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528 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1993)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0528 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE In the past decade, most Western democracies have experienced a flower- ing of citizen action groups and social movements concerned with environ- mentalism, women's rights, peace, consumerism, life-style choices, and other issues of advanced industrial societies. These groups have attempted to mobilize the public's changing values and issue interests into a new political force that can challenge governments and the dominant social paradigm. Through their advocacy of new issue demands and their reliance on new forms of protest and direct citizen action, these groups have disrupted the political status quo in an effort to expand the normal boundaries of democratic politics. This issue of The Annals focuses on how such citizen groups are transform- ing the nature of contemporary democratic politics. When citizen protest groups first emerged in large numbers during the turbulent 1960s in the United States, they were initially seen as a sign of these stormy times. Often, they were treated as political novelties; sometimes, they, or at least subgroups within these movements, faced outright opposition and hostility from the political establishment. It was just 30 years ago from this year that the free-speech movement was seen as a revolutionary cause in Berkeley and the civil rights movement was suffering bitter repression in parts of the American South. In both their nonviolent and violent forms, these new examples of citizen action generally were seen as lying outside the bounds of normal politics, representing an unconventional style of political action. Similar types of citizen interest groups began to appear in Europe in the 1970s, where they are known as new social movements. Many of the issues are the same: the environment, feminism, human rights, and alternative life-style choices. Furthermore, the political methods of these groups, ranging from nonviolent protest to politically based acts of violence, tested the limits of the democratic process. These groups appeared to be even more unconven- tional in the highly structured political systems of most European states. Green activists, for example, were often castigated as undemocratic extrem- ists; politicians and bureaucrats frequently responded to these new interests as if they were threats to the established political order. Several well-known political scientists cited these groups as illustrations of the excess of democ- racy that threatened the very vitality of the democratic process. Indeed, for many political systems based on neocorporatist or consociational models of interest representation, the populist and direct-action methods of these new movements did seem to represent a fundamental challenge to the existing political order, even if one of the claimed goals of citizen action groups was to make the system more democratic. As the contributors to this issue and other scholars now agree, these citizen interest groups and new social movements have become part of the political 8

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