call student politics, conceptualizes the forms that student activism takes, irrespective of the degrees of formalization and recognition from the state. The main question here is: how do students do politics?

Introduction

This book has analyzed student protests in four regions in South America, North America and Europe. In doing so it has aimed at contributing to social movement studies in several directions.

First, in considering contextual constraints and opportunities, the text has contributed in two ways to traditional approaches that have explained contention in terms of structural opportunities. With the aim of introducing political economy in the study of HE and of student protests, we looked at how the dominant form of capitalism, neoliberalism, has affected the current field of HE, its policies, and its actors. In doing so, and bearing in mind the processual approach taken, political opportunities were considered not as a given but rather as one of the dimensions affected by social movements themselves. In this endeavour, regions with distinct models of HE were examined, selected on a continuum going from ‘state-oriented’ (Italy and Quebec) to ‘market-oriented’ (England and Chile) HE sectors.

Second, looking at mobilizing resources, the authors considered student politics as a combination of both protest and associational politics in collective action to promote student claims, looking at long-term cultural dispositions as well as adaptations to the interactions with various players in the field of HE. It was noted that the capacities to adopt various types of strategies, ranging from conventional to disruptive, in coordinated fields of movement politics, increased the chances of policy impacts. Rather than singling out a specific strategy as the most successful, the book examined the evolution of a series of (more or less) strategic moves during movement campaigns as interactions with other actors favoured some choices, but blocked others.

Third, in order to deal with complex policy fields, a processual approach was adopted, looking at protest campaigns as eventful experiences with the potential to impact on social structures. In this sense, resources and constraints were not taken for granted but rather created in action as students interacted within complex webs of relations in policy fields. Mobilization processes included different steps, even if these steps were not in a neat sequence. In all cases studied, proposals for neoliberal adjustments (mostly in the form of fee hikes) operated as suddenly imposed grievances, triggering a protest event that acted as a positive shock, starting a wave of further mobilizations.

Introduction

In contrast with the dominant research trend in social movement studies, which has traditionally devoted little attention to the political economy of contemporary societies (della Porta, 2015), the authors contend that the effects of political-economic changes are key to better understanding the rise, variety and decline of student mobilizations. Transformations occurring in the institutional forms and modes of regulation of capitalism, especially those related to state institutions and their policies, have indeed been fundamental in setting in motion, and shaping the formation processes of social movements (Cini et al., 2017).

Considering this, the chapter addresses long-term and short-term political-economic changes occurring in the field of HE related to the recent wave of student protests. The four regions under investigation cover different HE systems, from those where the role of the state is still prominent (Italy and Quebec), and the commodification trend is not so strong, to others in which the market, along with the commodification of the sector, have acquired greater relevance over recent decades (England and Chile). The authors maintain that the different pace and form of the marketization process (see also Table 1.2 in Chapter 1) have heavily affected the ways in which students mobilized in terms of action repertoires, political goals and demands, and organizational structures. Exploring the variety and the institutional differences in the field of HE helps us assess the variety of the student movements embedded in such fields.

The economic crisis of 2008 represented a decisive watershed for further propelling the marketization process of HE, as governments overtly pursued pro-austerity and privatization agendas in various policy fields, including pensions, social protection, healthcare and HE. Austerity measures, following the crisis, have introduced neoliberal reforms in HE fields in countries where they previously did not exist, and accelerated their implementation elsewhere. This process has been characterized by one or more of the following measures: (1) the introduction of greater competition in the provision of student education; (2) the supplementation of public sources of funding of universities with private sources, especially tuition fees; and (3) the attribution of greater institutional autonomy from government steering (see Klemenčič, 2014, pp 397– 9).

Neoliberal reforms produced profound distributional consequences, as they altered the old state/family balance in the funding of HE by increasing the weight of families’ expenditures (tuition fees) to compensate for a retrenchment of state funding.

The referendum in Scotland and the non-binding unofficial consultation in Catalonia dominated the two entities’ political agendas in 2013–14. Despite their different natures and legal statuses, the two votes radically changed their respective political debates, triggered massive media and academic interest, and constituted momentous events that have successfully reframed (or even completely altered) understandings of nationalism in ‘quiet times’ (Beissinger, 2002). ‘In both cases, the unexpectedly high participation of civil society in the campaigns propelled territorial issues to the top of the political agenda, causing great polarisation’ (Alonso, forthcoming).

This chapter focuses on the framing strategies in the Scottish and Catalan mobilisation campaigns, analysing their content, messages and arguments, and identifying the multiple dimensions of the issue at stake. Although the nature of the referendum vote is often dichotomous (Yes/in favour or No/against), referendum issues nonetheless tend to be multifaceted (de Vreese and Semetko, 2004: 3).

As argued in the previous chapters, institutional contexts and political cultures differ remarkably across the two cases. However, there are some similarities between the two referendum campaigns in terms of framing, which seem to derive from the very nature of the mobilisation from below. In both cases, redistributive and democratic issues were emphasised over traditional ethnonationalist concerns. Frame bridging between independence and sovereignty, on the one hand, and social claims such as social justice and the renewal of democracy, on the other, were important in both contexts. Moreover, in both campaigns a general evolution of master frames shifted towards more radical positions, from devolution to independence.

More broadly, in historical terms, the main contribution of the two mobilisation campaigns consists of overcoming traditional identity frames and the central role of the democratic-emancipatory discourse, which resonated with expressions of discontent regarding the political and socioeconomic crises. The chapter shows the emergence of this innovative frame linked to self-determination; the importance of frame bridging (Snow and Bedford, 1988a), both at a substantial level (between the issue at stake in the referendum and broader values and claims traditionally addressed by left-wing social movements) and at a procedural level (in relation to participation and deliberative democracy); and the role of social movement organisations and citizens, leading the campaign, producing messages from below and developing imaginative initiatives going beyond the logic of electoral competition.