The Complexity of Decline: Explaining the Marginalization of the East German Women's Movement

The case of the East German women's movement is used to examine a understudied and undertheorized area of social movement research, movement decline. The political marginalization of this movement in 1990, only a few months after its promising beginning, can best be explained by integrating three fundamental concepts in social movement theory: political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing processes. Based on the analysis of movement documents and forty interviews with women's movement activists, it is demonstrated that none of these approaches by itself is sufficient to explain the decline of the East German women's movement. Instead, the symbiotic interrelationships among political opportunities, framing, and mobilizing structures are crucial to understanding movement decline. The analysis identifies key dimensions on which these three factors interact, and suggests that they can be used to explain other cases of movement decline, particularly in political transitions.