Social Movement Analysis

Nowadays people more and more tend to call the twenty-first century as an era of social movements or even claim that modern societies are becoming clearly the societies of social movements. To understand these points it is important to know the exact definition of social movements. This term can be defined as a special kind of collective actions. Specifically, a social movement is a motion of a group of people who have common aims and who try to success in realizing them. Social movements’ goal is to make social changes; they develop through informal systems, which do not have institutionalized and formalized nature. In the modern world social movements such as the movement for the prohibition and for allowing abortion, the environmental movement, …show more content…
These movements appeared due to the aggravation of global problems, entering into a new stage of scientific and technological revolution of western countries, changes in mass consciousness in the value orientations of society, a crisis of confidence in public institutions and traditional political institutions. The role of social movements in politics is that they exercise control over the activities of government agencies and help in the realization of the interests of a particular individual, and different social groups in society. In the second half of the XIX century the term “lobbying” has acquired in the United States of America. Lobby organizations, groups seeking to influence decisions of government on specific problem, play a special role in the social and political life. These groups usually emerge when private interests, which do not coincide with others’ interests, begin to dominate in organizations or movements. Lobby organizations influence political decisions through committees, commissions, councils, bureaus and so on. They use diverse methods of political pressure such as bribery, threats, sabotage, terror, and purposeful formation of public …show more content…
Environmental movement is a socio-political movement opposing the predatory attitude to natural resources, whose main objective is the protection of nature and the environment. On the basis of environmental motion some political parties have emerged in a number of Western countries, especially in Germany, in the 70-80-ies. Objectives of these parties were not only environmental demands, but also democratic and humanistic demands. The green movement is a mass democratic motion that has arisen mainly in the 1970s and acted to protect the environment from pollution and depletion. The party of "green" has a particularly strong position in Germany, where it successfully held its deputies in the elections to the federal parliament in 1998, entered into a coalition government won the SPD led by Schroeder. It also calls for the democratization of society, decentralization of power, strengthening the protection of the world, the destruction of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "Green" party has places in a number of parliaments in European countries and the European Parliament. Environmental movement has a number of important functions such as identifying and shaping public opinion, attitudes of different population groups, social control over the activities of the various structures of power and the creation of a kind of opposition to attempts to monopolize the decision-making and implementation, the creation