Structural Misalignment in Civic Campaigns: The Adaptive Campaign Architecture Model (ACAM)

Abstract

This study introduces the Adaptive Campaign Architecture Model (ACAM), a diagnostic framework that treats structural misalignment among a campaign’s core components as a primary explanation for civic campaign failure. Drawing on social movement theory, strategic communication scholarship, and conflict analysis, ACAM organizes campaign design around five interdependent components: environmental constraints, organizational capacities, audience dynamics, strategic communication, and mobilization dynamics. The study’s main theoretical contribution is the integration of Christopher Moore’s Circle of Conflict into campaign audience diagnostics. This shifts the foundational audience question from demographic segmentation to conflict positioning: not only who audiences are, but how they are situated within the specific social conflict a campaign seeks to influence. The framework is applied to two contrasting Polish civic campaigns: Solidarność, the labor and civic movement of the early 1980s, and Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet, the contemporary women’s rights movement, with the analysis focusing on the period from 2016 to 2022. These cases were selected for maximum structural contrast. Solidarność operated under conditions of scarcity of independent information, state repression, and organizational illegality. Strajk Kobiet operated in a digitally saturated hybrid media environment shaped by algorithmic fragmentation and deep value-based polarization. A comparative analysis reveals that Solidarność achieved sustained institutional impact despite extreme constraints, displaying a high degree of structural alignment. At the same time, Strajk Kobiet generated extraordinary visibility and genuine discursive impact but struggled to convert peak mobilization into durable institutional change. The findings emphasize three points: visibility alone is not a reliable indicator of impact; misalignment becomes visible only through relational rather than component-level analysis; and alignment is a continuous process rather than a design-stage achievement.