Analyzing Predictive Power: WUNC Theory vs. The Strategy of Social Protests in the Context of Occupy Wall Street

Amity Martino

amarti29@unca.edu

SOCIOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY

When Social Movement scholars aim to understand the causality behind movement success, they often points to one of two theories, either Charles Tilly’s WUNC theory that movements are worthy, unified, numerous and committed, or the twelve characteristics William Gamson highlights in his Strategy of Social Protest which contribute to protest success, such as having a centralized authority. There has been little empirical work to support either of these theories and none of the work compares the two. This case study uses both of these theories to analyze the Occupy Wall Street movement. It aims to identify which theory better explains the movement’s outcomes. Each characteristic was defined with reference to the original authors and operationalized as scored excerpts which put the Occupy movement in relation to each characteristic. Scores for the Occupy movement were created for each characteristic between 0 and 1 by the researcher based on archival evidence. These scores were used both as is and as weighted by coefficients from previous studies to compare each theory independently and combined. Finally, archival evidence was used to score how successful the Occupy Wall Street movement was in gaining new advantages so that these scores could be compared with the predictive scores of the theories.

May-14-2024