social movements and elections

From Katrina Vanden Heuvel's Washington Post opinion piece:

As professor and activist Frances Fox Piven has argued, this is a false dichotomy. “Electoral politics creates the environment in which movements arise,” while movements can force politicians to do the hard work they were elected to do. Electoral politics and movement politics operate on parallel, often converging tracks. It was the energy of the Occupy movement that compelled Obama to make the alarming growth in income inequality a central issue. And activists fighting for fairer immigration laws undoubtedly helped generate the conditions that led to last week’s executive order.