One of the remaining gaps in social movement research is the lack of an adequate explanation for how movement organizations sometimes adopt dramatically different organizational structures, tactics, and deliberative practices, even when they share important features like size and issue focus, and face largely the same structural environment. My dissertation examines how ideology shapes these preferences through an analysis of two competing organizational currents in Germany’s new social movement sector. Over the last thirty years, Germany has seen the emergence of two extraparliamentary countercultures that are both deeply committed to a non-hierarchical, “collectivist-democratic” style of politics. One counterculture is rooted in the Gandhian tradition of radical nonviolence; the other in the anti-authoritarian “autonomous” movement (known as the Autonomen). Though both exist within the same political-economic regime, recruit from the same class base, and face the same political opportunity structures, these two countercultures have developed markedly different collectivist-democratic practices, including different ways of dividing labor and running meetings, different decision-making processes, and different tactical orientations. My dissertation attempts to account for these differences by analyzing the ideologies and practices of six autonomous and six nonviolence groups located throughout Germany and varying in size, age, and issue orientation.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 62 semi-structured interviews with a matched sample of activists from each counterculture, my analysis shows that the development of what I call the organic and mechanistic forms of collectivist democracy is rooted in ideological tensions around questions of power and conflict. These tensions surfaced in the narratives of each counterculture as competing and sometimes contradictory understandings of the core ideological concepts of nonviolence and autonomy, respectively. How each group dealt with and tried to manage these ideological tensions proved critical in shaping their collectivist practices. My findings suggest that the relationship between ideology and social movement practice is conditioned not only by the content, but also by the structure of their political ideologies. Choices about the adoption of particular organizational structures, tactics, and deliberative processes represent more than a response to political and cultural circumstances outside of the movement, and more than a simple expression of the movement’s political ideals. They are also a product of the activists’ conscious and unconscious attempts to resolve contradictory elements within their own ideological systems.