LECTURE 7: STRUGGLES AROUND INEQUALITY AND DIVERSITY
THE POLITICS OF INEQUALITY
The reproduction and normalization of inequality
Inequalities are durable, reproduced in daily interactions (habitus, doing gender), difficult to change
o Normalization
o Institutionalization
If we want to change them, it requires structural change, that requires collective movements
Conflict
Durable social inequalities as an ‘inexhaustible breeding ground’ for conflicts (of interests)
Politics being everywhere where decisions on opportunities and distributions are made and there is some degree of conflict
Articulation of inequalities and diversity as conflicts (‘who are we, what have we to complain about, who is to blame for it’)
(Manifestos)
o Somebody has to articulate that something is wrong and must be change as it affects people
Struggles for change (What people are asking for, core goals of social movements)
Access/power: in particular groups that are underrepresented, marginalized in formal politics
Formal equality: equal rights and anti-discrimination
Redistribution: material resources
Recognition: the right to be different, challenging dominant norms about stigmas
Unequal access to polity and representation
Dahl: “in all human organizations there are significant variations in the participation in political decisions -variations which
in the United States appear to be functionally related to such variables as concern or involvement, skill, access, socio-
economic status, education, residence, age, ethnic and religious identifications, and some little understood personality
characteristics” (1956, 71- 72)
These are the issues that he finds at that moment as salient, but other issues are for example not addressed (e.g. gender)
Politics by other means
Bachrach and Baratz (1970, 18): "Subordinate groups, because of their insufficient power resources in relationship to the
restrictive political system, are often unable to convert their demands for change into important political issues.
o As their grievances grow ... such groups not uncommonly back their demands by the threat of violence or by actual
violence."
Movements:
o Yellow Vests Movement:
Quite dispersed demands, not a clear homogeneous group with defined leadership. Main strategy was to
use yellow vests and road blockades (clear performance of angry people in the street because of
inequality).
o Civil Rights Movement: Peaceful protest that led to concrete legal political change, discrimination changed, very
visible large protests
o Stonewall protests: Fight back of gay people in Caucus, reaction to violence perpetuated by police, violent
outcomes, no concrete political change, but it was a visible protest
o Occupy Wall Street: Very visible, not really any political gains
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,Core questions
Why do some grievances about inequality result in collective action, but others do not?
When does collective action lead to political change?
HOW ARE SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE RELATED TO SOCIAL CONFLICT? ARE SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS EXPRESSIONS OF CONFLICT?
Social movement theory
Early interpretations:
o Collective action as by-product of social transformation
o Crisis behavior: social deprivation and exclusion generates frustration and anger
o Disturbing order, theorists concerned with how to avoid social movements
Movements as products of alienation
Kornhauser: (1959) movements emerge when society loses its “intermediary” associations”
Criticisms
A lot of social movements emerged and changed the view of social movements that started to criticize the traditional social
movement theory
Level of deprivation does not predict protest
Not outbursts of emotion, but protest as rational and strategic action
Decreased relevance of class/Post-industrial society: rise of new classes
Too homogenous representation of social movements and demands: post-material values (liberation, environmental issues,
lifestyle issues, etc.)
Claus Offe (1985): social movements as critique of social and political order and of representative democracy
o Social movements seen as necessary, a voice for wanting change, people not happy with things are going, social
movement as instrument to bring about a new kind of politics.
Collective action as political participation
Pippa Norris (2002) Democratic Phoenix
o Understand collective action as good political engagement
Contrary to common belief, political engagement and participation has not declined, but rather takes a different shape.
o “Like a Phoenix, the reinvention of civic activism allows political energies to flow through diverse alternative
avenues as well as conventional channels”
Are the mass protests seen in 2019 a sign of:
o Increasing civic engagement?
o Or of hollowing democracy (distrust in electoral politics and liberal democracy)?
POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES: HOW POLITICAL CONTEXT AFFECTS MOBILIZATION , STRATEGIES
AND EFFECTIVENESS (TARROW AND TILLY)
Contentious Politics and Social Movements (Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly 2009 )
Contentious politics
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, o Is episodic rather than continuous
o Occurs in public
o Involves interaction between makers of claims and others
o Is recognized by those others as bearing on their interests
o And brings in government as mediator, target, or claimant, and the claims would, if realized, affect the interests
of at least one of the claimants
o Also refers to collective political struggle.
Contentious politics is not the same as social movements, as movements are only a small part of contentious politics
Contentious politics represents a broad range of phenomenon and refer to:
o Contentious: they involve the collective making of claims that, if realized, would conflict with someone else's
interests
o Politics: governments of one sort or another figure in the claim making, whether as claimants, objects of claims,
allies of the objects, or monitors of the contention.
The authors challenge any rigid boundary between institutionalized and non ‐institutionalized politics.institutionalized politics.
o Virtually all broad social movements, revolutions, and similar phenomena grow from roots in episodes of
institutional contention
o And the two form of politics involve similar causal processes
Institutions both constrain and enable contentious politics and different kinds of regimes produce different
configurations of contention
o Regimes consist of regular relations among governments, established political actors, challengers, and outside
political actors, including other governments
Peter Eisinger (1973)
Testing two hypotheses:
1) Protest occurs most frequently in unresponsive and unrepresentative political systems-in which the opportunity
structure is relatively closed.
2) Protest is not likely to occur in extremely closed (repressive) systems or extremely open (responsive) systems.
Curvilinear relation political opportunities and protest
o Protest prevails in a mixed system because the pace of change does not keep up with expectations, even though
change is occurring
o Very close system, almost not protest, very open system means protest
o Protest starts to emerge when the system opens. People expect change but the system is not responsive fast
enough, so people start to protest
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,Political opportunity structure. Political process theory (Tarrow and Tilly)
Political opportunity structure refers to features of regimes and institutions that facilitate or inhibit a political actor's
collective action and to changes in those features.
Political change: Opportunities for mobilization?
Tilly and Tarrow identify six properties of regimes that are crucial features of opportunity structure:
1) Multiplicity of independent centers of power within the regime
Allows people to go to different place, do venue shopping and thus allows for more protest
2) Its relative closure or openness to new actors
Has to do with political legacies
Do governments try to absorb new actors or are they hesitant
3) The stability or instability of current political alignments
When there is a break in power stability (e.g. a pact fails) then the change in the traditional configuration represent
the best moment for protest
4) Availability of influential allies or supporters
Internal in political system: parties or critical actors
External: unions, religious leaders, guerrillas
5) Strategy towards challengers
The extent to which the regime represses or facilitates collective claim making
6) Decisive changes in these properties
Threats also vary in different opportunity structures and most people who mobilize do so to combat threats or risks. But threats
and opportunities co occur and most people engaging in contentious politics combine response to threat with seizing opportunities
Both threats and opportunities shift with fragmentation or concentration of power, changes in a regime's openness or
closure, instability of alignments, and the availability of allies.
Contingent and more structural elements
There are some elements that are more contingent, so dynamic and changing:
o Shifting power configuration, alignments and available allies
And some that are more structural, more fixed, stable:
o Weak versus strong states
Targeting weak states largely ineffective because it is hard to make structural changes
o Centralist versus decentralized states
Multiple versus single point of access
“Venue-shopping”
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (Tarrow and Tilly)
Mechanisms and Processes of forming and sustaining social movements in relation to the political opportunity
structure
Mechanisms are seen as delimited events that change relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely
similar ways over a variety of situations. The three following forms combine.
o (1) Dispositional mechanisms: Operate at the individual level, are for example changes in preferences.
o (2) Environmental mechanisms: Operate at the level of externally generated shifts between the structure or
process of concern and surrounding structures and processes, for example, resource depletion, population change.
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, o (3) Relational mechanisms: These alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks and are
particularly central to movement dynamics because they describe the variety of ways in which challengers alter
their connections both to insiders and to contentious politics in general
E.g. Brokerage: The linking of two or more previously unconnected social sites by a unit that mediates
their relations with one another and/or with yet other sites.
Processes: Mechanisms seldom operate singly. They typically concatenate with other mechanisms into broader processes
or form a sequence of mechanisms so closely linked that they form a robust process
o Processes are regular sequences of such mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and
contingent) transformations of those elements
o There are some social movement process that can be found in a variety of episodes of contention:
Mobilization:
Consists in a number of interacting mechanisms, starting from the environmental ones that have
been broadly labeled “social change processes” passing through cognitive and relational
mechanisms such as attribution of opportunity and threat, social appropriation, framing of the
dispute and arraying of innovative forms of collective action.
Political identity formation:
The establishment of political identities involves changes in the awareness within the persons
involved as well as within other parties to those identities that they constitute an identity, but it
also involves alterations in connections among the affected persons and groups.
Coalition formation:
Weak social and political actors combine in order to face powerful, entrenched opponents.
Process of polarization:
Widening of political and social space between claimants in a contentious episode and the
gravitation of previously uncommitted or moderate actors towards one, the other, or both
extremes.
When it occurs, polarization is an important accompaniment to contentious episodes because it
vacates the moderate center, impedes the recomposition of previous coalitions, produces new
channels for future one, and can lead to repression, and civil war.
What is a social movement?
A social movement consists of a sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of
those power holders by means of public displays of that population's worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment
As it developed in the West after 1750, the social movement emerged from an innovative, consequential synthesis of three
elements: campaigns, repertoires of association, and public self ‐representations.representations.
Campaigns
A campaign is a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on targeted authorities and it extends beyond a
single event
o A campaign always links at least three parties: a group of self-designated claimants, some object(s) of claims, and a
public of some kind.
o And interactions between the three constitute a social movement.
Negotiation
o External:
Resisting processes of negative differentiation, stigmatization and reification
Demanding right to be different
o Internal:
Deliberation over meaning and direction
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, Contestation is productive in clarifying “who are we”, what do we want?
Forging emotional/ affective ties
Associational Repertoires
People have always come together in associations. But in the past, many of these associations were vertical— i.e., they
were linked to notables — or all encompassing — i.e., religious communities
Consciousness
o Grievances and shared experiences
During the twentieth century, special purpose associations and cross cutting coalitions in particular began
to do an enormous variety of political work across the world
The special purpose association brought people together around concrete, often contingent aims
and produced its own repertoire of organizational routines
And organizations participating in social movements, furthermore, sometimes move into some
other political spheres, e.g. durable interest groups
o Cognitive framework: Ongoing processes of interpretation and meaning making (manifestos!)
Treat social interaction, social ties, communication, and conversation not merely as expressions of
structure, rationality, consciousness, or culture but as active sites of creation and change.
Think of interpersonal networks, interpersonal communication, and various forms of continuous
negotiation— including the negotiation of identities—as figuring centrally in the dynamics of contention
o Awareness raising
o Politicization of self and daily life
Boundaries
o Defining us and ‘them’ (adversaries)
o Belonging, in- and exclusion
o Reverse affirmation of attributed characteristics
o Boundary strategies include creating visible markers, but also alternative spaces, institutions and cultures
Institutions offer the framework within and around which both “insiders” and “outsiders” interact.
Movements often leave associational residues behind them long after their campaigns have ended –
what we call “social movement bases”:
E.g. The American Women’s movement created a panoply of stable institutions that can also
later become available as bases for future mobilization.
Some movement organizations are patently “insiders”—that is, their actions are wholly or mainly
determined by institutional routines.
Consider the European Environmental Bureau : it is heavily subsidized by the European
Commission; and represents an extreme case of movement co-optation
But even movement “outsiders” are tied to the logic of institutions
Public self-representation and identity work: Articulating and mobilizing discontent
Movement participants make concerted public representations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment on the
part of themselves and/or their constituencies
For example:
o Worthiness: neat clothing; presence of clergy
o Unity: matching badges, marching in ranks; singing and chanting
o Numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents, filling streets
o Commitment: braving bad weather; visible participation by the old and handicapped; resistance to repression;
ostentatious sacrifice
For social movements, creating a self representation goes much deeper than creating an image
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, Because they are creating a collective actor, movements do an enormous amount of identity building through their
interaction with significant others
Interaction occurs first among those within the inner core of the movement—whom we can call “activists.”
o But it also takes place with sympathizers on the margins of the movement, with opponents and with key third
parties like the media and other authorities.
In an important sense, the task of a movement's activists is to turn sympathizers into participants, turn indifferent
onlookers into sympathizers, and neutralize opponents
o From these, people who at the beginning have little in common emerge at the end as a unified actor with a
collective identity, with boundaries that separate them from others, thus becoming constituted political actors
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND COLLECTIVE ACTION FRAMES
Collective identity (Bernstein)
Creating a collective identity coupled with the feeling that political action is feasible, either precedes collective action or is
constructed through the process of mobilization
Identity for empowerment is not the same as, and should be kept analytically distinct from, seeking identity as a goal,
whereby activists challenge stigmatized identities, seek recognition for new identities, or deconstruct restrictive social
categories as goals of collective action
Whether or not activism is defined as political is a cultural construct that changes over time
Voicing (political) claims
Involves three overlapping processes:
o A discursive process, in which a collective action frame is articulated
If discourse structures the ways in which the social world is accorded meaning, including the issues
around which social movements are mobilized, then it is an important part of contentious politics.
o A strategic process, in which frames are connected to movement purposes and goals and communicated to
relevant audiences
Movements influence the ways in which their issues are understood, thus constituting an important
movement outcome.
o A contested process, in which activists work out internal "framing disputes" and engage in "framing contests" that
involve movement opponents, the media, and others.
Movements emerge though the mobilization of objective and constructed claims on behalf of a variety of
represented actors on the part of movement entrepreneurs
Because they are weak and their claims diverse, these figures fashion new identities around
these claims and bridge their interests in movement coalitions.
But these moves do not occur in a political vacuum
The shaping of powerful movement coalitions around the claims of challengers can trigger two
other processes.
First, the desire for broadened support brings the movement into contact with insiders who
sympathize with its claims, see in it opportunities for advantage, or both; this can lead either to
movement co optation or to divisions in the political class that weaken the position of elites and,
at the extreme, can bring about a situation of divided sovereignty.
Second, to the degree that they threaten opponents, mobilization and coalition formation
frequently give rise to opposing movements and coalitions, and to a process of polarization
between the movement and a counter movement
So, a social movement that voices political claims needs to have a collective identity and a collective action frame
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