existing policy. The final and most recent conventional view of state reaction involves non-
incremental shifts in public policy over time. Characterized as “alternating between periods of
relative gridlock and periods of dramatic change” (Jones, Baumgartner, and True 1998: 1),
punctuated equilibria allows for drastic policy and institutional alterations breaking up phases of
incrementalism or immobilism.
This paper emphasizes another mode of interaction, known as the Red Queen response,
which is the adaptive, measured state response via institutional or policy change to contentious
politics. Like Lewis Caroll’s character the Red Queen, under certain conditions bureaus and
sections within the central government selectively adapt to a changing environment. This pattern
is most likely when movement contestation and issue salience are high. Instead of continuously
using the same techniques or strategies against social movements and citizen groups, agencies
display flexibility and proportionate shifts in their responses. While models like punctuated
equilibria posit that institutional and policy changes come about only because of enormous
exogenous shocks like wars, the Red Queen has the state closely monitoring its opponents.
Movement from the state is not merely reactive to challenges, but also proactive. Hence even
small shifts in social movement strategy trigger changes in institutions and instruments. The
government’s reaction forms a dialectic with protest groups which in turn may alter their own
strategies in response to the state’s actions.
Lichbach underscored the well known examples of “dissidents learning from their
mistakes and changing their tactics in response to unsuccessful experiments” such as socialists,
terrorists, and revolutionaries (Lichbach 1995: 54). While conventional theories of state-citizen
interaction note the innovativeness of the contentious citizens, the Red Queen model shifts the
focus to calculated moves by the state. States engaging in such flexible responses move away
from “core” state tools like coercion, police suppression, and expropriation towards more
3
Convention