Tilly's work has had considerable influence on the study of social movements. Ironically, Charles Tilly was initially reluctant to tackle social movements. "I avoided writing about social movements for about twenty years because I felt that the term had become swollen and imprecise," he said in a 2007 interview. "The phenomenon of the social movement looked to me like a historically specific form of politics parallel to the electoral campaign and the collective seizure of food, not a universal category of human action."