hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 5 of the ap government curriculum and in this video it's time to talk about how a whole junk drawer of groups have influenced public policy so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it so in this video here's what we're trying to do explain how various political actors influence policy outcomes so various political actors what in the fresh heck does that mean well really what this topic is all about is to help you see that there are tons of different groups some more organized some less organized some with funding and some without etc who are able to effect change in our political system in the last video we talked specifically about interest groups and i emphasized what are known as single-issue interest groups who basically rally around one policy outcome and devote all their energy and resources to that think of the nra for example who devotes all of their energy and resources to keeping gun laws as unrestrictive as possible or think of pro-life and pro-choice groups those are all single-issue interest groups and as we saw in the last video they have very specific mechanisms for mobilizing their resources for political change but here's where we open up the junk drawer and have a look at all the other kinds of groups that work for policy change as well and there are two big categories here social movements and protest movements now before i tell you what those are let me just tell you they can't draw a hard line between those two kinds of movements rather it's more like a dotted line which is to say you really don't need to know specific examples of social movements and specific examples of protest movements because they often overlap so let me give you two examples of these kinds of movements first is the prohibition movement of the late 19th and early 20th century this movement was made up of mostly women who had grown tired of the rampant and drunkenness of their men and without much central organization at least in the beginning these women marched and demonstrated and some of them got straight up destructive for example my favorite prohibitionist has always been carrie nation she was a deeply committed christian and believed that alcohol was ruining the christian morals of society and so with a bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other she would walk into saloons and start breaking up bottles and cakes and the men in the taverns would be so shocked that a woman was doing this that they'd just stare at her and let her keep chopping anyway groups like the women's christian temperance union were able to coordinate their efforts enough to persuade legislators to get a constitutional amendment passed outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcohol a second example is the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s which fought for the civil rights of black americans as we've talked about before one of the key methods they used in this movement was civil disobedience martin luther king one of the leaders of this movement said that by breaking unjust laws on purpose they put on display the injustice bound up in those laws so to that end devotees of the civil rights movement sat at lunch counters that were for whites only and some of them refused to give up their seats to white passengers on buses all of which was illegal and for their efforts many of them suffered imprisonment and physical brutality but ultimately their work led to the passage of significant legislation like the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965. okay so now you have a sense of social and protest movements now let's try to understand how they along with other groups affect policymaking so when you open the junk drawer for policy making you find a bunch of different entities competing for influence you know you've got social and protest movements you've got interest groups you've got professional organizations political parties you've got the military bureaucratic agencies and probably a hundred others but those are the main ones so each of these groups plays a role in getting new policies passed social and protest movements are really good at getting the nation's attention on certain realities that need to be changed then as those policies are being formed interest groups will step in and draft potential legislation to present to lawmakers then when it comes to actually making the laws political parties and bureaucratic agencies get involved and then it comes time to implement and execute the law so bureaucratic agencies figure out the rules and regulations to accomplish that and then once the law is in place maybe it's going to be implemented well or not and if not social and protest movements might spring up to get the nation's attention and the whole process starts over again so the point is there are a lot of political actors that take the stage and play their roles when new policies need to be enacted sometimes they're more successful and sometimes they're less successful but they are always working nonetheless okay thanks for watching click right here to review packet which is gonna help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam in may if this video helped you and you want me to keep making them then by all means subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out