Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding

Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understanding of this important topic. As the literature demonstrates, this conflation of celebrity and politics is not a recent phenomenon, as politicians have long employed dramaturgical elements to mobilize constituencies. Indeed, celebrities and politicians share many similarities. Both must construct public personalities appealing to their audiences and employ similar actors and strategies to help create these personalities. While some scholars working in this field agree with the concern that celebrity’s presence in politics inhibits serious political discourse, other scholars contend that the use of celebrity performances by politicians may actually attract a wider segment of society to meaningfully participate in politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that future works in this area should adopt a cultural sociology framework to empirically study the meaning of celebrity for different social groups in order to gain a stronger understanding of celebrity’s sociopolitical impact.     

Exploring the influence of celebrities in politics: A focus group study of young voters

A focus group study was conducted examining the way young voters interpret and make sense of celebrity influence in politics. Eight focus groups discussed the credibility and influence of celebrities when they speak on political and social issues. Findings suggest that young people have a complex interpretation of celebrity influence. Celebrity type, general credibility, identification with, and appropriateness to an issue were all key components in evaluating celebrity political credibility. Perceived influence of celebrities manifested in a greater interest in an issue but not necessarily an attitude change. There was a high degree of perceived influence on others; this was not always regarded positively. Social media was the primary medium for consumption of celebrity political appeals. An interweaving of all key themes suggests that young voters use aspirational identification and attachment to a celebrity to negotiate political messages. Normative implications and guidance for future research are discussed.     

American Evangelicals and Conservative Politics: Past,Present, and Future

Since the late 1970s, American evangelicals have been a potent influence in conservative politics. Recent scholarship both refines and contextualizes some of the central themes found in the broader literature on evangelical politics. We first review key recent scholarship in American religious history. It shows that current patterns of evangelical conservatism are the product of historically contingent social forces and that political conservatism was never uniform among evangelicals. We then discuss recent scholarship on evangelicals' attitudes toward public issues. This work indicates that commitment to moral traditionalism on social issues is the dominant force animating evangelical political conservatism and that evangelicals remain distinctly Republican in their partisan voting despite economic and foreign policy commitments that are not as strongly aligned with Republican priorities. We then shift our focus to the dominant conservative movement of the moment: the Tea Party. We cite evidence that evangelicals and the Tea Party remain distinct in terms of constituents and issue priorities but that social concerns may be taking precedence over the economic concerns that birthed the movement. We conclude by discussing recent trends that suggest that a de‐alignment between evangelicalism and conservative politics may be underway.     

FINDING POLITICS IN THE SILLY AND THE SACRED: ANTI-RAPE ACTIVISM ON CAMPUS

Volunteers often describe what they do as nonpolitical. That is, they tend to construct their efforts as simultaneously above and below politics but rarely as explicitly within the realm of politics. Using data from field research at a campus antirape organization, I analyze these aspects of participants' efforts and consider how they are linked to politics. I argue that even actions which appear at first glace to be nonpolitical have political consequences for movements and movement participants. Constructing volunteers' efforts as apolitical, either above or below politics, has the consequence of limiting the transformative potential of volunteer and activist work. I conclude by discussing this and other consequences of avoiding politics.     

Political activation and social movements: Addressing non-participation in Aotearoa New Zealand

The decline of participation in traditional civic political processes, like voting in elections and writing to elected representatives, continues to deepen in contemporary liberal democracies. However, civics comprise only one avenue for political participation. Social movements also play a key role in influencing political affairs by exerting pressure on established institutions from outside rather than within. ‘Political activation’ is key to understanding and addressing non-participation in both movement and civic settings alike, yet activation in movement settings, like non-participation more generally, remains under-researched. This article seeks to address this imbalance by exploring ways of using political activation theory to synthesise research on the fields of political participation and non-participation, in both civic and social movement contexts. After reviewing the literature on activation, which favours political participation in civic settings, I then juxtapose this existing scholarship with a case study focused more on non-participation and social movements as they are understood by movement organisers in Aotearoa New Zealand. In so doing, I demonstrate how civics, social movements, participation and non-participation can be better understood together to advance scholarship on why people do or do not engage with politics.     

The new information frontier: toward a more nuanced view of social movement communication

Abstract

The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing how a greater focus on audiences and message reception, as well as message context, could advance the study of social movements. Specifically, we discuss a range of topics as applied to movement research, including information overload, selective attention, perceptions of bias, the possibilities that entertainment-related communications open up, and priming, among other topics. We suggest the risks of not adapting to this changing information environment, and incorporating insights from political communication, affect both the study of contemporary (including digital) protest, as well as potentially historical protest. The possibilities opened up by this move are immense including entirely new research programs and questions.     

Political Process and the Development of Labor Insurgency in Turkey, 1945–80

Much attention in recent political science and sociology has been given to the origins of social movements, revolutions, and other similar forms of contentious politics. Furthermore, unlike other areas of study in the social sciences, analysts of contentious politics have actively sought to draw insights from divergent theoretical approaches. Such an integrated approach to the study of social movements is offered by the political process model. This paper offers an empirical extension of the process model of social movement emergence to the case of the labor movement in Turkey. The predominant view of the labor movement in Turkey is one that sees the movement as relatively inconsequential to the development of state–society relations in that country. This conclusion is based on two lines of reasoning: first, the notion that the state granted labor rights and freedoms without a protracted struggle from below, and, second, the notion that the military coup of 1980 effectively crushed the Turkish labor movement. On the contrary, applying insights from the political process model better helps to explain why the 1960s and 1970s saw the development of an important labor insurgency in Turkey.     

Candidate emergence as movement mobilization: An analysis of Women's post-2016 electoral engagement

Political science scholarship argues that women's underrepresentation in American politics stems from a persistent shortage of female candidates. Women are less likely to run because they often perceive individual and structural obstacles that negatively impact their electoral interest. Such barriers remain intact, yet thousands of women have signaled their interest in running for office since the 2016 election by participating in candidate training programs (CTPs). Though running for office is not commonly defined as an activist activity, this article argues that theories of collective action and movement mobilization, rather than those focusing on the psychological aspects of candidate emergence, are better equipped to explain the recent increase of electoral interest. Using EMILY's List—an elite political entity that began as a grassroots social movement organization—as a case, this article integrates scholarship from sociology and political science to examine how feminist activist organizing can impact women's interest in running for public office. I first review the research on women's candidate emergence and CTPs before discussing the electoral movement strategies and the mobilizing impact of the media and collective action frames. The article reviews recent scholarship on the Women's March and the Resistance, then synthesizes the literature to examine EMILY's List and their electoral movement strategies leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. I conclude by suggesting avenues for future research that can bridge the relationship between movements and electoral politics and advance scholarly understanding of how, when, and why women run for office.     

THE RISE AND (RELATIVE) DECLINE OF GLOBAL WARMING AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

This article extends recent work on the public arenas approach to social problems (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) by examining changes in audience receptiveness to claims-making activities. Scientists' claims about global warming failed to attract much public attention until the extraordinary heat and drought of the "summer of '88" created a social scare . That is, environmental claims are most likely to be honored—and accelerate demands in the political arena—when they piggyback on dramatic real-world events. The dynamics of this social problem over time reveal that both demand attenuation and issue redirection processes have diminished global warming's standing as a "celebrity" social problem. Social scares hold potential importance for prospective social problems that revolve around new technologies.     

The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Vulnerability

The Occupy movement has generated a significant amount of scholarly literature, most of which has focused on the movement's tactics or goals, or sought to explain its emergence. Nevertheless, we lack an explanation for the movement's broad appeal and mass support. In this article we present original research on Occupy in New York City, Detroit, and Berlin, which demonstrates that the movement's heterogeneous participants coalesced around the concept of vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inability to adapt to shocks and stresses, and it inhibits social reproduction and prohibits social mobility. Rather than specifically discussing the wealth of elites per se, Occupy participants consistently expressed the feeling that the current political economic system safeguards elites and increases the vulnerability of everyone else. We argue that the Occupy movement has reworked the relationship among a range of political struggles that were hitherto disconnected (i.e. ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements) and rendered them complementary through the politics of vulnerability.     

Understanding Meaning in Movements: A Hermeneutic Approach to Frames and Ideologies

Social movements contain structures of beliefs and values that guide critical action and aid activists' understandings. These are worthy of interrogation, not least because they contain points of articulation with ideational formations found in both mainstream politics and academia. They offer an alternative view of society, economy and polity that is grounded in protagonists' experience and struggle. However, the ideational content of social movements is often obscured by a focus on particular, immediate goals; by their orientation to certain forms of action; and by the mediated, simplified nature of their communication. Additionally, recent social movements display a tendency to coalition action, bringing a diverse set of political understandings in concert on highly specific campaigns. This conceptual article seeks an approach to identifying the messages within social movements that remains sensitive to their complexity, dynamism and heterogeneity. Through a critique of the concept of ‘interpretative frames’ as developed in social movement studies, I describe the novel concept ‘orientational frame’. In contrast to social movement scholars' tendency to focus on instrumental claim-making by movement organizations, I emphasize deeply held, relatively stable sets of ideas that allow activists to justify contentious political action. Through an engagement with Michael Freeden's morphological approach to understanding ideologies I attempt to draw frame analysis away from the positivistic attempt to delineate general processes into a hermeneutic endeavour more suitable to understanding the richly detailed, context dependent ideas of particular social movements.     

Are social movements truly social? The prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements

A growing body of research demonstrates that U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized over the past few decades. In these polarized times, what potential roles might social movements play in bridging divides between, or perhaps further dividing, people across a variety of political and social groups? In this article, we propose a research agenda for social movement studies focused on the prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements. Although scholars commonly frame their work on the consequences of social movements in terms of social movements' political, economic, cultural, and biographical outcomes, we suggest a focus on two categories of social movement outcomes (prosocial and antisocial outcomes) that cut across prior theoretical categories, and we show how an emerging body of scholarship has documented such outcomes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. We also consider how emerging scholarship has addressed the sociological question about the conditions under which social movements produce prosocial versus antisocial outcomes. As we argue, attention to prosocial and antisocial outcomes of social movements holds both theoretical implications for social movement research and practical implications for social movements navigating the United States' political and social divides.     

Effects of celebrity involvement on young people's political and civic engagement

This study introduced the concept of celebrity involvement, which is the audiences' relationship with mediated celebrities along three sub-dimensions: affinity, parasocial relationships, and identification. Based on this concept, this study examined the underlying mechanisms through which young people's involvement with celebrities influences their political and civic engagement. A survey of 248 undergraduate students in Macau, which is a Special Administrative Region of China, showed an indirect association of celebrity involvement with political and civic engagement, which was mediated by situational involvement and self-efficacy, respectively. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Genocide as Contentious Politics

Despite a recent turn towards the study of political violence within the field of contentious politics, scholars have yet to focus their lens on genocide. This is puzzling, as the field of collective action and social movements was originally developed in reaction to fascism (Nazism in particular), while research on collective action and research on genocide has long shown parallel findings and shared insights. This paper reviews the history of this scholarly convergence and divergence, and suggests that recent findings of research on genocide can be improved by the consideration of concepts from social movements and collective action. It then details three theories of the micro‐mechanisms that mobilize individuals for contention – framing, diffusion, and networks – and specifies how they refine existing explanations of civilian participation in genocide. In the conclusion, I suggest that a contentious politics approach to genocide would consider it one form of collective action among others, analyzable within the existing framework of collective action and social movement theory.     

Latin American Identity Politics: Redefining Citizenship

Identity‐based social movements and politics have played an important role in Latin America since the 1970s and continue to do so today. In this essay, I argue that this form of politics – as it has taken shape across Latin America – has been defined by its intersectionality. I trace the ways in which neoliberalism has facilitated a certain kind of identity politics while limiting more radical political claims. I argue that identity politics have contributed to the current “pink tide” sweeping across the continent and are in continual dialogue with these new leftist governments as they redefine what it means to be citizen and what the relationship between state and citizen should be.     

Celebrity Philanthropy in China: An Analysis of Social Network Effect on Philanthropic Engagement

Celebrity philanthropy is a recent but widespread phenomenon in China. Using social network analysis, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: Is a celebrity’s position within a social network related to that celebrity’s philanthropic engagement, and how? Does a celebrity’s network position interact with normative influence to affect philanthropic engagement? What implications the study has for the development of modern philanthropy in China? Hypotheses regarding the associations between philanthropic engagement and a celebrity’s social network were tested using a sample from the “Celebrity Relationship Database.” Findings suggest that philanthropic engagement was more common in the center of the social network; under normative influence, a celebrity was more likely to engage in philanthropic activities if other members within the social network were active in philanthropic engagement; and, the effect of normative influence was stronger for celebrities who were positioned at the center of a social network than those who were positioned at the periphery. Implications for the development of modern philanthropy in China are also discussed.

     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

Political Elites and the Culture of Social Movements

While sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to how political elites matter for the emergence and development of social movements, they have focused less explicitly on how political elites matter for the culture of social movements. This essay reviews work that directly and indirectly addresses this relationship, showing how political elites matter for various aspects of movement culture, like collective identity and framing. It also reviews literature that suggests how movement culture comes to impact political elites. The essay concludes by drawing from very recent scholarship to argue that to best understand political elites and the culture of social movements, we need to think about culture and structure as intertwined and to understand how relations matters in the construction of meaning.     

A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches

Abstract

The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.     

Social Movements Seen as Radical Political Actors: The Case of the Polish Tenants’ Movement

This article casts new light on the processes of collective claims and identity formation in social movements, with the help of the radical political framework of Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London, 2001). Polish tenants, classified as “losers” of transition and marginalized in the mainstream discourse, nevertheless act collectively, mobilizing alliances with other democratic struggles and thus challenge the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas in the country. The very fact of mobilization of a socially and economically deprived group demanding the right to the city is provocative in the studied context. The empirical foundations of our study are 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish tenants’ activists cross-referenced with media material produced by and about the movement, and previous studies on the topic. The contribution of this article is twofold: it combines social movement theory with radical political framework and fills the empirical gap in the body of literature on social movements in post-socialist Europe.