The Rise, Fall, and Influence of the Tea Party Insurgency

Patrick Rafail is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. His work focuses on social movements, collective behavior, social control, and computational social science. John D. McCarthy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the Pennsylvania State University. His diverse and extensive research began with resource mobilization, including numerous studies of social movement organizations. Notre Dame's Social Movement Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award is named in his honor.

• 1. Introduction: A Fragile, Grassroots Insurgency; 2. Toward a Theoretical Account of the Tea Party's Rise and Fall; 3. The Birth of the Insurgency: The 2009 Tea Party Protests and the Groups that Staged Them; 4. Tea Party Supporters, Activists, and Mobilizing Structures; 5. The Trajectory of the Tea Party Insurgency: Local Activism and its Rapid Decline; 6. Threat, Political Integration, and the Disappearance of Local Tea Party Groups; 7. Moving Off Message: The Discursive Demobilization of the Tea Party; 8. How Tea Party Activism Polarized the House of Representatives; 9. From Ridicule to Unbridled Enthusiasm: The Tea Party's Slow Embrace of Trumpism; 10. Conclusion; Appendix: Research Design and Methodology.

'This book is carefully researched and uses a wide variety of data sources to support the authors' arguments, providing a treasure trove of interesting new approaches to studying political movements. … Recommended.' R. J. Gelm, CHOICE