Sept. 19, 2007

Mess o’ Mobilizations

By Scott McLemee

A few months back, Intellectual Affairs reported on the work of a couple of social scientists who were studying the contemporary antiwar movement. They have been showing up at the national demonstrations over the past several years and – with the help of assistants instructed in a method of random sampling – conducting surveys of the participants. The data so harvested was then coded and fed into a computer, and the responses cross-correlated in order to find any patterns hidden in the data.

The methodology was all very orthodox and unremarkable, unlike some things we’ve discussed around here lately. But one of the researchers, Michael T. Heaney, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, explained that the project involved a departure from some of norms of his field. Political scientists have tended to be interested in studying established institutions, rather than the more informal or fluid networks that sustain protest movements.

His collaborator, Fabio Rojas, is an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University – so their effort to understand the polling results had the benefit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and could draw on models from recent work on social movements and network analysis. Nowadays you can often spot a paper by a sociologist at five paces, just because of the spiderweb-like graphics. Those are the maps of social networks, with the strength of connection between the nodes indicated by more or less heavy lines.

Heaney and Rojas have kept on gathering their surveys and crunching their numbers, and they recently presented a new paper on their work at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago. The title, “Coalition Dissolution and Network Dynamics in the American Antiwar Movement,” seems straightforward enough – and the abstract explains that their focus was on the rather difficult relationship between United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), the two main coalitions organizing national protests.

So far, so good. The topic is rather familiar to me – deriving, as it ultimately does, from certain important disagreements between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. (See Monty Python, 1979.) But my effort to follow the paper soon ran up against a single curious and unfamiliar term: “mesomobilization.”

You could decrypt this etymologically, if course, as “intermediate mobilization” or something of the sort. But doing so did not cause a concept to spring instantly to mind. And since they were addressing colleagues (all of whom probably had strong and definite ideas about mesomobilization) it wasn’t as if the authors had to define their terms. So I broke down and asked Heaney for a gloss.

“Mesomobilization,” he wrote back, “is the process through which social movement leaders mobilize other organizations to do the direct work of bringing individual participants to a protest. In that sense mesomobilization is one level ‘above’ micromobilization (i.e., bringing out the actual bodies).”

In other words, an organization (a labor union or whatever) does the micromobilizing when it gets its members and supporters to become involved in some activity (a demonstration, political campaign, etc.) A coalition enables different organizations to collaborate when they share a common agenda. This is “mesomobilizing” – that is, mediating and connecting the different activist cohorts.

That distinction corresponds to very different sorts of functions. “Micromobilizing groups play a critical role in contacting people and shaping they way they understand issues and the efficacy of political action,” as Heaney explained. But mesomobilizers – that is, coalitions – provide “an overall conceptual framework for events that links the demands and grievances of myriad groups together.” (The mesomobilizers also buy advertising and get the parade permits and so forth.) “Effective mesomobilization is necessary to make large-scale events possible,” says Heaney, “especially in highly decentralized fields, like peace and antiwar movements.”

The paper delivered at APSA looks at how relations between the two biggest antiwar mesomobilizers have affected participation in the national demonstrations. The differences between ANSWER and UFPJ are in part ideological. The rhetorical style of ANSWER normally runs to denunciations of American imperialism and its running dogs. (I exaggerate, but just barely.) UFPJ is by contrast the “moderate flank” of the antiwar movement, and not prone to tackling all injustice on the planet in the course of one protest. As Heaney and Rojas put it, UFPJ argues that “in order to build the broadest coalition possible, it should focus on the one issue about which the largest number of organizations can agree: ending the war in Iraq.”

The groups have a long, complicated history of mutual antagonism that in some ways actually predates even the present organizations. Comparable fault-lines emerged between similar coalitions organizing in 1990 and ‘91 against the first Gulf War. But UFPJ and ANSWER did manage to mesomobilize together at various points between 2003 and 2005. This honeymoon has been over for a couple of years now, for reasons nobody can quite agree upon – even as public disapproval of president’s handling of the war rose from 53 percent in September 2005 (when the UFPJ-ANWER alliance ended) to 58 percnet in March 2007.

What this meant for Heaney and Rojas was that they had data from the different phases of the coalitions’ relationship. They had gathered surveys from people attending demonstrations that UFPJ and ANSWER organized together, and from people attending demonstrations the groups had scheduled in competition with each other. (They also interviewed leading members of each coalition and gathered material from their listservs.)

The researchers framed a few hypotheses about contrasts that would probably be reflected in their data set. “We expected that participants in the UFPJ demonstrations would have a stronger connection with mainstream political institutions and a weaker connection to the antiwar movement,” they write. “We expected, given ANSWER’s preference for outsider political tactics, that its participants would be more likely to have engaged in civil disobedience in the past, while UFPJ would be more likely to have engaged in civil disobedience in the past.”

They also anticipated finding significant demographic differences between each coalition’s constituency. “Given the relative prominence of women as leaders in UFPJ,” they say, “we expected that it would be more likely to attract women than would ANSWER. Given that ANSWER explicitly frames its identity as attempting to ‘end racism,’ we expected that individuals with non-white racial and ethnic backgrounds would be disproportionately drawn to ANSWER. Further, given the relatively radical orientation of ANSWER, we hypothesized that it would more greatly appeal to young people and the working class. In contrast, we expected UFPJ to appeal to individuals with higher incomes and college educations.”

These predictions were not, for the most part, all that counterintuitive. And so it is interesting to learn that very few of them squared with the data.

People who showed up at demonstrations under the influence of UFPJ’s mesomobilizing framework were “significantly more likely to say they considered themselves to be members of the Democratic Party (54.1 percent) than ANSWER attendees (46.9 percent).” There might be a few Republicans mobilized by either coalition, but most non-Democrats in either case would probably identify as independents or supporters of third parties.And they tended to come for different reasons: “Participants at the ANSWER rally were significantly more likely to cite a policy-specific reason for their attendance (such as stopping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), while participants at the UFPJ rally were more likely to cite a personal reason for their attendance (such as the death of a friend or a family member).”

But in terms of important distinctions, that was really about it. There was no difference in degree of political involvement, or experience with civil disobedience, or previous attendance at antiwar protests. Nor was there a demographic split: “Despite the stereotypes that many people have of the two coalitions,” write Rojas and Heaney, “they are equally likely to attract the participation of women and men, whites and non-whites, the young the old, those with and without college degrees, and people from various economic strata.”

The paper also considers how the parting of the ways between ANSWER and UFPJ influenced their mesomobilizing capacities — that is, what effect it had on the networks of organizations making up each coalition.

The various spider-webs of organizational interaction did change a bit. ANSWER began to work more closely with another coalition pledged to denouncing American imperialism and its running dogs. United for Peace and Justice came under stronger influence by MoveOn – a group “much more closely allied with the Democratic Party than either UFPJ or ANSWER” and taking “a more conservative approach to ending the war.” (Or not ending it, I suppose, though that is a topic for another day.)

The researchers conclude that the conflict between the groups has not really been the zero-sum game one might have expected – if only because public disapproval of the president has won a hearing for each of them.

“To some extent,” write Heaney and Rojas, “ANSWER and UFPJ are vying for the attention, energies, and resources of the same supporters. But to a larger extent, both groups are more urgently attempting to reach out to a mass public that has remained largely quiescent throughout the entire U.S.-Iraq conflict....If public opinion were trending in favor of the president, or even remaining stable, the conflict might have been more detrimental to the movement as its base of support shrank.”

Such are the points in the paper catching one layman’s eye, at least. You can read it for yourself here. Heaney and Rojas are discussing their work this week at Orgtheory – a group blog devoted to what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, in its epigraph, “the science of association.”

Want it on paper? Print this page.
Know someone who’d be interested? Forward this story.
Want to stay informed? Sign up for free daily news e-mail.

Advertisement

Comments