This article addresses the civil disobedience and humorous protest tactics of a set of old ladies that blocked recruiting at the Times Square recruiting station. They were found not-guilty, despite ignoring the police orders to leave the station, because the judge ruled that they had left space for others to enter and leave, and thus had not completely disrupted the station.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/28grandmothers.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/nyregion/27schools.html
This article addresses parent concerns over the mobile scanning set up by the school chancellor to confiscate weapons, cell phones, and electronic devices. Incredibly, the chancellor's office is attempting to hold firm against cell phones in school. This will probably be a classic example of majority pressure to achieve change.
According to some political scientists almost every political struggle falls into one of the following categories -
1. Real benefit or cost to the minority, negligible to the majority. In this case, as you could guess, the minority will often get its way, as it has an incentive to organize, and there is little opposition. An example of this might be the billion dollar give-away of TV airwaves to huge corporations by the FCC. It didn't matter much to us, we didn't hire lobbyists - it mattered a lot to the huge corporations, so they organized, lobbied, donated, and got their way. Another example is the Regents' waiver that our school and others struggled for - it helps us a lot, didn't really affect most people, so there was only ideological opposition among the bureaucrats, and we ended up winning. On the other hand the TWU didn't completely win in their strike, even though it would seem to fit this category.
2. Negligible to the minority, real benefit or cost to the majority. In this case, the majority will virtually always win. This situation with the cellphones is a perfect example. The parents are not going to give up their chance to contact their children at any time, it matters a lot to them. Although less significant (in terms of political power) the students aren't going to give up their right to maintain their social communications networks. This is what the huge majority wants, and the ideological opposition among the leaders of the bureaucrats will snap like a finger-bone caught in a heavy steel door. The only real puzzle here is why the chancellor has decided to fight such an antagonistic and obviously losing battle against the people he is hired to serve? Especially one which steps on the emotional landmine of parents' desire to protect the safety of their children?
3. Real cost or benefit to the minority, real cost or benefit to the majority. This is the one that sparks big conflicts. About 5 years ago the lobbyists for the banks got some legislation passed against credit unions. But the benefit to the banks was relatively small - they weren't going to use all their power to defend the legislation, and there are millions of members of credit unions. The legislation was withdrawn after a huge reaction by the millions. What about the classic case? Bush's tax cuts for rich people gave a huge benefit to people like him - the richest people in the nation. But the cost to the majority was also significant - more national debt, higher deficits, higher interest rates, cuts in programs, etc. This is the situation where the outcome is in doubt - it really depends on the political skill of interested parties. In the case just mentioned, Bush was able to pretend (despite widespread analyses to the contrary) that giving lots of money to rich people would help poor people, and was even able to maintain the fiction that the tax cuts were mainly for regular folks. In the absence of skillful and massive response, and given the ignorance of the majority about how capitalism works (so they can be easily hoodwinked about "anti-recession" techniques), the rich were able to win on the tax cuts. The abortion case may be less simple. Although prohibiting abortion is a top priority of an extremely organized and militant minority, millions of women have direct experience with the need for safe and legal abortions.
