Consensus social movements: Strategic interaction in Dutch LGBTI politics

Relations between social movements and government actors are often understood by scholars and in popular opinion as being grounded in conflict. In this book movement-government relations are instead viewed on a spectrum between conflict and consensus. To redress the imbalanced attention paid to conflictual movement-government relations, this book is focused on the following questions: What constitutes consensus social movement advocacy, how can consensual relations between movement actors and other actors be established, and what implications can consensual advocacy have for activism and the actors involved? To answer those questions, I combine a definition of social movements that can account for consensus with insights from the strategic interaction perspective to study the case of the central social movement organization of the Dutch lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex (LGBTI) social movement, Federatie COC Nederland, and its advocacy, interactions with government actors, and outcomes from the 1960s until 2019. The research is an appraisal of consensus and was not written in praise of consensus. The findings indicate that consensual movement-government relations may result in a movement organization’s goals expanding, resources increasing, and chances of success rising. Such relations may, however, be limited to particular types of political engagement and restricted in the types of successes that they can facilitate. Drawing from the case of consensus between movement and government actors in Dutch LGBTI politics, I argue that, contrary to common expectations, government actors may come to take part in social movements, and movement actors may come to participate in governance