Political Opportunity, Community Identity, and the Emergence of a Local Anti-Expressway Movement

This study builds on the “community studies” tradition in urban sociology by examining the interconnections among political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and strategic framing in the emergence and outcome of a locally-based movement. Traditional urban analyses contend that there must be an intimate bond of community identity among individuals for them to engage in neighborhood collective action and political mobilization. This article challenges this assumption and examines “community identity” as a political strategy used by neighborhood coalitions and civil rights groups to contest public policies, neutralize counterframes and opposition, and mobilize constituents. I examine the emergence of an anti-expressway movement in Kansas City, Missouri during the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate the structural relationship between political opportunities, mobilization, and identity. Political opportunities not only create motivations for mobilization through “structural” changes (e.g., public policies, cycles of protest, and presence of external allies, etc.), but they also set in motion “ideational” shifts in political culture, expanding the cultural reservoir of strategic frames and enhancing the potency of movement framing.

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