The Impact of National Resources on State Woman Suffrage Outcomes: A Re-Examination of the Resource Mobilization Framework

Abstract

A key motivation in studying social movements is the belief by researchers that the characteristics, tactics and resources available to organizations within a movement facilitate or hinder the movement’s success. Relative to other processes within a movement—such as emergence, participation, and recruitment—however, systematic research focusing on outcomes has only recently begun. This dissertation advances the study of social movement outcomes by providing a quantitative, historical examination of the influence of national resources on U.S. state woman suffrage outcomes. The mixture of successes and failures at the state level affords a unique look into movement outcomes and how state outcomes may have been affected by the availability of national resources. Using a resource mobilization framework, I investigate the effects of organizational ties between national and state organizations and provision of material resources to the states by the national. Through event history analysis, I find that, net of factors such as political and gendered opportunities and framing of movement arguments, resources delivered by the national organization to the states do not help explain the likelihood of winning woman suffrage at the state level. The primary contribution of my work is thus a partial re-writing of the resource mobilization story, at least for the U.S. suffrage movement—net of other factors, resources are not useful in the final stage of a movement’s history, specifically the policy change of voting rights for women.