Emmett Goodhope: Advanced Democracy

Social science research on of the rise and fall of social movements--including peasant and labor movements--has shown that they tend to cluster together in time, when considered on a worldwide basis. So said the late Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, who reviewed the main work on this subject in the early-90s. (A draft of their unfinished paper can be found online at the Frank archives.

This would imply that there are some general causal factors at work in movement upsurges; otherwise you'd expect them to be randomly distributed over time. However, efforts to associate movements with readily identifiable social-structural changes, such as economic long-waves, have not been very successful. Social movement theorist Sidney Tarrow summarized the situation as follows:

"we cannot identify cycles of protest by simply extrapolating to them from normal trends in economic activity. Nor can we predict mechanically the timing of a cycle or its magnitude from the frequencies of past occurrences. Protest cycles resemble politics in general in their uneven and irregular diffusion across time and space. What we can say about cycles of protest is that they are characterized by heightened conflict across the social system: not only in industrial relations, but in the streets; not only there but in the villages or in the schools." (Quoted in the above Frank/Fuentes paper)

In short, things are complicated.