North Central Sociological Association 2012 Ruth and John Useem Plenary Address. Political Renewal: Occupations,Springs, and Tea Parties

Novelty is paramount in the development of sociological theory—so much so that sometimes novelty is attributed even when it does not really exist. The study of social movements is hardly exempt from this problem and at times the craving for newness can become palpable. Despite that desire, however, some have concluded that things really have not changed much over a score of years—at least in terms of the implications for theory—but now, we think the time has finally come. Three recent mobilizations have provided us with something new into which we can sink our collective teeth. The Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street represent changes in the motivations and tactics driving social and political change that can renew the study of protest and collective political influence. These three bursts of political behavior reveal important edges of social movement study even as they exhibit roots in the now classic ideas in the field.     

Psychological antecedents and motivational models of collective action: examining the role of perceived effectiveness in political protest participation

The present study examines Hong Kong citizens’ willingness to participate in the Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement. A representative adult survey (N = 816) was conducted before the Occupy Central protest in 2014. Regression analyses showed that the core psychological antecedents of political identity (psychological attachment to pro-democracy parties and Occupy activists), political efficacy (perceived effectiveness of individual and movement agency), ideology (dissatisfaction with the pace of democratization), and emotion (anger with the political environment) were significant predictors of likely participation. Measures of perceived effectiveness of the Occupy movement to achieve successful outcomes (i.e. its ability to influence public opinion, strengthen the pro-democracy cause in Hong Kong, and facilitate opinion expression) explained additional variance even after controlling for demographics and the core antecedents. An integrated motivational model of collective action was then tested using structural equation modeling. Findings are consistent with the extant literature. Moral convictions (democracy as a fundamental human value) served as an antecedent of identity, efficacy, ideology, and anger, while identity exhibited direct and indirect effects on participation through efficacy, ideology and anger. The model also pointed to a role for perceived effectiveness, supporting the idea that individuals are motivated by other potential outcomes of a protest beyond achieving its primary objective.     

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

Social media have been playing a growingly important role in grassroots protest over the last five years. While many scholars have explored dynamics of political cyberprotest (e.g., the ongoing transnational Occupy movement, the 2012 Quebec student strike, the student-led protest movement in Chile between 2011 and 2013), few have studied sub-dynamics relating to ethno-cultural minorities’ uses of social media to gain visibility, mobilize support, and engage in political and civil action. We fill part of this gap in the academic literature by investigating uses of Twitter for political engagement in the context of the Canada-based Idle No More movement (INM). This ongoing protest initiative, which emerged in December 2012, seeks to mobilize Indigenous Peoples in Canada and internationally as well as their non-Indigenous allies. It does so by bringing attention to their culture, struggles, and identities as well as advocating for changes in policy areas relating to the environment, governance, and socio-economic matters. Our study explores to what extent references to aspects of Indigenous identities and culture shaped INM-related tweeting and, by extension, activism during the summer of 2013. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 1650 #IdleNoMore tweets shared by supporters of this movement between 3 July 2013 and 2 August 2013. Our study demonstrates that unlike other social media-intensive movements where economic and political concerns were the primary drivers of political and civil engagement, aspects of Indigenous culture influenced information flows and mobilization among #IdleNoMore tweeters.     

The generalized action potential of protest movements: The new class,social trends,and political exclusion explanations

Three explanations have been advanced to account for the generalized action potential of contemporary protest movements: the rise of the new class, a set of general social trends that cumulatively lead to liberalized social values and loosened social restraints against protest, and the mobilization of excluded groups. Analyzing three dimensions of generalized action potential—protest potential, political action repertoires, and protest movement support—we find support for all three explanations. Educated salaried professionals, especially sociocultural and public sector professionals, display greater protest potential, especially for civil disobedience, and are supportive of emerging “middle class” movements. A set of general social trends centering on increased education, life-cycle and generational change, secularism, and increased women's autonomy also create greater action potential. Reflecting mobilization against political exclusion, African Americans display a consistently strong generalized action potential. These protests reflect the rise of new political repertoires, particularly “protest activism,” which combines protest with high levels of conventional participation and is centered among the more educated.     

In sight,in mind: Spatial proximity to protest sites and changes in peoples' political attitudes

Occupying public spaces can be an effective tactic for conveying a semantic message of protest and gaining wider support; however, it may also severely disrupt the everyday lives of non-participants and causes a backfire. Therefore, it remains unclear whether and how the occupy movements have shifted political attitudes among the general public. Bringing a social-spatial perspective to the case of the Occupy Central Movement (OCM) in Hong Kong, this study investigates how the attitudinal impact of occupation has varied according to people's spatial proximity to the protest sites. Using two waves of individual-level panel data collected right before and after the OCM and detailed geo-information on the respondents' home addresses and the occupied areas, we apply a difference-in-differences (DIDs) design to identify the causal link between space and attitudes. In addition, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are used to ensure the comparability of nearby and faraway residents. The results show that after the OCM, residents living near the occupied areas not only maintained their support for the pro-democracy camp but also became more liberal as compared to faraway residents. This phenomenon can be explained by the “on-site” effect, which suggests that the direct exposure to protestors' solidarity and the repressive actions of authorities arouse bystanders' sympathy for the protestors and support for their political cause. Such influence appears to be long-lasting and can be evidenced by the local election results after the protest.     

Piety over Protest: Cognitive Liberation and Deflected Collective Action in Central India

Cognitive liberation is often treated in the social movements literature as a mediating factor through which political opportunities and mobilizing structures generate protest. This paper unpacks multiple dimensions of cognitive liberation and finds that they may operate in tension with one another. Building on scholarship that focuses on subjective factors in social movements, the paper examines the case of the Korku, an oppressed indigenous community in central India, who choose not to protest despite the presence of several dimensions of cognitive liberation. Rather than engage in collective political action, the Korku’s grievances are deflected toward depoliticized religious goals. The Korku seek communal improvement through Hindu piety in a context of the Hindutva cultural-nationalist ideology, rather than protest against the encroachment of this ideology on their community.     

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.     

Social Movement Theory and the “Modern Day Tea Party”

The rise of the Tea Party movement took many political observers by surprise, but social movement theory can help us to understand how the Tea Party began. Frustration with the federal government's plans for economic recovery, combined with opposition to President Obama's election, morphed into nationwide protests and a vocal presence in the 2010 midterm elections. This paper uses the Tea Party as an example to illustrate social movement life cycles, explaining relevant theories, their application to the movement in each phase of its development, and areas in which the Tea Party challenges current literature on social movements. Social movement theory is discussed as a tool that is constantly being honed as new research increases our understanding of how movements develop and function.     

Are They Not Worthy? How Partisan Political Blogs Legitimize the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street

Social movements struggle to gain acceptance as legitimate actors so that they can raise money, recruit members, and convince politicians to meet their demands. We know little, however, about how this legitimacy is granted by various political authorities, in part because legitimacy is often poorly operationalized. To operationalize legitimacy, I revise Charles Tilly's ( 1999 ) classic concept of WUNC displays (i.e., public presentations of worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment) to assess how political authorities legitimize social movements. I analyze original data on the coverage the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street received from 20 elite political blogs during a critical event early in each movement's development. I find that liberal and conservative blogs both use the same aspects of worthiness (and not unity, numbers, or commitment) to endorse their preferred movement but different aspects of unworthiness to denounce the movement they opposed. Conservative outlets were more partisan on both accounts. This suggests that these blogs' shared status as distinctly partisan political outsiders produces a similar, but not identical, relationship with social movements. While both sets of blogs legitimize and delegitimize a movement based on its specific strengths and weaknesses, conservative blogs act more as a partisan bullhorn and liberal blogs act more as a forum for debate.     

French Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes): Similarities and Differences With Occupy Movements

The Yellow Vests movement in France was the most widespread and violent protest movement France has seen since 1968. This research highlights the resemblances and dissimilarities between the Yellow Vests and other Occupy movements. We find similarities in movement origins around suddenly revealed economic issues and relative deprivation. We also find that the Yellow Vests resemble other Occupy movements in terms of a combined strategy of a diffused and countrywide occupation of public spaces alongside weekly mass protest, and a lack of central organization and rejection of leadership. The Yellow Vests, however, differ from other Occupy movements in the extreme violence of the weekly demonstrations. Despite its rejection by the media, violence did not affect widespread public approval. In addition, the Yellow Vests achieved most movement objectives in spite of the lack of effective leadership with whom politicians could negotiate.     

Occupy's predicament: the moment and the prospects for the movement

Occupy Wall Street has stalled in its attempt to make a transition from a moment to a movement. It had a sizable impact upon the presidential election, driving America's political centre of gravity toward the left, but has been unable or unwilling to evolve beyond its original core into a ‘full‐service movement’ that welcomes contributions from a wide range of activists at varying levels of commitment and skill and plausibly campaigns for substantial reforms. In contrast to earlier American social movements of the twentieth century, the Occupy movement began with a large popular base of support. Propped up by that support, its ‘inner movement’ of core activists with strong anarchist and ‘horizontalist’ beliefs transformed the political environment even as they disdained formal reform demands and conducted decisions in a demanding, fully participatory manner. But the core was deeply suspicious of the ‘cooptive’ and ‘hierarchical’ tendencies of the unions and membership organizations – the ‘outer movement’ – whose supporters made up the bulk of the participants who turned out for Occupy's large demonstrations. The ‘inner movement's’ awkward fit with that ‘outer movement’ blocked transformation into an enduring structure capable of winning substantial reforms over time. When the encampments were dispersed by governmental authorities, the core lost its ability to convert electronic communications into the energy and community that derive from face‐to‐face contact. The outlook for the effectiveness of the movement is decidedly limited unless an alliance of disparate groups develops to press for reforms within the political system.     

Technique and Ethos in Nonviolent Action: The Woman Suffrage Case

The Woman's Party, a militant woman's suffrage organization, was active in nonviolent protests from 1916 through 1919. The party members, who drew their inspiration from the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain, were predominately middle and upper class. They were motivated to protest by the descrepancy between their relatively high social status and their relatively low political power. Although they continued to agitate for equal rights after the suffrage ammendment became part of the Constitution, they did not generalize their concern to an explicitly pacifist ethic but continued to emphasize the particularistic ideology of feminism.     

Political and Cultural Dimensions of Tea Party Support, 2009–2012

The Tea Party Movement (TPM) burst onto the political scene following the 2008 elections. Early on, the movement attracted broad public support and seemed to tap into a variety of cultural concerns rooted in the changing demographic, political, and economic face of the nation. However, some observers questioned whether the Tea Party represented anything more than routine partisan backlash. And what had started as a seemingly grassroots movement that changed the face of American politics in the 2010 election was reduced to being mainly a caucus within Congress by 2012. In this article, we examine the cultural and political dimensions of Tea Party support over time. Using polling data from North Carolina and Tennessee and quantitative media analysis, we provide new evidence that cultural dispositions in addition to conservative identification were associated with TPM favorability in 2010; that these dispositions crystallized into shared political positions in 2011; and that by 2012 little distinguished TPM adherents from other conservatives.     

Temporal blindspots in Occupy Philadelphia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the disjunctive temporalities of Occupy Philadelphia’s political constituencies. Drawing on both an ethnographic participant observation study of the Occupy Philadelphia movement and Philadelphia’s neoanarchist political communities, and on recent social scientific theorization of events, the paper argues that contradictory ideas about temporal timescales, momentum, duration, sequences, and rhythms of tactical and strategic action problematized interaction and coordination among movement participants. These points of coordinative disjuncture can be traced back to differences in participants’ ideas about prefigurative politics and strategic temporalities. Limning the temporal expectations and experiences of social movement participants, this paper contributes to the examination of both linkages and disjunctures between eventful temporalities experienced in moments of protest and in social movements with diverse timescales.     

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

Student union ‘political anti-politics’ in post-conflict Nepal

In contrast to rhizomatic youth movements that inspired the ‘Arab spring’ uprisings and the ‘Occupy’ movements, youth political activism in Nepal was orchestrated by hierarchical political parties in part through political student unions. The ability of parties to deploy youth into the streets to enforce general strikes and force election participation has been critical to their success, but focus groups conducted with Nepali students in the spring of 2013 suggest that many youth are withdrawing from party activism. Youth disengagement in Nepal is the product of years of political instability and conflict that has impeded peace and development, rather than a globalizing individualism that is fragmenting traditional institutions. In this paper, I argue that the ability of political parties to mobilize youth in post-conflict Nepal is being challenged by two related conditions. First, the demands of political parties on students for personal sacrifice are weighed by students against their own personal aspirations and, secondly, the inability of the party hierarchies to sacrifice their priorities for greater political stability, development and peace – exemplified by the repeated failure to resolve constitutional issues – made this commitment to personal sacrifice harder to justify.     

Support for campaign spending limitations in the U. S. senate: The role of party,ideology and electoral security

Recent media disclosures of American campaign funding raising practices in the 1996 election have renewed political interest in campaign finance reform. This paper examines senatorial support for the McCain/Feingold measure that would have established voluntary spending limits on senate candidates and banned unlimited campaign contributions through political party organizations. While party affiliation and senator ideology are very important in explaining support for the McCain/Feingold measure, various measures of electoral security are not significant. This is important because the public choice literature emphasizes that electoral security is the primary goal of legislators. Additionally, the electoral self-interest of legislators is probably much more accurately measured by the various electoral security measures used in this study than by the constituency measures typically employed in the public choice literature. Nevertheless, personal legislator electoral security is not a powerful explanatory factor.     

“We are all Hizbullah now”: narrating the Party of God

This essay is the first examination of the literary output of the Lebanese political party and militia Hizbullah. It examines a series of little-known fiction and non-fiction texts including novels, memoirs and autobiographies by Hizbullah fighters, supporters and sympathisers. At the same time, it seeks to place such Hizbullah narratives within the context not only of the Party’s media strategy but of the publishing industry in Lebanon more widely. The essay also argues that Hizbullah narratives consistently explore a cluster of key themes including the Karbala tragedy, Anti-Zionism and, in particular, the “infitah” or “Lebanonisation” of the Party. In conclusion, the essay argues that narratives of Hizbullah reflect the Party’s own gradual evolution over its 30-year existence from a purely sectarian group to a broader resistance movement that attracts support from across the religious and political spectrum.     

Internationalist Challenges: Antiglobalisation,Occupy, and Indignados

Subaltern classes' internationalism has a long history. The 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a new internationalism because of the emergence of the antiglobalisation movement. It was a short-lived movement, but that gave birth to a new set of strong internationalist activity. In 2011, there emerged a new international wave of protest by both the Indignados and the Occupy movements. These new movements, however, have developed relatively low levels of cross-border activity compared to the antiglobalisation movement, although it has brought a new internationalist drive.     

Anarchy in Iceland? The global left,pirates and socialists in post-crash Icelandic politics

ABSTRACT

The historically stable Icelandic political party system has been uprooted since the 2008 financial crisis. In this paper, we explore to what extent the global left movement of anarchists and socialists has manifested in Icelandic politics in this period. We provide a historical overview, starting with the 2008 financial crisis which brought to power the first entirely left-wing government in the country's history, but also gave birth to numerous new political parties that alternately united and divided socialists, anarchists and reformers. The Pirate Party spearheaded this movement from the 2013 elections, but internal disputes have plagued the party in recent years, and both they and the Left Greens now have a fresh challenge from the left: the Socialist Party. We conclude that the current prospects for a united uprising of these movements are dim, although history suggests that they can work together when focusing on common goals of political reform.