“Winning is underrated in grassroots movements” by JamesÖz

[Cross-posted from my Substack here. I wrote this back in November 2024 but someone recently said it would be worth cross-posting here. Some things....didn't age so well.] Grassroots movements can fall apart and die in many ways. One such way is having demands that are too broad, too intangible or have no defined endpoint. When Social Change Lab did a survey of 100+ political scientists and sociologists, something that cropped up was the importance of having achievable demands. In the graphs below, you can see that these experts believe that it was the 2nd most important strategic and tactical factor (of the ones we asked about) contributing to a social movement's success. The second graph shows that experts also believed having a clear political goal was one of the most important organisational factors leading to success. I wanted to unpack these findings a bit more [...] The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI. --- First published: March 10th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zq78Yj5tH6NGAReLT/winning-is-underrated-in-grassroots-movements --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.