Hierarchical organization correlates with protest movement success

Evidence

“Organize. Create an organized movement. And don’t be afraid of representation,” he said without hesitation, in his office in Giza, as his world fell apart around him. “We thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy.” I heard answers like this over and over, confirming research compiled by scholars. As early as 1975, William Gamson found that movements succeed more often when they deploy hierarchical forms of organization. In a wide-ranging 2022 study, Mark Beissinger found that loose uprisings of the Maidan type tend to increase inequality and ethnic tensions, while they do not consolidate democracy or end corruption. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 847

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir and earlier chapters on the failures of leaderless protest (ch26, ch18). — connects to: Leaders and hierarchies inevitably emerge in large groups regardless of horizontalist ideals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 901; Media-created reputations attract members who join a fictional version of a movement — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 74; Anti-hierarchical movement structures fail to integrate and educate new members (+9 more)