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Discussion: Mobilization and the Changing and Persistent Dynamics of Political Participation
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299 Discussion: Mobilization and the Changing and Persistent Dynamics of Political Participation We live in interesting times. Even in established liberal democracies, societies and politics are changing. As the institutions, economic conditions, and social strictures of the mid-twentieth century receded into history, these more affluent societies are said to have become more fluid and more participatory. Certainly it appears that participation in various forms of hitherto unconventional political action has increased, even as participation in electoral politics has tended to decline. However, as we will see, obdurate realities persist. Globalization has seized the imaginations of social scientists, but globalization is not responsible for all the disconcerting changes in affluent societies. Rather, it is, as Walgrave intimates in his introduction (chapter 10), a more fundamental and pervasive modernization of these societies that has transformed the who, the how, and the why of collective mobilization. Who is mobilized into collective action? How are they mobilized? Why? Why have some been mobilized, but not others? Why does their collective mobilization take the forms it does? Modernization creates new actors and the possibilities of new forms of action, and because it generates new concerns and discontents, it brings new reasons for acting collectively. But if modernization is the more general process, globalization—economic, cultural, and political—provides one particularly powerful lens through which the processes and discontents of late modernity have been viewed. Hutter and Kriesi (chapter 14) address some of the more prominent collective responses to it. Yet, although globalization has raised new issues, these have more often been channeled by the older forms of parties and interest groups than by new forms of protest. By contrast, it is most conspicuously the new information Christopher Rootes christopher rootes 300 and communication technologies (ICTs), the key technologies of this phase of modernization, whose impacts Van Stekelenburg and Boekkooi (chapter 11) discuss and that have facilitated new forms of mobilization. Snow (chapter 13) discusses the implications of the ICT revolution for the role of identity in collective action. Where identities have, under the impact of social and technological change, become unprecedentedly multiple, fluid, and/or fragmented , it may be doubted whether identity is still a glue capable of holding social movements together. More generally, in explanations of differential patterns of participation in collective action, the role of shared identity is easily exaggerated. The lack of an adequately developed shared identity is by no means the most potent factor impeding the collective mobilization of the disadvantaged. As Oliver (chapter 12) reminds us, those who are chronically marginalized and disadvantaged, socially and economically, are effectively excluded politically, even from the relatively uninstitutionalized forms of nonviolent collective action. In a rapidly changing world, not everything changes. Class inequality and racial exclusion have persistent effects on the dynamics of mobilization. Modernization and Its Discontents One leading candidate for principal cause of the recent rise of unconventional participation is the dramatic extension, during the past fifty years, of higher education. No longer the preserve of preponderantly male social and intellectual elites, universities now provide rites of passage for around half of young adults. Higher education bestows on many of its graduates enhanced cognitive skills, increased self-confidence, and expanded social networks, all of which stimulate political efficacy and so are facilitative of political participation. The increased numbers and salience of the highly educated stimulated increased membership in civil society organizations of all kinds, and this increase in numbers of people well resourced for participation also stimulated discontent with the constraints of minimally participatory political institutions. One consequence was that the expansion of repertoires of political participation as forms of collective action hitherto associated with the socially disadvantaged became more common among the highly educated (Barnes et al. 1979; Mayer, chapter 19). New social movements arose around new issues that appealed disproportionately to an emergent “new (middle) class” whose members identified closely neither with established elites nor with the (now shrinking) industrial working class, nor yet with a labor movement that was almost everywhere in decline (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979; Gouldner 1979). If social changes have transformed the demographics of participation in social movements, they have also changed the forms of collective action and the means by which people are recruited to such action. Organizational [3.226.254.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:47 GMT) discussion of part iii 301 membership has long been the best single predictor of political participation, and in old social movements, such as the labor movement, organizations themselves mounted protests and mobilized people...