Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (review)

In Freedom Is an Endless Meeting Francesca Polletta examines the meaning and practice of participatory democracy in social movements. Challenging prevailing views which see participatory democracy as either ideology or as pre-figurative, Polletta's mission is to demonstrate the strategic gains participatory democracy brings to movements in building solidarity, training new leaders, encouraging tactical innovation, developing accountability, and in changing structures.

Polletta traces the career of participatory democracy over time beginning with pacifists of the early twentieth century. Although she presents her study as examining seven movements, in fact the heart of the book concentrates on the 1960s: the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the women's liberation movement. The brief coverage of the pacifist and labor movements pose, as a backdrop, to trace how consensus decision-making made its way from these earlier movements to the 1960s. Similarly, the two organizations presented at the end demonstrate advances made since the 1960s.

For each of these cases Polletta examines in intricate detail the meaning of democracy as well as the dilemmas faced in implementing participatory democracy. Through a nuanced reading of organizational dynamics, Polletta analyzes the ambiguities and constraints, the successes and failures of these various efforts. In each movement she delves into the organizational issues faced, for example, how tasks were allocated, how participants reached compromise, how disputes were resolved, tensions over leadership.

Polletta distinguishes three deliberative styles of decision-making: religious fellowship, tutelage, and friendship. The book dissects how these styles promote or inhibit participatory democracy. For example, deliberation based on friendship, embraced by SDS and the women's movement, provided a basis for trust and understanding which created solidarity and ease in communication and decision-making. Yet friendship models also promoted exclusion, hierarchies, and inequalities, creating insiders and outsiders or covert control by the few, particularly as newcomers joined these movements. Thus, Polletta argues, there are liabilities of relying on friendships to build a democratic movement.

In analyzing SNCC Polletta offers perceptive commentary about the battle in 1964 between hardliners advocating centralized top-down organization and the freedom high activists promoting participatory democracy. Following the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party the embrace of "tight structure" was a substitute for the organization's failure to articulate organizational goals. Participatory democracy became associated with white, middle-class politics while hierarchy was upheld as militant, disciplined, and revolutionary. Given Polletta's previous scholarship on the role of emotions in movements, more attention towards this erosion of trust and the animosity toward white members would be illuminating.

Polletta argues the challenge for social movements is developing deliberative relationships that are trusting and open, caring and inclusive. She sees hope in two contemporary organizations' experimental efforts at participatory democracy: Communities Organized for Public Service, a faith-based community organizing group, and Direct Action Network, formed to protest the World Trade Organization in Seattle. She concludes that participatory democracy is alive and well and calls for activists to forge new bases of legitimate authority.

I have two criticisms of the book. First, surprisingly there is no section that details the methodology. Polletta mentions in one paragraph and a footnote that the study is based on archival analysis and 120 interviews yet there is no list of those interviewed and no discussion of how she chose the sample or the composition of the sample. Such information is standard procedure and it is puzzling why it was omitted.

The other criticism is that in her enthusiasm to prove her case, Polletta occasionally overstates things. For example, she makes the bold claim that every major American movement of the last hundred years has found strategic value in participatory democracy. What about communist and leftist sects? What about right-wing movements? Surely not every movement has wrestled with participatory democracy. I also question Polletta's statement that most accounts claim the New Left foundered from its...