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The wars that social movements wage are composed of many kinds of battles--guerilla street protests, psychological struggles for the hearts and minds of would-be recruits and sympathizers in coffee-klatches and mass media, and pitched confrontations in formal political arenas. In his Eco-Wars: Political Campaigns and Social Movements, Ronald Libby examines five important cases that fall into the last category: an effort to ban agricultural biotechnology, animal rights in Massachusetts, the so-called “Big-Green” omnibus environmental initiative in California, a second-hand smoke contest also in California, and a national effort to reform the Endangered Species Act. He calls these confrontations “expressive political campaigns” because they lie in the less charted regions between social movement organizing and interest group activity. In their post-material purpose and grassroots constituencies, they resemble social movements. In their battlegrounds of ballot measures, administrative decisions, and law-making and their techniques of professional public relations, expressive political campaigns are more like interest group skirmishes. The book should be read carefully by those interested in campaigns, social movements, interest groups, and environmental politics, for it offers rich and detailed case studies of major contests. Based upon this case material, Libby contends compellingly that money isn’t everything in politics and legislation, and in particular that the interest group sphere, conventionally dominated by economic Goliaths, can sometimes be penetrated by environmental and grassroots Davids. A careful reading of his cases sheds light not only on the sources of success in these campaigns, but critically their sources of failure. This positive case for the importance of social movement involvement in political campaigns must be tempered somewhat by Libby’s result that only one of the five campaigns is a clear victory: the battle between tobacco corporations and anti-smoking activists over second-hand smoke ordinances in California. The sources of victory in this case, moreover, seem to be quite idiosyncratic, and so its possibilities for generalization are quite limited. By the early 1990s, local governments all over California had passed ordinances to restrict smoking in public places to prevent alleged harms from second-hand smoke inhalation. In response, tobacco companies concocted a statewide initiative, Proposition 188, that would supercede local ordinances by establishing uniform weaker anti-smoking provisions throughout the state. Since they suffered from public distrust, Philip-Morris and other backers framed Proposition 188 as an anti-smoking ordinance and conducted a stealth campaign in which they concealed their sponsorship. Once anti-smoking activists publicized industry sponsorship, public opinion turned decisively against the initiative. It was defeated in 1994 by a vote of 42 percent against and 29 percent in favor. In the other four cases (and in political campaigns generally), activists did not enjoy a high ground in which industry occupied a fragile and deliberatively unstable position. Libby attributes the success of the anti-smoking activists to three factors: the presence of a mobilization infrastructure of activists in civil society and government, their ability to reframe Proposition 188 as an pro-smoking ordinance rather than an anti-smoking effort, and the absence of free-rider problems because social movement groups were unified in support of this cause. These generic explanations, however, miss crucial features of the initial positions that anti-smoking activists and tobacco companies occupied in this campaign. As evidenced by their campaign strategy, industry was on the defensive throughout, and that opening advantage was as crucial as any other factor in the determining the ultimate outcome. In this and his four other cases, Libby relies heavily on mechanisms such as framing, free-rider-problems, and the formation of alliances and opponents as the conceptual apparatus with which to understand the success and failure of social mobilization and political struggle. While these explanations no doubt figure into each, the highlevel of resolution of his cases reveals that more specific and contextual factors may have been more decisive. Unfortunately, Libby fails to incorporate his substantial case-level insights into his more general explanatory and theoretical understanding. For example, the institutional particulars of the political spaces in which these campaigns were waged seemed crucial to their dynamics and outcome. Three of them -the animal rights struggle in Massachusetts, the California “Big Green,” and second hand smoke -took the form of popular ballot initiatives. This institutional space lends itself to particular techniques of professional public relations, media blitzes, and grassroots face-to-face Reviews

journal of political ecology

Why Do Expressive Campaigns Succeed and Fail? A Review Essay on Eco-Wars: Political Campaigns and Social Movements, by Ronald T. Libby. New York: Columbia University Press (1998). Reviewed by Archon Fung