Understanding Governmental Activism

This article seeks to understand an understudied phenomenon: governmental
players joining forces with non-governmental players in contentious actions
against policies they want to prevent or redress. This behaviour, which we
call ‘governmental activism’, problematizes important assumptions in the
social movement literature on state–SMO dichotomies and on seeing
‘the state’ as a homogeneous and unified actor that solely provides the
context for SMO activities. Governmental activism also problematizes
assumptions on cooperation and ‘new’ modes of coordination in the
governance literature. To understand governmental activism, we build on
the strategic interaction perspective from social movement studies and on
third-phase institutionalism from political science. In our analysis, we show
the particulars of governmental activism. Our arguments are illustrated by
empirical material on a case of municipal amalgamation in the Netherlands.