Thanks for this post James! I found it thought provoking.
Overall, I’m still not sure what I make of your claims. There are a few things contributing to this, including:
The post is long and I read it quickly.
Probably just inferential distance/different background models and ways of thinking. E.g. I’ve never been involved in a mass movement, I’m a historian by background and would go about these questions in a different way methodologically, etc.
More specifically, I’m used to thinking of EA as a social movement, and other social movements as potentially useful historical comparisons. This post was an interesting refactoring for me, looking at social movements as a general kind of intervention.
I think the main reason I’m not sure what I think of your claims is that I felt that the post wasn’t crisp/precise enough about which interventions you think it might be good to have more of. Some questions that point towards my unclarity here:
Is it that you want EAs to try harder to change public opinion? Protests/social movements aren’t the only way to do this—think media campaigns, books etc.
Or maybe you’re arguing that EAs should cause there to be more protests on issues they care about, because protests are actually quite an effective strategy? Setting up new mass movements isn’t the only way to have more protests—what about liaising with existing movements, or setting up a temporary organising committee for a one off thing.
Or maybe you want there to be more social movements on issues you care about as you think they are key agents of change? These don’t necessarily need to be mass movements to make a difference, and even mass movements don’t necessarily need to operate centrally via protest....
I could give more examples of my confusions here. Definitely part of what’s happening here is that I am personally confused about how these concepts and phenomenon relate. Another contributor is that I haven’t taken the time to carefully go through your post and construct the clearest most charitable take here. I’m quite sure that if I did this, it would already clear up quite a bit of my confusion. But I also think it’s likely that you could benefit from expressing yourself more crisply here. I think clarity here matters for two main reasons:
Making your assumptions transparent. (E.g. I might be sympathetic to the argument that more social movements would be good, but not think that mass social movements are the main type to favour. Being clear about what you think here would help me to spot research gaps to fill.)
Making it easier to check whether you’re using the right kind of evidence and reference classes. (E.g. if you specifically think there should be more protests, then evidence about the effectiveness of phone campaigns is probably not very applicable.)
There are also a few more specific points I’d like to raise:
You write that longtermism might be a suitable candidate for this sort of mass movement, but that you think global poverty may not be relatable enough. Intuitively this seems a bit wild to me: most people I know find it much easier to empathise with e.g. malnourished children who are suffering right now, than with big abstract numbers on how many people may exist or how much they might suffer.
I’m not sure, but I think I might have different intuitions to you on how likely it is that a given embryonic social movement succeeds. At one point, you say “I believe you could launch a social movement with reasonable chances of success for less than £100K”. This sounds over-optimistic to me, but I suppose it comes down to what you mean by “reasonable chances”. My guess is that the vast majority of potential social movements never get off the ground, so 0.1% doesn’t seem implausible to me as a base rate for success, and >1% does seem a bit implausible to me. In another place, you say “I can confidently say it’s extremely rare to find such driven and talented people who manage to launch a project of this scale without self-imploding due to conflict and governance issues.” So maybe you also think that successful social movements are pretty rare. It also partly depends on what counts as movement success. Feminism has a very large membership, and is widely accepted as a set of values in lots of societies. But on the other hand, women still own something like 10% of global wealth. (Statistic that I vaguely remember. Haven’t checked.) So if you take full gender equality as the metric of ultimate success, feminism is still very far away from succeeding, in spite of its intermediate successes at growing a movement. You can push this to extremes and argue that just about every social movement has failed (e.g. chattel slavery has been legally abolished but modern slavery goes on, so the anti-slavery movement failed). That’s clearly an unhelpful way to define it, but being too inclusive about success (any movement that’s big must be successful) is also clearly a problem.
Do you know why OP commissioned the report on funding social movements? Or what conclusions they reached on this, if any? Seems relevant.
I’m excited to see what further research comes out of your project. Some particular things I’d be interested to see:
A literature review of (relevant bits of) social movement studies, if you think any parts of that literature might be generally insightful for EA/LTism. (FWIW, I feel a lot more optimistic about what we can learn from empirical work than theoretical work here.)
Counterexamples: examples of protest backfiring. Examples of big important changes where protest was largely irrelevant to the outcome.
(Maybe) A book review of the MAP book, if you think the model is good. (FWIW, I have a strong ish prior that rigid 8 step models are unlikely to be predictive of messy reality. But you know more about it than me, and think it matches the realities you’ve encountered well. If you back the model, it might be useful to write a good book review.)
(Not exactly part of the research project) A write up of your key learnings and takeaways from working in XR and Animal Rebellion. I found the asides and comments you made in this post interesting, as I don’t speak much to people in those communities, and it would be interesting to understand better how they do what they do.
I’ll also emphasise though that I think that the post has lots of (1) cool ideas and possibilities worth digging into and (2) snippets of useful empirical evidence.
Hi Rose, thanks so much for leaving such thoughtful comments. I really appreciate the level of detail and constructive tone you used, and genuinely feel like this will improve my future research to some degree. Also, sorry for the extremely slow reply. I’ve been quite busy starting the hiring for the second researcher who will be doing this research with me (slightly shameful plug but hoping you know someone who might be a good fit!).
On your overall points:
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you’re unsure what to make of the claims of this post. If the claims were watertight and absolutely convincing, I would expect a lot more people to be working on these questions. For what it’s worth, I’m not totally convinced by some of my claims as well and generally agree that the clarity of my claims / arguments could be improved quite a lot.
On your point regarding the methodology you would use to answer these questions, I would definitely be interested to hear more about that as I’ll be finalising my research methodology over January.
Regarding your questions for greater clarity:
Is it that you want EAs to try harder to change public opinion? Protests/social movements aren’t the only way to do this—think media campaigns, books etc.
This is directionally correct but maybe not exactly how I would phrase it. To pin down my thinking a bit more, this is vaguely it: I believe public opinion is quite important for social change → Mass movements can be useful tools to build public support → Protests can be a cost-effective way of building public support and building a mass movement. I definitely think a comparison of protests to media campaigns, books, documentaries, etc. could be quite interesting so that is one thing I could do to test that hypothesis.
On your other two questions, I think you’re right in that I haven’t been very clear on what my proposed intervention is e.g. incubate a new movement vs organise protests vs a mass movement not focused on protest. That is something I’ll definitely try clarify in future research but partly I think this is due to my own uncertainty on this topic which makes it hard to pin down.
On your reasons for improving clarity:
Making your assumptions transparent. (E.g. I might be sympathetic to the argument that more social movements would be good, but not think that mass social movements are the main type to favour. Being clear about what you think here would help me to spot research gaps to fill.)
Making it easier to check whether you’re using the right kind of evidence and reference classes. (E.g. if you specifically think there should be more protests, then evidence about the effectiveness of phone campaigns is probably not very applicable.)
For 1, I agree I could have done this better. One assumption you point out is that I don’t even reference non-mass social movements (and I can’t say I’ve given this a lot of thought either) so thanks for raising this.
For 2, agreed there was a slightly opaque assumption in that section that I didn’t spell out. To be precise, it was that I think a) protests can be useful in getting more people engaged in political advocacy, which b) leads to a higher proportion of people phoning or emailing their representatives, c) which might lead to policy change. In the actual research however I left out b) and largely skipped over a) so agree that I could probably do this better.
On specific points:
You write that longtermism might be a suitable candidate for this sort of mass movement, but that you think global poverty may not be relatable enough. Intuitively this seems a bit wild to me: most people I know find it much easier to empathise with e.g. malnourished children who are suffering right now, than with big abstract numbers on how many people may exist or how much they might suffer.
I would definitely re-emphasise the caveat I gave in that section that I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes thinking about those examples so they could definitely be off! I guess the reason why I thought longtermism could be suitable is that a lot of the messaging around climate change hinges on similar concepts e.g. we’re doing this for future generations so they have a planet to inherit / live in. This is not exactly the same, however, as often people referencing “doing it for the children” or for younger generations alive today but I thought that’s one argument in favour of longtermism. The reasoning I had against global poverty was that it’s a relatively well-known issue that’s been talked about for decades so I can’t imagine that if there hasn’t been a popular movement for that up until now, why that would be any different going forward.
I’m not sure, but I think I might have different intuitions to you on how likely it is that a given embryonic social movement succeeds. At one point, you say “I believe you could launch a social movement with reasonable chances of success for less than £100K”. This sounds over-optimistic to me, but I suppose it comes down to what you mean by “reasonable chances”. My guess is that the vast majority of potential social movements never get off the ground, so 0.1% doesn’t seem implausible to me as a base rate for success, and >1% does seem a bit implausible to me. In another place, you say “I can confidently say it’s extremely rare to find such driven and talented people who manage to launch a project of this scale without self-imploding due to conflict and governance issues.” So maybe you also think that successful social movements are pretty rare. It also partly depends on what counts as movement success. Feminism has a very large membership, and is widely accepted as a set of values in lots of societies. But on the other hand, women still own something like 10% of global wealth. (Statistic that I vaguely remember. Haven’t checked.) So if you take full gender equality as the metric of ultimate success, feminism is still very far away from succeeding, in spite of its intermediate successes at growing a movement. You can push this to extremes and argue that just about every social movement has failed (e.g. chattel slavery has been legally abolished but modern slavery goes on, so the anti-slavery movement failed). That’s clearly an unhelpful way to define it, but being too inclusive about success (any movement that’s big must be successful) is also clearly a problem.
You’re right in that I should definitely be more specific about what I mean by “reasonable chances” and also “success”. I think reaching the level of salience and scale that XR has is probably in the 0.1-1% ballpark, but I do think they’ve been particularly successful. However, I would guess that starting something of similar effectiveness to Animal Rebellion is closer to 10%. I haven’t quantified this and could be totally wrong but I think Animal Rebellion has been 1-10% as successful as XR so far for reference. Basically, I think there’s an inverse relationship where less effective movements have a higher chance of reaching that level of success, where even the less effective movements such as Animal Rebellion might be worth it from a cost-effectiveness angle / hits-based angle.
Do you know why OP commissioned the report on funding social movements? Or what conclusions they reached on this, if any? Seems relevant.
It was commissioned within their work on Criminal Justice Reform, led by Chloe Cockburn. I know she’s quite interested in social movement theory and how this applies to doing good. I have no idea what conclusions they drew from this and I’ve never spoken to her personally but it’s on my to-do list to contact her in the new year!
Future direction of the research:
A literature review of (relevant bits of) social movement studies, if you think any parts of that literature might be generally insightful for EA/LTism. (FWIW, I feel a lot more optimistic about what we can learn from empirical work than theoretical work here.)
This is definitely on the cards. Could I just check if you have any examples of what you would consider empirical social movement studies vs theoretical? As my initial hunch is that most of that work would fit into the theoretical categories but wondering if I’m drawing my boundaries different to you e.g. would conclusions from a very detailed case study be empirical or theoretical?
Counterexamples: examples of protest backfiring. Examples of big important changes where protest was largely irrelevant to the outcome.
This is a great point so will add this to the list of research questions—thank you!
(Maybe) A book review of the MAP book, if you think the model is good. (FWIW, I have a strong ish prior that rigid 8 step models are unlikely to be predictive of messy reality. But you know more about it than me, and think it matches the realities you’ve encountered well. If you back the model, it might be useful to write a good book review.)
I agree that any rigid model that trials to boil down reality in simple steps probably doesn’t capture it all but I would say the model does ring true in several ways, at least in my personal opinion. I agree this section is reasonably interesting so I think it’s worth doing.
(Not exactly part of the research project) A write up of your key learnings and takeaways from working in XR and Animal Rebellion. I found the asides and comments you made in this post interesting, as I don’t speak much to people in those communities, and it would be interesting to understand better how they do what they do.
I’ve been considering doing this for a while and feel reasonably encouraged enough by yours + others’ posts so will hopefully do this in January! Thanks for the little push I needed.
Overall—thanks again for all your extremely useful comments, it’s been a significant aid to help me refine the research a bit more.
Thanks for the responses James, I found them thoughtful and helpful!
A few responses in return:
On your point regarding the methodology you would use to answer these questions, I would definitely be interested to hear more about that as I’ll be finalising my research methodology over January.
Quick thoughts:
Partly it’s just that I don’t have a quant background, and so of necessity I would take a qualitative approach. I think for some questions, this would also be the most appropriate approach (to give a straw example, I’m sceptical about measuring broad social change by quantitative analysis of words used in searchable databases of newspaper articles, versus reading a whole bunch of different sources of evidence, and reaching a qualitative conclusion)
As implied in my comment, I’m reasonably sceptical of theoretical models of social change. Partly this is just my historian’s socialisation. I’d be pretty surprised if many (any?) of these models had high predictive power, and I worry that they miss important nuance. So I’d probably not pay much attention to them if I were doing this research.
I also note that you seem to me to have started from ‘this thing (mass movement protests) seems maybe really effective! What research can we do to dis/confirm this?’ I would be more likely to start from ‘there’s a gap in what we’re trying to do. What might fill that gap?‘, or from ‘there are a lot of past examples of people doing the thing we’re thinking of doing. What can we learn from that?’
To pin down my thinking a bit more, this is vaguely it: I believe public opinion is quite important for social change → Mass movements can be useful tools to build public support → Protests can be a cost-effective way of building public support and building a mass movement.
Thanks for clarifying. One thing I’ll note is that this is a multi-stage hypothesis, so you have to be right about quite a few different things for this to end up mattering.
I think you’re right in that I haven’t been very clear on what my proposed intervention is e.g. incubate a new movement vs organise protests vs a mass movement not focused on protest. That is something I’ll definitely try clarify in future research but partly I think this is due to my own uncertainty on this topic which makes it hard to pin down.
When you put it like this, I think it’s definitely legit and in fact wise not to have pinned down your proposed intervention: after all, you haven’t done the research yet, and might discover things which update your current guesses in important ways. Sorry for not getting this before, and implying that you should already know the answer here!
Could I just check if you have any examples of what you would consider empirical social movement studies vs theoretical? As my initial hunch is that most of that work would fit into the theoretical categories but wondering if I’m drawing my boundaries different to you e.g. would conclusions from a very detailed case study be empirical or theoretical?
I guess most things have aspects of both theory (~statements about how stuff works in general) and empirics (~statements about particular stuff that’s happened). A few different ways of gesturing at what I personally mean here:
Some types of theory fit my intellectual tastes; others don’t. When someone, after showing me a bunch of evidence, says ‘this evidence suggests that x tends to happen because of y’, that feels good to me: I know what evidence to use to assess the claim, and the claim is reasonably specific. When someone presents me with a complicated model of change (x influences y but also z can cause all of it if and only if in the presence of a), I feel a bunch more sceptical: the model is actually still qualitative masquerading as quantitate, it’s claiming a lot and so it’s difficult to assess and disentangle, and a lot of separate things would need to be right for the model to be right.
Speaking from the (relatively few) works of sociology I’ve read relating to social movements, I like the stuff which focuses on empirical explanation of particular social movements (e.g. this is what happened when foot-binding stopped in China) more than I like the stuff which focuses on engaging with theoretical models that come up elsewhere in the literature (e.g. here is our contribution to the concept of political opportunity structure).
Thanks for this post James! I found it thought provoking.
Overall, I’m still not sure what I make of your claims. There are a few things contributing to this, including:
The post is long and I read it quickly.
Probably just inferential distance/different background models and ways of thinking. E.g. I’ve never been involved in a mass movement, I’m a historian by background and would go about these questions in a different way methodologically, etc.
More specifically, I’m used to thinking of EA as a social movement, and other social movements as potentially useful historical comparisons. This post was an interesting refactoring for me, looking at social movements as a general kind of intervention.
I think the main reason I’m not sure what I think of your claims is that I felt that the post wasn’t crisp/precise enough about which interventions you think it might be good to have more of. Some questions that point towards my unclarity here:
Is it that you want EAs to try harder to change public opinion? Protests/social movements aren’t the only way to do this—think media campaigns, books etc.
Or maybe you’re arguing that EAs should cause there to be more protests on issues they care about, because protests are actually quite an effective strategy? Setting up new mass movements isn’t the only way to have more protests—what about liaising with existing movements, or setting up a temporary organising committee for a one off thing.
Or maybe you want there to be more social movements on issues you care about as you think they are key agents of change? These don’t necessarily need to be mass movements to make a difference, and even mass movements don’t necessarily need to operate centrally via protest....
I could give more examples of my confusions here. Definitely part of what’s happening here is that I am personally confused about how these concepts and phenomenon relate. Another contributor is that I haven’t taken the time to carefully go through your post and construct the clearest most charitable take here. I’m quite sure that if I did this, it would already clear up quite a bit of my confusion. But I also think it’s likely that you could benefit from expressing yourself more crisply here. I think clarity here matters for two main reasons:
Making your assumptions transparent. (E.g. I might be sympathetic to the argument that more social movements would be good, but not think that mass social movements are the main type to favour. Being clear about what you think here would help me to spot research gaps to fill.)
Making it easier to check whether you’re using the right kind of evidence and reference classes. (E.g. if you specifically think there should be more protests, then evidence about the effectiveness of phone campaigns is probably not very applicable.)
There are also a few more specific points I’d like to raise:
You write that longtermism might be a suitable candidate for this sort of mass movement, but that you think global poverty may not be relatable enough. Intuitively this seems a bit wild to me: most people I know find it much easier to empathise with e.g. malnourished children who are suffering right now, than with big abstract numbers on how many people may exist or how much they might suffer.
I’m not sure, but I think I might have different intuitions to you on how likely it is that a given embryonic social movement succeeds. At one point, you say “I believe you could launch a social movement with reasonable chances of success for less than £100K”. This sounds over-optimistic to me, but I suppose it comes down to what you mean by “reasonable chances”. My guess is that the vast majority of potential social movements never get off the ground, so 0.1% doesn’t seem implausible to me as a base rate for success, and >1% does seem a bit implausible to me. In another place, you say “I can confidently say it’s extremely rare to find such driven and talented people who manage to launch a project of this scale without self-imploding due to conflict and governance issues.” So maybe you also think that successful social movements are pretty rare. It also partly depends on what counts as movement success. Feminism has a very large membership, and is widely accepted as a set of values in lots of societies. But on the other hand, women still own something like 10% of global wealth. (Statistic that I vaguely remember. Haven’t checked.) So if you take full gender equality as the metric of ultimate success, feminism is still very far away from succeeding, in spite of its intermediate successes at growing a movement. You can push this to extremes and argue that just about every social movement has failed (e.g. chattel slavery has been legally abolished but modern slavery goes on, so the anti-slavery movement failed). That’s clearly an unhelpful way to define it, but being too inclusive about success (any movement that’s big must be successful) is also clearly a problem.
Do you know why OP commissioned the report on funding social movements? Or what conclusions they reached on this, if any? Seems relevant.
I’m excited to see what further research comes out of your project. Some particular things I’d be interested to see:
A literature review of (relevant bits of) social movement studies, if you think any parts of that literature might be generally insightful for EA/LTism. (FWIW, I feel a lot more optimistic about what we can learn from empirical work than theoretical work here.)
Counterexamples: examples of protest backfiring. Examples of big important changes where protest was largely irrelevant to the outcome.
(Maybe) A book review of the MAP book, if you think the model is good. (FWIW, I have a strong ish prior that rigid 8 step models are unlikely to be predictive of messy reality. But you know more about it than me, and think it matches the realities you’ve encountered well. If you back the model, it might be useful to write a good book review.)
(Not exactly part of the research project) A write up of your key learnings and takeaways from working in XR and Animal Rebellion. I found the asides and comments you made in this post interesting, as I don’t speak much to people in those communities, and it would be interesting to understand better how they do what they do.
I think I agree with every point Rose made here.
I’ll also emphasise though that I think that the post has lots of (1) cool ideas and possibilities worth digging into and (2) snippets of useful empirical evidence.
Hi Rose, thanks so much for leaving such thoughtful comments. I really appreciate the level of detail and constructive tone you used, and genuinely feel like this will improve my future research to some degree. Also, sorry for the extremely slow reply. I’ve been quite busy starting the hiring for the second researcher who will be doing this research with me (slightly shameful plug but hoping you know someone who might be a good fit!).
On your overall points:
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you’re unsure what to make of the claims of this post. If the claims were watertight and absolutely convincing, I would expect a lot more people to be working on these questions. For what it’s worth, I’m not totally convinced by some of my claims as well and generally agree that the clarity of my claims / arguments could be improved quite a lot.
On your point regarding the methodology you would use to answer these questions, I would definitely be interested to hear more about that as I’ll be finalising my research methodology over January.
Regarding your questions for greater clarity:
This is directionally correct but maybe not exactly how I would phrase it. To pin down my thinking a bit more, this is vaguely it: I believe public opinion is quite important for social change → Mass movements can be useful tools to build public support → Protests can be a cost-effective way of building public support and building a mass movement. I definitely think a comparison of protests to media campaigns, books, documentaries, etc. could be quite interesting so that is one thing I could do to test that hypothesis.
On your other two questions, I think you’re right in that I haven’t been very clear on what my proposed intervention is e.g. incubate a new movement vs organise protests vs a mass movement not focused on protest. That is something I’ll definitely try clarify in future research but partly I think this is due to my own uncertainty on this topic which makes it hard to pin down.
On your reasons for improving clarity:
For 1, I agree I could have done this better. One assumption you point out is that I don’t even reference non-mass social movements (and I can’t say I’ve given this a lot of thought either) so thanks for raising this.
For 2, agreed there was a slightly opaque assumption in that section that I didn’t spell out. To be precise, it was that I think a) protests can be useful in getting more people engaged in political advocacy, which b) leads to a higher proportion of people phoning or emailing their representatives, c) which might lead to policy change. In the actual research however I left out b) and largely skipped over a) so agree that I could probably do this better.
On specific points:
I would definitely re-emphasise the caveat I gave in that section that I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes thinking about those examples so they could definitely be off! I guess the reason why I thought longtermism could be suitable is that a lot of the messaging around climate change hinges on similar concepts e.g. we’re doing this for future generations so they have a planet to inherit / live in. This is not exactly the same, however, as often people referencing “doing it for the children” or for younger generations alive today but I thought that’s one argument in favour of longtermism. The reasoning I had against global poverty was that it’s a relatively well-known issue that’s been talked about for decades so I can’t imagine that if there hasn’t been a popular movement for that up until now, why that would be any different going forward.
You’re right in that I should definitely be more specific about what I mean by “reasonable chances” and also “success”. I think reaching the level of salience and scale that XR has is probably in the 0.1-1% ballpark, but I do think they’ve been particularly successful. However, I would guess that starting something of similar effectiveness to Animal Rebellion is closer to 10%. I haven’t quantified this and could be totally wrong but I think Animal Rebellion has been 1-10% as successful as XR so far for reference. Basically, I think there’s an inverse relationship where less effective movements have a higher chance of reaching that level of success, where even the less effective movements such as Animal Rebellion might be worth it from a cost-effectiveness angle / hits-based angle.
It was commissioned within their work on Criminal Justice Reform, led by Chloe Cockburn. I know she’s quite interested in social movement theory and how this applies to doing good. I have no idea what conclusions they drew from this and I’ve never spoken to her personally but it’s on my to-do list to contact her in the new year!
Future direction of the research:
This is definitely on the cards. Could I just check if you have any examples of what you would consider empirical social movement studies vs theoretical? As my initial hunch is that most of that work would fit into the theoretical categories but wondering if I’m drawing my boundaries different to you e.g. would conclusions from a very detailed case study be empirical or theoretical?
This is a great point so will add this to the list of research questions—thank you!
I agree that any rigid model that trials to boil down reality in simple steps probably doesn’t capture it all but I would say the model does ring true in several ways, at least in my personal opinion. I agree this section is reasonably interesting so I think it’s worth doing.
I’ve been considering doing this for a while and feel reasonably encouraged enough by yours + others’ posts so will hopefully do this in January! Thanks for the little push I needed.
Overall—thanks again for all your extremely useful comments, it’s been a significant aid to help me refine the research a bit more.
Thanks for the responses James, I found them thoughtful and helpful!
A few responses in return:
Quick thoughts:
Partly it’s just that I don’t have a quant background, and so of necessity I would take a qualitative approach. I think for some questions, this would also be the most appropriate approach (to give a straw example, I’m sceptical about measuring broad social change by quantitative analysis of words used in searchable databases of newspaper articles, versus reading a whole bunch of different sources of evidence, and reaching a qualitative conclusion)
As implied in my comment, I’m reasonably sceptical of theoretical models of social change. Partly this is just my historian’s socialisation. I’d be pretty surprised if many (any?) of these models had high predictive power, and I worry that they miss important nuance. So I’d probably not pay much attention to them if I were doing this research.
I also note that you seem to me to have started from ‘this thing (mass movement protests) seems maybe really effective! What research can we do to dis/confirm this?’ I would be more likely to start from ‘there’s a gap in what we’re trying to do. What might fill that gap?‘, or from ‘there are a lot of past examples of people doing the thing we’re thinking of doing. What can we learn from that?’
Thanks for clarifying. One thing I’ll note is that this is a multi-stage hypothesis, so you have to be right about quite a few different things for this to end up mattering.
When you put it like this, I think it’s definitely legit and in fact wise not to have pinned down your proposed intervention: after all, you haven’t done the research yet, and might discover things which update your current guesses in important ways. Sorry for not getting this before, and implying that you should already know the answer here!
I guess most things have aspects of both theory (~statements about how stuff works in general) and empirics (~statements about particular stuff that’s happened). A few different ways of gesturing at what I personally mean here:
Some types of theory fit my intellectual tastes; others don’t. When someone, after showing me a bunch of evidence, says ‘this evidence suggests that x tends to happen because of y’, that feels good to me: I know what evidence to use to assess the claim, and the claim is reasonably specific. When someone presents me with a complicated model of change (x influences y but also z can cause all of it if and only if in the presence of a), I feel a bunch more sceptical: the model is actually still qualitative masquerading as quantitate, it’s claiming a lot and so it’s difficult to assess and disentangle, and a lot of separate things would need to be right for the model to be right.
Speaking from the (relatively few) works of sociology I’ve read relating to social movements, I like the stuff which focuses on empirical explanation of particular social movements (e.g. this is what happened when foot-binding stopped in China) more than I like the stuff which focuses on engaging with theoretical models that come up elsewhere in the literature (e.g. here is our contribution to the concept of political opportunity structure).