Political Mobilization Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political mobilization is the process whereby political actors encourage people to participate in some form of political action. In its concrete manifestations, this process can take on many different shapes. Political mobilizers may typically persuade people to vote, petition, protest, or rally, or to join a political party, trade union, or politically active civic organization. Less frequently, they may propagate violent activities such as rioting or ethnic cleansing. Political mobilization thus covers a broad spectrum of public action, from the covert to the disruptive, and from the institutionalized to the unconventional.

Means And Ends Of Political Mobilization

The tools that are commonly used to mobilize audiences are widely diverse, too. They include classic electoral campaigning through billboards, mass conventions, postal mail, and various types of television and radio communication, but mobilizing political actors may just as well rely on door-to-door canvassing, pamphleteering, mobile phone communication, or social networking on the Internet. In nondemocratic environments, rulers or particular nonstate groups may sometimes use (military) force to push people into certain collective political behavior.

All political mobilization has in common that it is initiated by mobilizing agencies looking for adherents to a collective cause. These agencies try to persuade potential adherents to take part in public actions in order to defend that cause. Therefore, political mobilization usually has a distinctly collective dimension to it. There is strength in numbers, mobilizers know, and so they seek to change the behavior of large groups of citizens in order to achieve well-defined political aims. These aims, however, may vary. There are myriad types of public action that are considered to best serve these causes, and many strategies are used to persuade people to participate.

Research Traditions

Political scientists have studied political mobilization in several ways. One important strand consists of scholars who examine the mobilization patterns created by electoral politics. Their research interest is thus in institutionalized mobilization. Especially in the study of established democracies, political mobilization is often understood as the actions that elites undertake in order to create a stable group of supporters and persuade them to express their support through the ballot box. Among the questions these researchers ask are the following: What determines voters’ decisions? To what extent is the success of electoral mobilization dependent on existing affiliations, organizational capacities, or persuasive ideas? The study of ethnic mobilization, for example, may weigh the relative importance of different potential sources of ethnic voting: cultural affiliation, political manipulation by elites, and existing socioeconomic divisions that coincide with ethnic boundaries.

Political scientists would have only a narrow understanding of the process of political mobilization if they were to exclude from their scope those forms of political action that are outside the electoral process, ranging from peaceful protest to violent revolutions. This is the field of unconventional political mobilization, or as it is sometimes referred to, contentious politics. Many now view extra electoral action as an inherent aspect of political mobilization. Political scientists argue that such unconventional expressions of politics do not diminish with the advent of modernization. In fact, they are increasingly viewed as a “normal” characteristic of politics, even in advanced democracies.

According to some scholars, in the early twenty-first century, the importance of unconventional political action has grown. Long-term declines in election turnouts and membership numbers in political organizations show evidence of an increasing disengagement from the channels of political participation that are traditional to advanced industrial democracies. In their place, new forms of mobilization—globalized activism based on international norms, consumer boycotts, participatory networks through the Internet, and so forth— have emerged. Perhaps, some scholars argue, democratic engagement is not declining, but being reinvented and even reinvigorated.

Social Movements And Political Mobilization

The study of political mobilization outside electoral politics has deep roots in political sociology and, in particular, in the study of mass protest and social movements. This sociological view on political mobilization has allowed analysts to look for factors beyond electoral campaigns. These studies have examined the way in which protest waves and social movements have emerged, how they have developed, and what impact they have had on policy outcomes or social change. They have brought several new dimensions of mobilization to the attention of political scientists: the social grievances underlying collective action, the importance of resources, the role of meaning manipulation and ideas, and the political context (the opportunities and constraints) shaping such action. For example, contemporary researchers do not simply view the American black civil rights movement as a spontaneous mass response to social grievances. They have examined the political opportunity structures that have shaped this movement, the resources that have supported it, and the global spread of human rights norms that has given the movement’s ideas, claims, and demands a universal validity.

Social movement research has thus considerably altered political scientists’ understanding of what is “political” in mobilization. Political scientists are now increasingly inclined to question the neat division social scientists once made between the political significance of political parties and interest representation in state institutions, on the one hand, and the social and cultural (but supposedly less political) weight of social movements, on the other. Of course, social movements have important cultural and social implications, but they are also inherently political. The mobilization of people into nonelectoral and noninstitutionalized types of public action should be regarded as a form of political mobilization, since these actions may be signs of newly emerging interest cleavages. These interest cleavages, in turn, may serve as a new basis of electoral mobilization. In the 1960s, for example, environmentalism in Europe was exclusively a form of grassroots activism, yet it was also inherently political. This activism created possibilities for a new type of electoral politics in later times. In the 1970s and 1980s, “green” political parties were established across Europe, and in some countries, notably in Germany, green candidates received the support of a substantial part of the electorate. In many current European party systems, the greens represent a small but relatively stable political force.

Conclusion

Political scientists have moved toward a more inclusive definition of political mobilization, which includes electoral as well as extra electoral politics. They have also become more aware of the ways in which electoral and contentious politics may coincide and interact. Interaction is often subtle and covert. In some cases, however, it is more conspicuous, in particular when contested election results become a focal point for new forms of public protest, as has been exemplified in postelection unrest and clashes in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Kenya (2007 and 2008), and Iran (2009).

Bibliography:

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Birnir, Jóhanna Kristín. Ethnicity and Electoral Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. Social Movements: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Dynamics of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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Tucker, Joshua A. “Enough! Electoral Fraud, Collective Action Problems, and Post-Communist Colored Revolutions.” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (September 2007): 535–551.

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