Professor John McCarthy is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Penn State University. He will present a paper co-authored with Patrick Rafail, Kevin Reuning and Hyun Woo Kim titled “Movement Success, Political Fracturing, and Demobilization: Explaining the Tea Party’s Short Romance with Protest Demonstrations.”

Abstract: On April 15, 2009 the Tea Party movement staged more than one thousand tax day protests across the nation. By 2014, just 22 events took place. What explains this rapid decline? We argue that the Tea Party experienced political fracturing: a combination of internal and external pressures that pushed the movement toward demobilization. We combine quantitative and qualitative data on the Tea Party to examine the decline of protest mobilization. Our findings indicate that the decline of the movement was the result of the organizational diffuseness of the Tea Party and its transition from top-down to predominantly grassroots mobilization. Tea Party activists became skeptical of the effectiveness of protest, hindering mobilization, while growing disenchantment with the Republican Party pushed activists into locally focused political mobilization. Our analysis underscores the power of organizational structure and activist strategizing in sustaining mobilization.