The major goals of the project were to collect data on which social movement organizations, like the NAACP or Veterans of Foreign Wars, testified before Congress over the twentieth century, and analyze the factors that predict their presence before Congress. Prior research has focused extensively on the topics of Congressional hearings, but who testified at these hearings has gone largely undiscussed. We sought to understand the full spectrum of social movement activity, and so looked at representation for 23 social movement families (including veterans, the elderly, and farmers as well as women's rights and anti-war protesters, among others). To conduct our research, we trained a team of both graduate and undergraduate students in various aspects of coding reliability, data validity, and working with "big data."

We first collected data on all congressional hearings from 1900 to 2000, and then searched for whether 6,374 unique social movement organizations were witnesses or provided information at those hearings. We find that which types of social movements testified before Congress diversified considerably over the course of the 20th century (see attached image 1). Prior to 1950, the Veterans, Farmers, and Labor movements were the most likely to testify (and there is also a large spike for women's rights groups prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment). After 1950, social movements representing new issues like the environment, minority rights, and old age emerged. Prior explanations for social movement representation have focused on a disruptive explanation (social movements forcing their way into the conversation) or a more state-based explanation (the state is selective in who it invites). We find that Congress is particularly moderate in who they invite to testify. Organizations that use institutional tactics like petitions and press conferences, and represent already lionized issues (e.g., veterans' or farmers' issues) were more likely to be invited to testify whereas groups that used disruptive or violent tactics and represented radical ideologies or minority groups were less likely to testify. We will make these data publicly available as soon as our findings are published. 

Not all congressional hearings are positive for social movements. In some cases, Congress calls hearings with the intention of stigmatizing or discrediting a specific movement or organization. We termed these "repressive hearings" and worked with our team of graduate and undergraduate students to find all such hearings from 1900-2000. We found 1539 such hearings, mostly targeting communist organizations such as the American Communist Party, but also at times targeting fascist, labor, civil rights, and anti-war organizations (see attached image 2). In sum, we find that these hearings occurred in three historical waves. The first wave spanned roughly 1918-1920 and focused on the National Security League and the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. The second wave, spanning the 1940s and 1950s, was driven by the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings targeting Communist and labor organizations. The third wave, spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on the Civil Rights movement and Anti-war movement, and included hearings denouncing the Black Panthers in the 1950s and 1960s. We find that although engaging in violent protest significantly increased a group's likelihood of being the subject of a repressive hearing, engaging in institutional tactics did not guarantee immunity from such attention. 

In the course of this research, we also developed a dataset describing when social scientists testified before Congress. We found that 5,457 individual social scientists testified 15,506 times over the twentieth century, and that testimony from economists was much more common than from other social science disciplines such as anthropology, political science, psychology, or sociology. We made these data publicly available, and published these findings in a publicly available scientific journal (PLOS ONE). 

Last Modified: 12/17/2021
Modified by: Charles Seguin