The politics of gun policy in the United States are dramatic. Against the backdrop of daily gun violence—which claims more than 33,000 lives per year—gun control groups push for stronger regulations, while gun rights groups resist infringements upon their Second Amendment rights. To illuminate the dynamics of this polarized debate, Warped Narratives examines how and why interest groups frame the gun violence problem in particular ways, exploring the implication of groups’ framing choices for policymaking and politics. Melissa K. Merry argues that the gun policy arena is warped, and that both gun control and gun rights organizations contribute to the distortion of the issue by focusing on atypical characters and settings in their policy narratives. Gun control groups emphasize white victims, child victims, and mass shootings in suburban locales, while gun rights groups focus on self-defense shootings, highlighting threats to “law-abiding” gun owners. In reality, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Homicides occur disproportionately in urban areas, mainly affecting racial minorities. While warping makes political sense in the short term, it may lead to negative, long-term consequences, including constraints on groups’ ability to build broad-based coalitions and to reduce prospects for compromise. To demonstrate warping, Merry analyzes nearly 67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases. This book is the first to systematically assess the role of race in gun policy groups’ framing and offers the most comprehensive examination to date of interest groups’ presentation of this issue.

"A must-read for scholars across a broad sweep of disciplines. Laurel Weldon weaves together skillfully the theoretical strands of gender equality policy, intersectionality, social movements, and representation in a multimethod/level comparative study that unequivocally places women's movements at the center of our understanding of democracy and social change."
---Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University

"Laurel Weldon's When Protest Makes Policy expands and enriches our understanding of representation by stressing social movements as a primary avenue for the representation of marginalized groups. With powerful theory backed by persuasive analysis, it is a must-read for anyone interested in democracy and the representation of marginalized groups."
 ---Pamela Paxton, University of Texas at Austin

"This is a bold and exciting book. There are many fine scholars who look at women's movements, political theorists who make claims about democracy, and policy analysts who do longitudinal treatments or cross-sectional evaluations of various policies. I know of no one, aside from Weldon, who is comfortable with all three of these roles."
---David Meyer, University of California, Irvine

What role do social movements play in a democracy? Political theorist S. Laurel Weldon demonstrates that social movements provide a hitherto unrecognized form of democratic representation, and thus offer a significant potential for deepening democracy and overcoming social conflict.

Through a series of case studies of movements conducted by women, women of color, and workers in the United States and other member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Weldon examines processes of representation at the local, state, and national levels. She concludes that, for systematically disadvantaged groups, social movements can be as important---sometimes more important---for the effective articulation of a group perspective as political parties, interest groups, or the physical presence of group members in legislatures.

When Protest Makes Policy contributes to the emerging scholarship on civil society as well as the traditional scholarship on representation. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with advancing social cohesion and deepening democracy and inclusion as well as those concerned with advancing equality for women, ethnic and racial minorities, the working class, and poor people. 

S. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University.

In Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua, Jennifer Leigh Disney investigates the contours of women’s emancipation outside the framework of liberal democracy and a market economy. She interviews 146 women and men in the two countries to explore the comparative contribution of women’s participation in subsistence and informal economies, political parties and civil society organizations. She also discusses military struggles against colonialism and imperialism in fostering feminist agency to provide a fascinating look at how each movement evolved and how it changed in a post-revolutionary climate.