The social dynamics of Canadian protest participation

In the context of these broad shifts in public engagement and uncertainty surrounding the capacity of contemporary protest to improve democratic politics, this thesis focuses on identifying and elaborating the social dynamic underlying Canadian protest participation at the turn of the 20th century. [...] As the grassroots élan of the civil rights movement began to recede by 1970 and that of the women’s movement by 1982 with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the organizational legacy of many mass mobilizations were professional, staff-run outfits of communications directors, management consultants, and lawyers “concentrating on manipulating the mass media so as to influence public opinion a [...] A third significant shift in the character of protest relates closely to the second: the institutionalizing of a set of response procedures for protest control. [...] In addition to these frameworks, I will examine the direct and moderating effects of political and religious values, ethnicity and gender, and determine whether the effects of these variables vary between active and passive participation. [...] Postmaterialists and the young are markedly more tolerant of homosexuality, abortion, divorce, extramarital affairs, and prostitution than are materialists and the old, and this is part of a pervasive pattern – the rise of humanistic norms that emphasize human emancipation and self-expression” (Inglehart and Welzel 2005: 126).