Shifting opportunities drive power-holders rigid and challengers flexible

Evidence

Rapidly shifting threats and opportunities, I suggest, generally move power-holders toward rigid repertoires and challengers toward more flexible repertoires. Power-holders cling to proven performances, including repression of challengers; meanwhile, challengers seek new means to outwit authorities and competitors. (Complication: as the POS argument implies, rivalry among power-holders often leads some of them to form alliances with challengers, which limits the power-holders’ movement toward rigidity as well as the challengers’ move toward flexibility.) Since some repertoires link challengers to power-holders, rapidly shifting threats and opportunities thus introduce more uncertainties into the relations between claimants and objects of their claims. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 279

Categorization

• QUESTION: This asymmetry between power-holder rigidity and challenger flexibility is the reader’s lever: does a constitutional rights regime that legitimates dominant-group claim-making as ‘rights defense’ freeze dominant repertoires into rigidity while binding subordinate challengers to tolerated flexible forms?
• XREF: connects to: Regimes sort contention into prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden performances — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 272; Rapid opportunity shifts ignite spirals of contention reaching revolutionary extremes — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 280; Contention spirals make rulers’ performances rigid and challengers’ flexible — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 679