Summary
Bill Moyer’s Doing Democracy (2001) and the accompanying Movement Action Plan pamphlet (2002) — the canonical practitioner-level framework for diagnosing where a social movement is in its lifecycle, identifying the four roles every movement needs (citizens, rebels, change agents, reformers), and predicting the recurring backlash stage. [source: moyer-movement-action-plan]
Body
Bill Moyer (1939-2004) was a Quaker, anti-nuclear organiser, and co-author of the 1969 Liberation News Service. The Movement Action Plan (MAP) emerged from his twenty years of organising with the Movement for a New Society (MNS) and the War Resisters League, applied retrospectively to the US anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s-80s. The model’s claim: every successful social movement passes through eight stages (normal times → trigger event → hope → majority non-support → failure of authorities’ counter-movement → majority support → success → continuation), and most movements that fail do so at stage 4 — the backlash, which the movement mistakes for defeat.
MAP’s other contribution: identifying the four roles every movement needs in order to succeed. Citizens (the mass base, motivated by moral urgency), Rebels (the disrupters, motivated by outrage), Change Agents (the long-term organisers), and Reformers (the inside actors). Campaigns that have all four out-perform those that have only one or two. [source: moyer-movement-action-plan]
The model is descriptive rather than predictive, and Moyer was explicit that his framework was developed for liberal-democratic contexts. Its application to authoritarian movements, online-only movements, or movements that never face a single target is limited.