What factors facilitate the success of religious movements in democratic societies? What are the micro-mechanisms of mobilization used by relgiopolitical actors? This paper investigates these questions by comparing the political success stories of the Shas movement in Israel and the National Outlook Movement (NOM) in Turkey in the 1990s. Comparing religiopolitical movements in Turkey and Israel constitutes a “most different” case design and provides analytical leverage to control for alternative explanations in the literature. The analysis in the paper is centered on two theoretically important arguments, both borrowing insights from the Social Movement Theory (SMT) (Snow and Benford, 1988; Benford and Snow, 2000; Meyer, 2004). The first argument focuses on the contextual variables that define the opportunity structures for the fledgling religiopolitical movements in both countries. This part of the analysis demonstrates how the politicization of a historical socio-cultural cleavage through social change, such as rural-urban immigration, increasing literacy, and school integration ripened opportunities for both movements by making the grievances of the marginalized segments in each society more acute. Moreover, state incorporation of religious actors created a second set of opportunity structures by granting religious actors access to state institutions which were later effectively used by religious entrepreneurs to carry their messages to appropriate audiences. The second part of the analysis focuses on how framing processes mediate between political opportunity structures and collective behavior. In this part, I discuss how injustice frames, prognostic frames, and empowerment frames were utilized by religious entrepreneurs. I argue that these frames led to successful mobilization, because they i) resonated with the target audiences’ socio-cultural grievances; ii) were articulated by credible agents (i.e. activists of religious movements); and iii) were disseminated to the larger society through social networks built in poor neighborhoods. The paper provides a contribution to an emerging trend in the study of Middle Eastern politics where area specialists integrate the theoretical tools of SMT to their analyses of religious activism in different contexts in the region (Munson, 2001; Wickham, 2002; Wiktorowicz, 2004; Clark, 2004). The paper’s comparative focus on Shas and NOM establishes an argument against essentialist understandings of Islam by illustrating similarities between Islamic and Judaic movements’ political activism. Moreover, the paper shows how, in the absence of alternatives, religiopolitical movements can become the carriers of identity demands by successfully empowering the disenfranchised through political frames and by carrying their political voice to the center of politics.

In Social Movement literature there is a big debate between structuralists who highlight macro factors such as political opportunity structures, and constructionists who emphasize micro factors such as emotions. The former for instance contends that behaviors of a movement can be explained by main attributes and changes in the political context, while the latter argues that we cannot fully understand protestors if we neglect different emotions active in different stages of protest. In this paper, I argue that these two different accounts can be reconciled. My focus will be on elections as political opportunities within competitive authoritarian regimes. Paul Almeida has argued that elections provide a political opportunity in authoritarian context, inasmuch as they let social movements to build an organizational infrastructure. I argue that this is not the only mechanism at work. In some cases, elections just provide a space for activists for emotional mobilization. The emotional energy created in the campaign stage can later explode if it follows by a fraudulent election and lead to upheavals. Iranian Green Movement is a case that can show how macro and micro factors play together, and structuralist and constructivist approaches can be reconciled. My data consist of two parts. First, I will examine blog posts that both movement activists and rank and file supporters wrote at the time of the movement. Second, I will conduct interviews with both organizers and ordinary participants of the movement.

The Iranian ‘Green Movement’ emerged in June 2009 from the context in which most of reformist parties and socio-political NGOs were drastically circumscribed by Islamist hard-liners. In contrast to some analyses which explained this movement as a sudden emotional reaction to the result of the controversial presidential election by North Tehran upper-class, the paper addresses the foundational origins of the Green Movement that were comprised of a cross-class of multiple and seemingly divergent socio-political forces both religious and secular. Considering this diverse base, the formation of collective identity among mosaic identities seemed highly unlikely. The paper, however, attempts to track down its formation through the concept of ‘fragmented collective action’ that points to the dispersion of a social movement’s political energies and the fragmentation of its constitutive movement groups. Additionally, the paper spotlights the importance of disparate spaces and crucial networks, i.e. reshaped student university associations and kinship-friendship networks that underlie the Green Movement as a collective action, before, during, and after the special phases. The article, also, delves in the production of alternative cultural models and symbolic challenges within those spaces to unmask the dominant codes constructed around ‘Islam’ as a central, nodal point. The article, furthermore, points to the pivotal role of widespread use of modern virtual space and information technology to bring together protestors and to crystallize a new collective identity. This collective identity shaped the Green Movement’s strategies and was, in turn, shaped at various points over the course of the Green Movement’s evolution. Furthermore, the paper argues that the inter-subjectively constructed collective identity was relational in that it is shaped by the Green Movement’s interactions with other social forces, principally the Islamic regime, and with the movement’s interlocutors. This means that Green Movement’s collective actors never acted in a void. Conversely, their submerged resistances in quotidian life in these scattered spaces found the possibility for emergence as a protest and then morphed into a movement, when the institutional context, particularly the institution of election, shifted.

Following the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, street demonstrators in Jordan have managed to bring down a prime minister and his government, but have so far avoided direct confrontation with the monarchy itself – yet they are only part of the challenge to the state. THESIS: The tensions in Jordan are higher than the monarchy thinks and, I argue, pulling from opposite directions; while many in the streets have called for more democracy, support for the poor, and solutions for the unemployed, there is another potentially far more powerful reactionary movement rising – and it is not the “usual suspects” of the Muslim Brotherhood. This conservative movement is a challenge within the ruling elite itself. It is made up of conservative, nationalist, East Jordanian, and often tribal elites who speak in the language of reform and pluralism, but are in fact in many ways akin to the American Tea Party movement: they feel political and economic change has actually gone too far, and they see themselves as patriots saving the nation from the encroachment of both domestic and foreign “others.” They are increasingly challenging not only Palestinians empowerment in Jordan, but also local and global capitalism – from business elites to the IMF and WTO – in every case arguing that Jordan has been “sold out.” (The movement has now turned this argument toward the monarchy itself, by specifically criticizing Queen Rania herself -- even equating her with the wives of former presidents Mubarak and Ben Ali). METHODS AND SOURCES: This paper draws on interviews and extensive field work in Jordan conducted in July 2010, December 2010, and May 2011, to analyze the composition, purpose, coherence, and organization of the Jordanian “Tea Party”, and explains its political, social, and economic implications for both reform and resistance in Jordan. CONCLUSIONS: I argue that the movement is based on an intersection of ethnic, economic, and ideological interests; that it is increasingly coherent and even daring in its challenge to King Abdullah II; that it has significant roots in the state security apparatus; and that it is likely to slow the process of economic privatization and neoliberal reform, while paradoxically supporting some political reforms while also trying to overturn others. PANEL PLACEMENT? This paper crosses several issue areas but would perhaps fit best in panels: democratization v. authoritarianism, social movements, political or economic reform and resistance, or the impact of the Arab revolutions beyond Tunisia and Egypt.