Despite the initial high-profile burst of public protest in 2009, Tea Party activism declined quickly and never returned to its initial level or ferocity. At its peak, the insurgency turned out more than one million supporters at protests staged on April 15, 2010. This chapter utilizes a systematic sampling of 19,758 Tea Party gatherings between 2009 and 2014. We distinguish between protests, meetings, awareness events, and political events, and analyze the rise and rapid decline of the Tea Party’s patterns of local activism. The Tea Party quickly moved away from staging public protests, and instead, focused their efforts on hosting what we call maintenance events, especially monthly or biweekly chapter meetings. We link the swift decline of Tea Party protest to three factors. First, we emphasize the role of activist burnout and activist disillusionment with protest’s effectiveness. Second, we identify an astounding decline in media attention to Tea Party protests after 2009. Last, we highlight the widespread belief held by many Tea Party activists that the Internal Revenue Service had directly targeted local groups.

Protest is ubiquitous in contemporary societies, as is illustrated by any review of recent news headlines. Tarrow and Meyer (1998) refer to the proliferation of protest and its diffusion into everyday life as characteristics of "the social movement society." Social networks are integral to understanding social movement processes. This chapter provides a broad overview of the SNA methodological toolkit, with a focus on ego-networks, so that social movements scholars better understand how networks shape social movement recruitment and support, communication, and social-political influence. The chapter is structured as followed. First, we provide a contextual overview of research on networks, collective action and social movements that underlines the importance of SNA approaches to social movement research. Second, we introduce a set of standard ego-network approaches to social movements and discuss some of the attendant challenges of these approaches. Third, we discuss less well-established qualitative and mixed-methods network approaches to social movements research. Fourth, we describe and discuss some consideration relevant to conducting longitudinal social network analysis, and modeling network dynamics. Finally, we discuss virtual networks as sources of social movements data collection and analysis.

Chapter 6 extends beyond the preceding chapter and explores collective action fields. It begins by reviewing some limitations with the previous approach: its granularity is limited to organizational types and not particular associations, and it does not incorporate the role of events in the political process in tandem for individuals and organizations. Our example illustrates how to overcome such limitations where data allow it. Focusing on civil society actors in one British city, Bristol, we explore the networks linking citizens’ associations, their core members, and local public events of both a contentious and non-contentious kind. We treat those networks from two different perspectives: first as a “restricted” 3-mode network in which ties only occur between elements that are logically proximate to each other (in our case, individuals participating in organizations that themselves promote or support specific events); then as a “general” 3-mode network that additionally allows for ties across all different modes (in our case, this means including individuals’ direct participation in events). We show that again, where data allow, multimodal political network analysis offers a fruitful avenue to the analysis of political settings.