The Movement Against Nuclear Power in the 1970s: Protest, Litigation and Opportunity Theory

This paper examines the strategic choices taken by the anti-nuclear power movement in the 1970s across five European countries (France, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, the UK) and the USA. Among the strategies adopted, the focus of the paper is on protest and litigation. It seeks to explore how far opportunity theory can help to explain the differing levels of protest and litigation that were seen in the various countries. Kitschelt, in his well known 1986 study of the anti-nuclear movement, famously argued that political opportunity structure accounted for strategic variation. However, the current paper claims that legal opportunity structure and political opportunity (as opposed to structure) are better at explaining litigation and protest levels, respectively.