Social movement insiders: The impact of institutional activists on affirmative action and comparable worth policies

We challenge the assumption within resource mobilization theory that polity members and social move-ment activists are distinct entities by offering the concept of "institutional activists. " Institutional activists are so-cial movement participants who occupy formal statuses within the government and who pursue social movement goals through conventional bureaucratic channels. Using regression analyses we examine the impact of institu-tional activists and social movement organizations (SMOs) on the comprehensiveness of two U.S. state policies: affirmative action, pursued by the civil rights movement; and comparable worth, pursued by the women's move-ment. We find that SMOs were decisive in adoption of affirmative action, but not comparable worth policies. In contrast, institutional activists were important for the passage of comparable worth but not affirmative action policies. These findings suggest that resource mobilization theory would better capture the impact of social move-ments on policy outcomes by recognizing activists who work as insiders on outsider issues. One defining feature of social movements is that they operate outside of the institutional arena. Social movements typically rely upon social movement organizations (SMOs) to influ-ence governments because they lack formal political representation. However, many contem-porary social movements, such as the civil rights and women's movements, have a significant number of activists who have gained political positions. In 1990, for instance, Blacks held th