The relationships between social movement challenges and political outcomes remain strongly underresearched in the field of social movements. Here, we use the labels “social” and “political” in a broad sense to comprise many types of challenges and many types of outcomes, such as economic and social outcomes for specific movements as well as general policy outcomes. Four theories are crucial for understanding successful mobilization of social movements: relative deprivation, resource mobilization, framing, and the theoretical figure of the opening political opportunity structure. Political outcomes, at least in democratic political systems, are usually the result of a parallelogram of different claims and means of influencing outcomes, in short, of compromises. Here, we list various forms of outcomes, from successful acceptance of movement demands to part-time successes or entire failures, and also the various strategies incumbents have in dealing with social movement challenges. Researchers usually have focused on the individual and structural conditions of the emergence of social movements but less so on the conditions of processing social movement demands and the outcomes for movements themselves, for the electorate and for policy changes. Consequently, there is little research available that would meet the requirements of an adequate research design in view of the numerous factors spelled out here as a theoretical control list. The idea of a response hierarchy of incumbents is suggested as a sort of a dispositional concept for further, more consolidated, research in this area. Also the notion of cycles of various sorts has to be kept in mind in order to avoid misjudging of both, the persistence of social movements over time, and their eventual successes and failures.
Different starting points, similar processes and different outcomes can be identified when comparing East Central Europe and East and South Asia. The two regions face similar global challenges, follow regional patterns of democratization and face crises. In communist times, East Central Europe was economically marginalized in the world economy, while some parts of Asia integrated well in the global economy under authoritarian rule. Europeanization and a favorable external environment encouraged the former communist countries to opt for the Western-style rule of law and democracy. Different external factors helped the Third Wave democracies in Asia, especially South Korea and Taiwan, which benefited from the support of the United States and other global economic, military and cultural partnerships to develop their human rights culture and democracy while facing their totalitarian counterparts, namely the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. The very different positions Taiwan and Hungary have in their respective regions follow from the different capacities of their transformation management since 1988-1989. Taiwan preserved its leading role and stable democracy despite the threat to its sovereignty from the People’s Republic of China. Hungary never had such an influential and problematic neighbor and was ensured security and welfare partnership by the European Union, which Taiwan lacked. While Taiwan was less secure, economic and social conditions were more favorable for democratization than those in Hungary. Hungary, in turn, held a leading position in democratization processes in the period of post-communist transition which was lost during the crisis and conflicts of the last decade (after 2006 and especially since 2010). Despite the fact that liberalization prepared the way for peaceful transition in both countries and resulted in similar processes of democratic consolidation in the 1990s, Hungary joined the ‘loser’ group in its region, whereas Taiwan is among the top ‘winning’ countries in its region. Taiwan at the moment is starting comprehensive reform processes toward enhanced democracy, civil rights and the rule of law, and Hungarian development is criticized by many external and internal analysts as straying from the path of European-style consolidated democracies towards illiberal trends and hybridization. Western global concepts of democratization may help to identify similarities and differences, and compare stronger and weaker factors in the democratic transitions in Asia and Europe within the Third Wave democracies.
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