Making Constituencies

Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy

Lisa Jane Disch

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226804477
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Public division is not new; in fact, it is the lifeblood of politics, and political representatives have constructed divisions throughout history to mobilize constituencies. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of a divided United States has become commonplace. In the wake of the 2020 election, some commentators warned that the American public was the most divided it has been since the Civil War. Political scientists, political theorists, and public intellectuals have suggested that uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed voters are at the root of this division. Some are simply unwilling to accept facts or science, which makes them easy targets for elite manipulation. It also creates a grass-roots political culture that discourages cross-partisan collaboration in Washington.Yet, manipulation of voters is not as grave a threat to democracy in America as many scholars and pundits make it out to be. The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade. Making Constituencies proposes a new theory of representation as mobilization to argue that divisions like these are not inherent in society, but created, and political representatives of all kinds forge and deploy them to cultivate constituencies.

CHAPTER ONE

In Defense of Mobilization

Mobilization is a term of art in every subfield of political science. As voter mobilization, it names various activities for stimulating turnout, typically among those whom a campaign has identified as its likely supporters. As political mobilization, it refers specifically to voter participation. Scholars of comparative politics speak of ethnic mobilization, an activity that is assumed to work on group identities. The same is true of interest-group mobilization as well.

These commonplace uses of the term exemplify the persistence of the “social determinism” that comparative political scientist David R. Cameron criticized in “standard” social-science conceptions of mobilization almost fifty years ago.1 Then as now, social scientists said mobilization when they meant something that might be better termed targeting. Their use of the word implies a constituency, already formed but dormant, that mobilization activates. Mobilization as I use the term casts off this most basic intuition of both pluralist and participatory theories of democracy: that groups form around shared interests to demand laws and policies that serve those interests. I turn that model around by proposing a term—constituency effects—that registers the power of representation to divide the social field.

I do not use mobilization in the typical sense, to refer to the activities—such as canvassing, phone banking, and other forms of direct contact—that political parties and other organizations use to turn out their likely voters by “reminding [them] of their partisan identities.”2 My use comports with the robust conceptualization of mobilization first proposed by political behavior scholars Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee. Far from reducing it to targeting, they—in the eyes of at least one subsequent scholar—recognized mobilization “as a key mechanism that fashions group identities into political blocs.”3 So understood, mobilization brings an understudied aspect of political representation into focus: that acts of political representation solicit groups and constitute interests.4

Under this category of acts of political representation, I include the “claims” and promises of political candidates, the policies enacted by legislatures, and the declarations of party leaders and other elite opinion shapers.5 I also include appeals by unelected and “self-appointed” representatives such as charismatic individuals, advocacy groups, political movements, and minor political parties.6 Slogans—“we are the 99%,” “Black Lives Matter,” “#MeToo”—have group-defining effects as well, as do cultural objects like knitted pink hats and red baseball caps.7

I maintain that acts of representation can change the subject of politics in the fullest sense of the word: they change how people identify themselves by redefining what they care enough to fight for and whom they count as allies. Mobilization involves prioritizing and clarifying select lines of conflict from among a field of cross-cutting social divisions, then working them up into politically consequential group identities. My concept constituency effects registers this power.

This chapter reclaims mobilization from commonplace uses of the term that circulate in political science today. I turn first to an emergent and innovative field of research on organizing that has made mobilization the lever of a polemic. These authors, who reject the standard determinism about constituencies, and who insist that constituencies cannot simply be targeted but must be organized, undercut the force of their own argument by using mobilization in the conventional sense. With the help of Rogers Brubaker, who coined the striking phrase “commonsense primordialism” to characterize the beliefs about social divisions that typify much scholarship on political groups, I propose a nondeterministic rethinking of constituencies.8

I begin by exposing as “commonsense primordialism” the beliefs about social divisions that typify much scholarship on political groups and political mobilization.9 I proceed to empirical research on public-policy feedback that turns primordialism around, demonstrating that social divisions and political groups are effects of acts of representation, not their basis.10 This research, which demonstrates that key beneficiary groups of social-welfare policy follow from social divisions that the policies themselves introduce, lends credence to my concept of constituency effects. Feedback scholars do not frame their work as a contribution to theorizing political representation; I interpret it as doing exactly that.

From Targeting to Constituency Effects

Leading scholars in an emerging field of research on organizing have reduced the term mobilization to a derogatory label for a counterproductive shortcut: targeting groups to activate them in superficial ways.11 These scholars do not think of constituencies as static or socially determined; they know constituencies need to be forged. That is precisely why it concerns them to see organizations—having once provided an important “pathway to action” for ordinary people—now avoiding the political work of constituency-making, instead shifting their resources toward lobbying, lawsuits, and public relations campaigns.12 Such strategies make a false promise to substitute targeting for the painstaking work of organizing, as if constituencies form spontaneously by their “preexisting interest” in a cause and need only be summoned into action.13 Jane McAlevey and Hahrie Han, two of the most prominent figures in this emerging field, undercut their own valuable, innovative work by resorting to a polemical framing that makes what McAlevey calls “shallow mobilizing” the enemy of “deep organizing.”14

Han and McAlevey recognize that union or interest-group members are not like soldiers who stand ready to be drafted into political action; they need to be organized. This recognition, the very centerpiece of their argument, gets undercut by their resorting to dichotomy as a rhetorical shortcut to convey it. By juxtaposing mobilizing against organizing and equating mobilization with targeting, Han and McAlevey inadvertently affirm the very myth they seek to puncture, one that disavows the value and work of organizing in the first place: the myth of society as a field of already organized groups that stand ready to be activated.

Back in 1984, social psychologist Bert Klandermans made an argument similar to that of Han and McAlevey in less polemical terms.15 Like them, he insisted that organization members are not like soldiers. Even a union, operating in a workplace that is “highly unionized and [has] a strong union network, cannot be “assured of [its members’] willingness to take action.”16 For the call to action to succeed, Klandermans argued that members have to own a problem—accepting that it is urgent, that it can be solved without unreasonable sacrifice, and that it is up to them to take on the fight. Klandermans called the task of catalyzing that ownership “consensus mobilization.”17 Organizations can and do engage in consensus mobilization without “action mobilization,” or the call to action; but, Klandermans warned, they cannot do the reverse: “action mobilization cannot do without consensus mobilization.”18 I reach back to Klandermans’s work for empirical affirmation of a presupposition of my argument, which is that organizing is an aspect of mobilization and not its opposite.

Rethinking Groups: Effects, Not Origins, of Political Action

Many of us, whether we are scholars or not, posit social groups as a political starting place. We think of political-group identities and interests as being determined by economic or other social interests that are fixed prior to politics, and we imagine that political groups emerge relatively spontaneously whenever those interests are at stake. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker calls this “commonsense primordialism,” a way of thinking that takes “discrete, bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis.”19 Brubaker coined this vivid term as part of a counterargument contending that social groups are not given by economic interests or identities that are fixed prior to politics, and that they do not give rise spontaneously to political groups whenever those interests or identities are threatened. Rather, they take shape in response to the work of entrepreneurial political actors who deploy “categories” to “stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle, and energize” them into being.20 A self-proclaimed “constructivist,” Brubaker maintains that categories are not merely labels to be applied to groups once they have emerged; on the contrary, categories themselves actively solicit group formation.21 Groups, as Brubaker theorizes them, are not foundations of politics but constituency effects, outcomes rather than origins of acts of political representation.

No doubt most people picture groups as basic social building blocks, imagine themselves belonging to groups, and believe groups to be basic units of political action and participation. Brubaker’s point is that even if people subscribe to such a “folk sociolog[y],” scholars are not justified in doing so.22 It is one thing for scholars to recognize that primordialist thinking exerts a powerful hold on political behavior and quite another to concede that groups are “things in the world.”23 The distinction is, admittedly, difficult to grasp. What can it mean to admit something is consequential but deny that it exists?

Brubaker recommends that we think about “groups” as we think about race. We may accept the fact that “racial idioms, ideologies, narratives, categories and systems of classification . . . are real and consequential, especially when they are embedded in powerful organizations,” but this acceptance in no way obligates us to “posit the existence of races.”24 Just as “race”—when conceived as a real difference or natural basis for hierarchy—gives little analytic purchase on white supremacy, “group” affords little analytic purchase on the phenomena of identity, loyalty, and mobilization that primordialists use it to explain. Groups hold together not by any essential property shared among their members, but by virtue of representations of division and difference that position them in a social field.

Rethinking Mobilization as Cleavage-Making

Thirty years before Brubaker, comparative politics scholar David R. Cameron picked up on the primordialism in the “standard framework for research on mobilization.”25 His article “Toward a Theory of Political Mobilization” targeted the work of leading mobilization scholar Karl Deutsch. Cameron faulted Deutsch for conceiving of “political mobilization [as] the end result or end product of certain types of social cleavage and social change.”26 Deutsch made it seem as if these cleavages opened spontaneously in response to changes wrought by such large-scale forces as industrialization, urbanization, and (today) globalization.

Cameron turned Deutsch’s model upside down. He argued that large-scale forces do not register as political cleavages without the mediation of “mobilizing agents,” such as parties, whose policy choices and organizing strategies lend them “political meaning,” determine their “impact” on group identities, and shape their relations of alliance and enmity.27 Mobilization scholarship depoliticized mobilization by treating “induction” into a group “as passive and inevitable,” and that depoliticization made party organizations invisible as “agent[s] of mobilization.”28

Cameron gave the example of a centuries-old linguistic and territorial divide between the regions of Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia that did not become a political cleavage until the 1960s and 1970s. In 1958, a change in state policy that expanded public funding for private and religious education muted the long-standing political cleavage that had divided Catholics against liberal secularists.29 A series of policy decisions in the 1960s politicized language as the new dividing line. Those policy decisions—which fixed the borders of Flanders and Wallonia as “officially unilingual regions,” established French as the majority language in most of Brussels, and imposed restrictions on bilingualism—invested long-standing linguistic and regional identifications with political significance.30 These political identifications gave rise to ethnonationalist parties that appeared to emerge from (and would claim) a primordial ground. Cameron’s account showed these parties to be constituency effects, products of acts of representation that select particula...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• introduction: Responsiveness in Reverse
• chapter 1.   In Defense of Mobilization
• chapter 2.   From the Bedrock Norm to the Constituency Paradox
• chapter 3.   Can the Realist Remain a Democrat?
• chapter 4.   Realism for Democrats
• chapter 5.   Manipulation: How Will I Know It When I See It? And Should I Worry When I Do?
• chapter 6.   Debating Constructivism and Democracy in 1970s France
• chapter 7.   Radical Democracy and the Value of Plurality
• conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index