Can Social Movements Save American Democracy? A Review Essay

Recent scholarship on the fragility of American democracy has generally focused on political elites rather than the mass public. Sidney Tarrow’s Movements and Parties offers an essential corrective to this view. Tarrow shows how that social movements have been central to historical patterns of democratization and democratic backsliding in American history and how movements have systematically interacted with political parties in ways that have profoundly shaped the American democratic experiment. Tarrow’s historical survey reveals a recurring pattern of movements that often make tactical alliances with political parties and then provoke countermovements, and he elucidates the underappreciated importance of this pattern for American political development and the path of democratization and de-democratization in the United States. © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Academy of Political Science. All rights reserved.