Women’s and environmental movements
anti-racist, anti-war, or anti-colonialist groups, gay-rights groups, animal rights and anti-nuclear groups

Called “postmaterialist” or “postmodern” successors to traditional political parties and entrenched interest organizations [discuss how the values they represent are “post-materialist” or grow out of “post-modern” critiq\que of politics]

Agendas cut across traditional ideological lines. They may have views that might put them on either the traditional right or the traditional left of the political spectrum.
 e.g. Radical feminists may favor censorship of what they see as pornography just as strongly as those who promote traditional family values. Radical environmentalists may promote what conservative farmers would defend as traditional farming methods, and so on.

Membership of a typical new social movement tends to be rather fluid, with people drifting in and out of affiliation with a movement or cause on a rather casual basis.

Leadership often informal, non-hierarchical; many activists cut their political teeth during the period of student radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s,

Internal Organization: seek to maximize active participation and group democracy, rather than the more passive membership and hierarchical decision- making structures of a traditional political party, trade union or interest group.

Some groups may even refuse to acknowledge that they have any “leadership” at all [discuss the practical ramifications of this]

Tactics:
Demonstrations, boycotts, and other forms of DIRECT ACTION are preferred to lobbying, letter writing, petitions, and more conventional pressure tactics (but may also do these).

Why preference for direct action????

Because mobilizes and engages members who would otherwise be alienated from the political process;

It forces new issues onto at least the media’s political agenda;

And it maintains the group’s status as a radical outsider, rather than a co-opted part of the traditional establishment. [question, therefore, of what happens when they become part of the “traditional establishment” – e.g., the German Greens]

New social movements fit more easily with a pluralist than with a corporatist view of the world of political decision making [i.e., pluralists see them as competing for power/voice in the marketplace of ideas. How would (do) corporatists systems handle NSMS???}