This thesis documents and examines Occupy Portland's organizational structure and the impact of this structure on the leadership roles of participants. Interviews with key activists and participant observation reveal that the ideologically influenced horizontal organization employed by the movement disrupts the emergence of centralized authority and charismatic leadership. This, in turn, encourages the rise of a "distributed leadership" comprised of multiple, task driven leaders. It finds that these task-oriented leaders within Occupy Portland tend to fulfill three specific leadership roles; the facilitation of process, the construction of movement structures, and the organization of actions. This study provides an exploration of conceptualizing leaders in a non-hierarchical, decentralized, consensus-based decision-making social movement and works to give needed expansion to the literature on social movement leadership.

Using quantitative content analysis, this study explores social movement (SM) framing in commercial news media -- by comparing how leading newspapers covered prominent protest occupations in 2011 and 2016. More than other SMs, anti-systemic protests like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the 2016 Malheur Refuge Occupation (MRO) only have partial frame-setting agency, raising a broad theory question (to inform the research questions below): If SMs and media relate as interacting systems, are protest news frames more movement- or more media- driven; and do media not just enable but also constrain SMs? With the movement-media theory question above, the study design adapts media opportunity structure (MOS) to model a hierarchy of influences on news coverage of ideologically opposed or "distant twin" OWS and MRO, as 40- to 60-day protest occupations. The focused research question -- exploring media's constraining potential -- asks if commercial news framing of collective action: i) commercially frames or "sells" even anti-corporate protest; or ii) instead marginalizes or neutralizes such protest? Coverage from three top national or state newspapers (The New York Times, USA Today, and The Oregonian) was analyzed randomly from all protest stories during the occupations. Sampled time periods in 2011 and 2016, during actual encampments/ occupations in Portland, OR and New York City (OWS) and in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon (MRO), also correspond with transitional years in print news. The inductive-based comparative results, from 15 coding dimensions for news framing of collective action, dispersed passivity, and commercially-framed activism, showed some evidence for the "selling protest" question. And the compiled summary Framing Advantages and Disadvantages yield this study's key finding: Although anti-corporate OWS was far larger, with more widespread media coverage, the comparative overall media frame for the small, remote, anti-government MRO was far more potent and resonant. Comparing media-and-movement framing of these distant twin 40-day protest occupations finds some support for the "selling (or underselling) protest" question. This comparative frame analysis helps bridge micro- and macro-theory levels, addressing an enduring dual gap in movement-media research literature -- to yield insight on SMs' and media's respective roles in protest news framing and then identify potential mechanisms for future research.

Occupy Wall Street galvanized the country and attracted thousands of participants, who came to New York City in order to protest corporate greed. Occupy Portland, standing in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, began their encampment less than a month later and attracted more participants on its first day than did Occupy Wall Street. This grounded theory inquiry uncovers the principle reasons why individuals participated in Occupy Portland. The findings revealed that participants were (1) upset about the bank bailouts and corporate irresponsibility; (2) swept up by the size and organization of Occupy; and (3) looking to get some fundamental societal needs met. The findings do not neatly fit collective behavior or resource mobilization theory, paving the way for further scholarship.