Through his Political Mediation Theory, developed as a consequence of studying the Townsend Plan, an organization demanding old-age pensions during the Great Depression, and other New Deal-era movements, Amenta has influenced how scholars conceptualize, study, and explain social movement impacts.
Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton University Press, 1998) won the 1999 Distinguished Book award from the American Sociological Association section on Political Sociology.
Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on U.S. Old-Age Policy" (with Neal Caren and Sheera Joy Olasky) won the 2006 Best Published Article Award from the American Sociological Association section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements.
[8] Amenta has served as the chair of the American Sociological Association Political Sociology section and Collective Behavior and Social Movements section,[9] and he has received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation[10] and the National Science Foundation.
[11] Before Amenta, most work on the influence of social movements focused either on the internal characteristics of movements (membership, resources, organization, tactics) or their external environments (openness of the political system, elite alignments and alliances, and state repressive capacities).