Hearts and Minds\": Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In

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"Hearts and Minds": Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In Author(s): Alison Brysk Source: Polity, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 1995), pp. 559-585Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3234960Accessed: 19-03-2015 16:01 UTC

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"Hearts and Minds": Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In*

Alison Brysk Pomona College

Materialist and rationalist models of collective action often fail to explain political outcomes because they ignore the impact of normative and affective representations, a deficiency that can be remedied by paying attention to symbolic politics. This article uses a framework drawn from theories of narrative to explain political struggle as a competition between established canons and counter-hegemonic challenges, to indicate the conditions under which counter-hegemonic challenge is most likely to succeed in inspiring collective action, and to suggest appropriate research strategies for studying symbolic politics.

Alison Brysk is Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is the author of The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina (1994) and articles on social movements in Latin America.

How can dissidents like Argentina's Mothers of the Disappeared, Czech- oslovakia's Vaclav Havel, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King transform their societies by rewriting political consciousness? Why do protestors, from the first-century Israelites who committed mass suicide to resist Roman rule at Masada to the Buddhist monks who practiced self-immolation to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sacrifice even their own survival to send a message? To understand, we must remember that states as well as their challengers spill blood and treasure for slogans, flags, rituals-and even inert flesh. In ancient Greece, Antigone reshaped history in her quest for a corpse; in the contemporary U.S., a social movement for the recovery of MIA bodies held foreign policy hostage to its demands.

*John Seery has provided close readings, useful references, insight and support. Many thanks to Gerardo Munck, Sidney Tarrow, and Jane Jaquette for helpful comments.

Polity Volume XX VII, Number 4 Summer J99S Polity Volume XXVII, Number 4 Summer 1995

560 "Hearts and Minds"

Our leading materialist models of collective action slight this ancient, universal source of social change. When the political will of peasant communities overcomes the wealth and weapons of a superpower, as in Viet- nam or Afghanistan, we may be told that nationalism transformed "hearts and minds"-but not why or how. When the most marginalized sectors of poor societies mobilize around Islamic fundamentalism in Iran or liberation theology in Haiti, their stories and symbols are seen as a code for more material interests, even though the participants repeatedly sacrifice earthly rewards in pursuit of their vision.

Faced with the limits of positivism and rational actor models, one trend in the wider study of politics has been a renewed consideration of the subjective influence of ideas, learning, and information as sources of political change.' While most social movement studies still follow rational actor models, some students of collective action increasingly consider the role of identities and cognitive constructions.2 But this emerging emphasis does not yet offer us general explanations of how meaning shapes both mobilization and transformation, and generally fails to draw on the rich tradition of political theory that addresses these questions. This essay seeks to bridge the gap by providing a theoretically grounded account of how values inform political consciousness and how changes in political consciousness translate into social change through the mechanism of symbolic politics. This involves reviving an earlier literature on symbolic politics and extending it to embrace narrative

1. A representative selection from several sub-fields includes Judith Goldstein and Robert 0. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Policy Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); David Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Lawrence J. R. Herson, The Politics of Ideas: Political Theory and American Public Policy (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1984); Pamela Johnston Conover, Feminism and the New Right: Conflict over the American Family (New York: Praeger, 1983).

2. Identity is discussed at length in Jean Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements," Social Research, 52 (Winter 1985): 663-717; Alberto Melucci, "The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements," Social Research, 52 (Winter 1985): 789-817; D. Slater, ed., New Social Movements and the State in Latin America (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1985); Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). On cognitive constructions, see David R. Maines, "Narrative's Moment and Sociol- ogy's Phenomena: Toward a Narrative Sociology," The Sociological Quarterly, 34 (Spring 1993): 17-38. For an inspiring synthesis, see Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Alison Brysk 561

theoretical approaches and an analysis of social change as political communication.

Symbolic politics involves the maintenance or transformation of a power relationship through the communication of normative and affective representations. While symbolic politics is important for both the maintenance and transformation of social order, this essay will concen- trate on challenges from below-the use of appeals to ideas and values to bring about social change through collective action. Collective action may be measured in mobilization, protest, and rebellion.

Symbolic politics does not constitute a full alternative model of collective action, but rather an explanation for an important dynamic that operates at varying levels during particular episodes of collective action. As synthetic political process theorists like Tarrow show, all collective action blends symbolic and structural elements. In his approach, symbolic politics is a framing and signalling device for interests, which coor- dinates and socializes interest-based mobilization.3 But this essay will claim that interests are not fixed needs, but rather deeply subsumed stories about needs, and that symbolically mobilized political actors can create new political opportunities by revealing, challenging, and changing narratives about interests and identities. Thus, under some conditions symbolic politics becomes more than a framing device and produces a distinct logic and effects.

Symbolic politics serves, then, as what Jon Elster calls a "mechanism."

The distinctive feature of a mechanism is not that it can be universally applied to predict and control social events, but that it em- bodies a causal chain that is sufficiently general and precise to enable us to locate it in widely different settings. It is less than a theory, but a great deal more than a description, since it can serve as a model for understanding other cases not yet encountered.4

The mechanism of symbolic politics produces collective action through the narrative structuring, interpretive resonance, and projection of affective information. We think about politics in stories, and our consciousness is changed when new stories persuade us to adopt a new paradigm. Collective action itself then involves a kind of storytelling or political theater, performing the new paradigm to persuade others. Stories that work rewrite history because they contain the elements of successful

3. Tarrow, Power in Movement. 4. Jon Elster, Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

communication-legitimate speakers, compelling messages, and satisfy- ing plots-and can compensate for the lack of other resources. The successful exercise of symbolic politics then leads to social change through shifting priorities, building collective identities, shaping social agendas, or challenging state legitimacy.

The further development of the symbolic politics approach systematizes and adds value to the stock of existing concepts-prominently ideology, political culture, charisma, and legitimacy-that treat the influence of ideas and values on social change. Symbolic politics adds communicative and affective dimensions to the treatment of ideology, which supports critiques of various political philosophies as emotionally appealing narratives rather than scientific analyses.5 Symbolic politics also goes beyond ideology in the classical Marxist usage-socially pro- moted beliefs that mystify exploitive class relations6--because of its transformative potential. Though Gramscian treatments of ideological counter-hegemony do address the role of symbol systems as a source of social change, they treat symbol systems as superstructure subordinate to base.7

Symbolic politics also expands the treatment of change offered by "political culture." Political culture usually refers to a set of attitudes held by individuals and aggregated across a national unit. Symbolic politics describes clusters of messages intended to change attitudes, which may be enunciated by individuals, groups, states, societies, or international organizations. In political culture, the causal path between changes in political attitudes and political action is unspecified, while

5. For a feminist critique of economics' "story of the marketplace of ideas" and "story of free choice," see Dianna Strassman, "Not a Free Market: The Rhetoric of Disciplinary Authority in Economics," in Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, ed. Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 54-68; also Paula England, "The Separative Self: Androcentric Bias in Neoclassical Assumptions," in Beyond Economic Man, pp. 37-53. For a narrative reading of the ideology of science, see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modem Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). Michael Oakeshott provides an interpretive critique of ideology with distinct, Burkean conclusions, in Rationalism in Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991).

6. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1960); Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971) and Ronald Chilcote, "Post-Marxism: The Retreat from Class in Latin America," Latin American Perspectives, 17 (Spring 1990): 3-24. The debate on the potential autonomy of ideology is discussed in Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

Alison Brysk 563

symbolic politics suggests several channels for the transformation of beliefs into behavior.8

Social change that responds to symbolic protest is sometimes explained by reference to legitimacy, usually implying system-wide normative expectations between rulers and subjects. But the concept of legitimacy has been criticized as a residual quality rather than a generalizable process explaining social change.9 Symbolic politics depicts legitimacy as a socially specific set of stories about justice, rights, and identity. Success- ful collective action challenges these stories; success can be analyzed and sometimes predicted by the ability of challengers to insert themselves in an old story and/or create a new one that others adopt.

Charismatic leadership is often offered as an explanation of value- inspired social change. More recent approaches expand on Weber's treatment of charisma as the quality of an individual to depict it as a relationship between leader and followers.10 Symbolic politics frames charismatic leadership as one element of successful communication, and offers a broader discussion of other determinants of persuasion. This advances the study of change, since resort to the concept of charisma often focuses on the qualities of the speaker while ignoring the qualities of the message, media, and receivers.

This essay will sketch a symbolic politics approach to collective action and social change. First it reviews the theoretical tradition that provides tools for understanding power and identity in terms of meaning. Then it

8. See Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Almond and Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1980); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). While Harry Eckstein attempts to apply political culture to social change, in "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," American Political Science Review, 82 (September 1988): 789-804, Sidney Tarrow questions the ability of political culture to account for collective action in "Mentalities, Political Cultures, and Collective Action Frames: Constructing Meanings Through Action," in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 174-202. Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson empirically test the relationship in "Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships," American Political Science Review, 88 (September 1994): 635-52.

9. See Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1964); William Connolly, Legitimacy and the State (New York: New York Univer- sity Press, 1984); John Scharr, Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1981). The critique is in Adam Przeworski, "Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy," in Transitions To Democracy, ed. Phillipe Schmitter, Guillermo O'Donnell, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

10. Douglas Madsen and Peter G. Snow, The Charismatic Bond: Political Behavior in Time of Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

examines existing approaches to collective action that fail to fully assimi- late these insights from political theory. Next, it suggests that a revival and elaboration of the symbolic politics approach can address these questions. The essay then outlines the symbolic politics mechanism: how persuasion changes hearts and minds, which stories persuade, and what channels are used to achieve social change through symbolic collective action. Finally, a range of applications will be explored.

I. Politics as Persuasion

In contrast to the static concept of power employed by many studies of collective action, political theory reminds us that power is not a fixed property of individuals, but rather an evolving relationship among individuals or collectivities. In the classical tradition, communication is an important form of political contestation, and rhetoric creates power. Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the communicative elements of power locates persuasion as antecedent to "the ability to act in concert."11 Fur- thermore, both instrumental and normative communication create and sustain power. That is, persuasion can be used to redefine actors' goals or interests as well as the strategies to secure those ends. Part of politics is convincing people of what they want.12 This implies that a power relationship can take at least three basic forms: coercion (force), bargaining (exchange), and persuasion (manipulation of meanings).'3

In reaction to modernism's turn toward rational, scientific, and materialist models of human behavior, neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian theorists insisted on the meaning-laden character of social science and its subjects. In a contemporary parallel vein, Alan Wolfe links the case for a distinctive social science to the uniquely human attribute of interpretation.14 The theoretical underpinning of persuasion is a reading of the

11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 199-207.

12. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), pp. 103-98 and "Communicative Power," in Power, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: New York University Press, 1986); P. Bachrach and M. S. Baratz, "Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytical Framework," American Political Science Review, 57 (September 1963): 632-42; Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983).

13. For classical roots, see Plato, The Republic and Other Works, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), Books II and III; for modem critique, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

14. Alan Wolfe, The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Alison Brysk 565

identity of political actors that acknowledges the need for meaning, long recognized by theorists but only recently rediscovered by scholars of political behavior. This builds on Eisenstadt's analysis of Weber, that: "among the 'egoistical' wishes of human beings a very important part is comprised by their quest for and conception of the symbolic order, or the 'good society,' and of the quest for participation in such an order."15 Rational choice theorist Jon Elster recently concluded that, "a largely ignored but very significant phenomenon for the study of political life is that of beliefs arising from a need for meaning."' Elster's survey of political behavior leads him to conclude that norms cannot usually be changed by an appeal to interest, but more often by an alternative norm or description.'6

The hermeneutic approach sees social life as a search for meaning through narrative. Hermeneutics thus departs from the positivist strategy of causal, law-like explanation to seek interpretation: the recovery of meaning and intention through the textual analysis of human behavior.17 The rationality of political behavior is defined within the context of a historical political narrative. Hence, to discover the motives and mech- anisms of political behavior such as collective action requires a hermeneutic reading of that narrative.18 But an account of symbolic politics must go beyond interpretation to consider the impact and influence of narrative communication on political actors and social change.

The post-modern project suggests one channel for the influence of narrative communication in its depiction of communication as constituting rather than simply representing identities. 9 Although some forms of

15. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution-Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. xli.

16. Elster, Political Psychology, p. 14; Elster, The Cement of Society, p. 130. 17. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, "The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an

Approach," in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Rabinow and Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, and Culture (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1991); Michael T. Gibbons, ed., Interpreting Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

18. See Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1967); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

19. On post-modernism, see Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Jean-Francois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (London: Humanities Press, 1993); Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

post-moder critique question all fundamental interpretive categories of structure, subjectivity, and causality, we need not accept radical indeter- minacy to benefit from the insight that identity is a form of meaning that can also be manipulated. Pre-constituted subjects do not simply project narratives toward other fixed subjects; rather, the messages and texts of social life help to construct and reconstruct the identities of all participants. Performative speech transforms as well as communicates.20 Post- modernism reminds us that knowledge, power, and representation are interpenetrated. "Discourses are not only social products, they have fundamental social effects. They are modes of power."21 Part of politics is convincing people of who they are.

If communication is one face of power, collective action will often involve persuasion as well as bargaining. If actors seek meaning and principle as well as welfare, rational actor models cannot explain communicative collective action-unless hermeneutic and principled "interests" follow the strategic logic of material goods that more is better, efficiency is the only criteria for choice of means, and all ends can be quantified in terms of some universal standard of value.22 If subjects are to some extent constituted by communication, methodological individualism will miss how collective action can transform consciousness through symbolic politics.

II. Explaining Collective Action

Prevailing paradigms offer partial accounts of mobilization, collective action, and social change. The traditional model of collective action focused on modernization-induced patterns of social strain and disloca- tion from the traditional social structures that manage change. The cumulation of grievances over time (rising expectations) and across reference groups ("relative deprivation") was believed to produce frustra- tion, expressed in aggressive, anomic protest.23 Yet this approach cannot explain the incidence of activism; why do some persons take their "rela-

20. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 79-80, 84-96, and p. 89ff. on Arendt, Derrida and performative utterance.

21. Donna Harraway, Primate Visions, p. 289. 22. Nozick attempts to integrate symbolic utility in a theory of rationality, but concludes

that they cannot be amalgamated because they appear to follow a different logic, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 26-35, 133-39.

23. James Davies, "Towards a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review, 27 (1962): 5-19; Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Alison Brysk 567

tive deprivation" to the streets? The traditional perspective tends to view mobilization as dysfunctional. Therefore, little attempt is made to explain the transmission of protest messages to broader publics, or the differential impact of types and episodes of collective action.

In reaction to the explanatory limits and status quo bias of traditional views, a wide range of American scholarship of the past generation has adopted economistic models of collective action. Despite important differences in other respects, rational choice, resource mobilization, political economy, and political process approaches share the assumptions of rational actors, methodological individualism, material and structural bases of power, and the predominance of political process over political content. In these models, protesters are rational actors who cal- culate the utility of alternative strategies to secure their political preferences. In a world of multiple and endemic grievances, the rational actor protests only when opportunities exist and relevant resources can be deployed to exploit them. Social change is a product of bargaining or disruption-sometimes multiplied by the nature of political opportunities or the cumulative effect of "protest cycles." Persuasion only helps social movement actors to recognize their common interests.24 In this interest-based model, preferences are exogenous and resources are potentially fungible. Political struggle becomes a form of shopping: pur- chasing the "political goods" desired with the resources available. Such paradigms cannot account for the very elements the political theory tradition depicts as the essence of politics: changing preferences, changing identities, and changing responses to resources.2s

Thus, sophisticated applications of these interest-based approaches are

24. On rational actors, see Albert Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), and Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). On resource mobilization, see Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978) and "Models and Realities of Collective Action," Social Research, 52 (Winter 1985): 717-47; William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1975); John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory," American Journal of Sociology, 82 (1977): 1212-41. On political process, Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Disruption is emphasized in Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

25. For related criticism, see Shawn Rosenberg, "Rationality, Markets, and Political Analysis: A Social Psychological Critique of Neoclassical Political Economy," in The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action, ed. Kristen Renwick Monroe (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Virginia Held, "Mother- ing Versus Contract," in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 287-304.

often forced to incorporate elements of collective symbolism in an ad hoc way. James Q. Wilson simply lists both solidary and purposive incentives as types of non-material interests inspiring mobilization, but does not discuss how they work.26 Henry Dietz's resource mobilization interpretation of rebellion in Peru incorporates "social network incentives ... a more important kind of private interest reward than material selective incentives."2' Sidney Tarrow describes disruption as a combination of drama, symbolism, and uncertainty.28 Samuel Popkin tells us that his individualistic, rational Vietnamese peasant is critically influenced by "credibility, moral codes and visions of the future."29 Charles Tilly provides perhaps the most systematic treatment in his discussion of "repertoires" as culturally and historically specific vocabularies of collective action,30 while Tarrow's recent work examines the development and dif- fusion of a modern modular repertoire.31 Thus, recent work in the economistic tradition has been preoccupied with reintegrating the lost dimensions of meaning, context, and values.32

The Marxist tradition shares many of the assumptions of economistic models, but focuses on a collective subject (class) and on domination and disruption rather than bargaining. The Gramscian tradition and the turn to critical theory permit a treatment of discourse as a locus of class struggle, but most Marxist theorists still deny symbolic politics an independent logic.33 It is an important irony for historical materialism that the most enduring revolutionary socialist systems in the world-China and Cuba -have placed an unusually strong emphasis on moral suasion.34

26. James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 27. Edward N. Muller, Henry A. Dietz, and Steven E. Finkel, "Discontent and the

Expected Utility of Rebellion: The Case of Peru," American Political Science Review, 85 (December 1991): 1265.

28. Sidney Tarrow, Struggle, Politics and Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University West- ern Societies Occasional Papers, 1989), pp. 6-7.

29. Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 262.

30. Charles Tilly, "European Violence and Collective Action since 1700," Social Research, 53 (Spring 1986): 159-84.

31. Tarrow, Power in Movement. 32. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., Frontiers in Social Movement

Theory, includes several studies seeking to reintegrate social psychology into the study of collective action.

33. An exception is Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1977).

34. On Cuba, see Richard Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). On China, see Martin King Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

Alison Brysk 569

As a result of parallel gaps in the positivist analysis of other domains of political behavior, scholars have consciously incorporated semantic accounts of political values: international relations' "operational codes,"35 "epistemic communities,"36 and constructivist definitions of state identities and interests;37 public opinion's "schema";38 organization theory's "organizational stories."39 Within the social movement literature, increasing attention is given to new social movements,40 activists' cognitive frames, analysis of political discourse and "hidden transcripts," and interpretive sociology.4' However, this panoply of promising approaches does not yet offer a systematic and theoretically grounded account of the mechanism of symbolic politics. Furthermore,

35. Alexander George, "The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-making," International Studies Quarterly, 13 (June 1969): 190-222.

36. Peter Haas, "Do Regimes Matter? Epistemic Communities and Mediterranean Pollution Control," International Organization, 43 (Summer 1989): 337-403.

37. Alexander Wendt, "Collective Identity Formation and the International State," American Political Science Review, 88 (June 1994): 384-96.

38. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Causal Schemas in Judgments Under Uncertainty," in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahne- man, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 117-28; James H. Kuklinski, Robert C. Luskin, and John Bolland, "Where Is the Schema? Going Beyond the 'S' Word in Political Psychology," American Political Science Review, 85 (December 1991): 1341-56; Milton Lodge, Kathleen M. McGraw, Pamela Johnston Conover, Stanley Feldman and Arthur H. Miller, "Where Is the Schema? Critiques," American Political Science Review, 85 (December 1991): 1357-82.

39. Steven P. Feldman, "Stories as Cultural Creativity: On the Relation Between Sym- bolism and Politics in Organizational Change," Human Relations, 43 (1990): 809-28.

40. On new social movements, see Cohen, Melucci, Slater, Alvarez, Alesandro Pizzorno, "Political Exchange and Collective Identity in Industrial Conflict," in The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968, ed. Colin Crouch (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978); Claus Offe, "New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institu- tional Politics," Social Research, 52 (Winter 1985): 817-69; Russel Dalton and Manfred Keuchler, eds., Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kreisi, and Sidney Tarrow, eds., From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988); Bert Klander- mans, ed., Organizing for Change: Social Movement Organizations in Europe and the United States (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1989).

41. On frames and discourse, see David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, "Master Frames and Cycles of Protest," in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Morris and McClurg Mueller; Paolo R. Donati, "Political Discourse Analysis," in Studying Collective Action, ed. Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 136-67; Maines, "Narrative's Moment"; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

these semantically informed treatments of changes in political consciousness differ widely in their implications for changes in political behavior, from cooperation to mobilization to adaptation to passive attitude change. Perhaps the most promising, the new social movement approach, does consider the importance of consciousness-raising, building collective identity, and expressive protest. But its focus on the personal empowerment of activists and change in discourse slights the wider social impact of collective action on political behavior and institutions. In order to explain how semantic collective action produces social change, we must revive and extend the literature on symbolic politics.

III. Bringing Meaning Back In

An earlier literature on symbolic politics examines communicative and semantic aspects of political life, with applications to collective action.42 As Edelman puts it, "the single problem takes its meaning from the con- stellation of problems with which it overlaps and from narratives about its past and its future consequences."43 Symbolic politics is based on a meaning-seeking, frame-producing actor. Work on symbolic politics reminds us that, "politics does not begin with mass emotion or policy preferences but with conceptual structures into which people receive information and transform it into a world view from which action (or inaction) proceeds."44 Proponents of this approach argue that symbols do not simply mediate "objective reality"; they help to constitute political reality.45 One recent treatment even incorporates post-modern insights about how political communication shapes identity.46

Thus, the symbolic politics approach can help us to interpret collective action as persuasion. Subordinates may be liberated by unmasking the

42. See Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Edelman, Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail

(New York: Academic Press, 1977); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Sym- bolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1975); Ferdinand Mount, The Theatre of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 1972); Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a

Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 43. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988), p. 29. 44. Michael Lipsky, "Introduction," to Edelman, Political Language, p. xxi. 45. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin, Political Symbolism in

Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Inc., 1982), p. 5.

46. Edelman, Spectacle, pp. 104-17.

Alison Brysk 571

symbolic manipulation of their political consciousness. Challengers may struggle to appropriate multivocal metaphors and myths. The disenfran- chised may enter the political agenda by attaching their issue to legitimate symbols, redefining, displacing, or enlarging that wider agenda.47 Political theater can situate grievances in universally accessible plots, reverse the relationship between audience and performer, and resolve breaches of norm-governed social relations.48

However, the symbolic politics approach has its limits, and thus must be augmented. The earlier wave of literature on symbolic politics concen- trates on the maintenance of social order and state legitimacy through the projection of symbols from the top down, with less attention to symbolic collective action that challenges dominant paradigms.49 To the extent that older treatments of symbolic politics do treat collective action, they focus on symbols as a source of action rather than the effect of symbolic action on the observers' consciousness and behavior. While drawing on the hermeneutic approach, symbolic politics offers little guidance as to the sources of narratives or how to read them. Although a symbolic politics approach does improve our understanding of actors' nonrational interest in meaning, it does not systematically address the pursuit of other types of principled interests through collective action.

An invigorated symbolic politics approach will expand its treatment of collective action by drawing on newer approaches to social movements, such as the "frame" literature, which document the use of symbols for social change from the bottom up. "From this perspective, movement mobilization not only requires that the structural conditions be ripe for collective action to occur, it also requires that a critical mass of persons collectively define the situation as ripe and persuade others on an on- going basis that their version of reality rings true."50 While most of this

47. On unmasking, see Edelman, Symbolic Uses; on metaphors, Jameson, Political Un- conscious, and Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Agenda change is treated most

extensively by Roger Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The

Dynamics of Agenda-Building (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972). 48. Discussions of political theater range from plot types in A. Paul Hare and Herbert

H. Blumberg, Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction (New York: Praeger, 1988) to performer status in Mount, The Theatre of Politics, to social drama as crisis resolution in Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphor.

49. See Edelman, Spectacle; Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Symbol and Politics.

50. Robert D. Benford, " 'You Could Be the Hundredth Monkey': Collective Action Frames and Vocabularies of Motive Within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement," Socio- logical Quarterly, 34 (1993): 195-216.

literature confines its dependent variable to mobilization, Klandermans, Tarrow, and Snow and Benford have recently begun to treat the construction of meaning as a result as well as a cause of collective action.51

In order to read narratives more systematically, symbolic politics approaches must make greater use of hermeneutics and consider the sources of narrative. Interpretive theorists believe that we can arrive at useful and determinate understandings from shifting and plurivocal texts and subjects. Max Weber introduced verstehen, the process of testing plausible hypotheses against the reading of an agent's behavior.52 Ricoeur analogizes the process to a courtroom, in which arguments link intentions to outcomes; we "make the case" for a reading of a frame. Roth draws on metaphors of history and psychoanalysis as modes of interpretation in which inquiry rewrites the initial plotting of events.53 Political consciousness-raising may then be seen as a form of rewriting and linking personal and social history, as in the feminist movement slogan, "the personal is political."

Where do these narratives come from, and how do they work? Some authors who treat symbolic politics do not analyze the sources of symbols, some treat symbols as a condensation of material conditions, while others posit universal archetypes of plot, character, or genre (quest, "the good king," tragedy).54 Instead, we can trace narratives to canon and counter-hegemony. Canon is the framework of received wisdom, universally transmitted by storytelling, which shapes how ordinary people talk about politics. This framework can range from a post-colonial theme that "We fought a revolution so that everyone could eat" to a Hindu account of caste to the elaborate international conspiracy depicted in the "tree of subversion" drawn for me by an Argentine military officer.55

The specification of canon as a source allows for a flexible, inductive approach that avoids psychological or anthropological determinism. Symbolic vocabulary may be learned quickly, or may correspond to deeply held cultural values-but it need not be innate, or rooted in child- hood socialization, like political culture is. Like a dialect of symbolic

51. See the Klandermans, Tarrow, and Snow and Benford essays in Morris and McClurg Mueller, eds., Frontiers in Social Movement Theory.

52. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 53. Roth, "Interpretation as Expectation," in Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman, eds.,

The Interpretive Turn, pp. 184-92. 54. Edelman rarely considers the source of symbols in his earlier work, while symbols

are seen as condensations in Spectacle. Hare and Blumberg posit universal plot types in their treatment of political theater in Dramaturgical Analysis.

55. Interview, Buenos Aires, April 27, 1988.

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language, what counts as canonical will generally vary by class, gender, and cultural location, and may be exported cross-culturally. For example, some Stalinist symbols were successfully exported from their Soviet source to Eastern Europe.56 While symbols and stories of national scope transform readily into national political change, part of symbolic politics is a competition for attention and influence among national, local, and global narratives. Thus, the current debate on immigration in the U.S. may be seen as a contest among narratives of the American Dream, nativism, civil rights, ethnic identities, states' rights, hometown and neighborhood identification, and global modernization.

Counter-hegemonic uses of symbolic politics generally involve reversal of a canonical narrative, attachment of new characters to an existing narrative, or self-representation by marginalized members of society. An example of reversal would be human rights protestors in a dictatorship singing the national anthem, appropriating the military's legitimacy as guardians of national identity. As Clifford Geertz comments, "any expressive form works (when it works) by disarranging semantic contexts in such a way that properties conventionally ascribed to certain things are unconventionally ascribed to others, which are then seen actually to possess them."57 The insertion of new characters in an old story might be seen in the U.S. civil rights movement's insertion of African-Americans into the constitutional canon, while feminist and human rights movements draw heavily on silence-breaking testimonial. Projection of new characteristics and silence-breaking are linked to public performance, often taking the form of political theater (as when AIDS activists in the group ACT UP stage die-ins with slogans such as "silence equals death" and "we're queer and we're here").

Actors involved in symbolic politics use narratives to seek and manipu- late meaning, not just welfare. But we know that actors also seek other principled ends. Even the core self-interest of biological welfare and survival has been repeatedly sacrificed for values such as nationalism, memory, and altruism. Irish political prisoners fast to death to make a point about national identity. Kristen Renwick Monroe's systematic study of altruistic behavior by philanthropists, heroes, and rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe ties altruism to an other-identified cognitive frame-

56. See Lars Erik Blomqvist, "Introduction," in Symbols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. Blomqvist and Classes Arvidsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell Intl., 1987).

57. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Rabinow and Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science, p. 217.

work rather than to any rational motive or structural determinant.58 The principled interests most often pursued in collective action share a common link to identity, in the sense of roles and values that orient group consciousness.59 Thus, a broader interpretation of symbolic politics should recognize the realization of identity as a motor of mobilization and as a search for internal as well as external meaning. When this is combined with post-modern insights about the communicative construction of identity, we can come to see collective action as a search for identity by participants that communicates and transforms new roles and values to observers.

Stories do not just describe; they motivate and explain collective action. Symbolic politics achieves social change through a two-stage process: first the projection or performance of narratives opens hearts and changes minds, and then changes in consciousness produce changes in political behavior. This provides the link between Klandermans's pro- cesses of consensus formation and consensus mobilization.60 Reframing leads to renaming, and renaming leads to reclaiming.

IV. Consciousness-Raising as Paradigm Shift

What is the mechanism of impact? Roth analogizes narrative explanations (by interpretive social theorists) to Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms.61 Democratizing this insight provides an account of changes in the political consciousness of ordinary people as paradigm shifts. Just as students of ethics have discovered that some social actors are "everyday Kantians," I propose that most of us are "everyday Kuhnians." The adoption of Kuhn's framework does not imply that an old paradigm will necessarily be superceded by a superior framework. Following Lakatos, we can make use of the paradigm metaphor while recognizing that para-

58. Kristen Monroe, "John Donne's People," Journal of Politics, 53 (May 1991): 394-433.

59. Allesandro Pizzorno, "On the Individualistic Theory of Social Order" in Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bordieu and James Coleman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 224.

60. See Bert Klandermans, "The Formation and Mobilization of Consensus," in From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures, ed. Bert

Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), pp. 173-96.

61. Paul Roth, "How Narratives Explain," Social Research, 56 (Summer 1989): 449-78, drawing on Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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digms often overlap and coexist even within the same population or individual.62

We need some sort of semantic framework to make sense of the con- stant influx of political data. Most of the time, some form of received wisdom tells us who we are, what interests to seek, what is political, what is just, and what is possible (perceived inevitability creates obedience while a judgment of injustice inspires resistance to authority).63 Undis- turbed, this semantic framework is rarely visible (and thus often suscepti- ble to rational actor modelling); it performs the function of a paradigm in "normal science." But occasionally some highly salient political event or figure does not make sense: peaceful protestors are massacred, a hero defects, the government bans a language, a child is dragged away in the middle of the night. When anomalies concatenate, we seek a new story. Triggering events that open hearts are usually linked to the actor's sense of personal identity, and often to a vision of justice, coinciding with some facets of the "moral economy" approach.64 Ideology helps to construct and politicize grievance from triggering anomalies.65 As the founder of an Amazonian Indian social movement described his reaction when faced with cultural, physical, and environmental threats, "I realized that my problem is not folklore, my problem is politics."66

The paradigm shift analogy suggests that anomalies are likely to have more impact when regnant canonical paradigms are visible and in crisis. At these moments any form of social order legitimated by strong claims about justice and identity will be particularly vulnerable, as both Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism and "culture theory" would predict.67 Rapid changes in economic, cultural, and authority systems generate large numbers of incommensurable phenomena. Yet deteriora- tion in material conditions or universal modernization are not enough to

62. Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

63. See Barrington Moore, Injustice: Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1979).

64. See James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Marsha Pripstein Posusney, "Irrational Workers: The Moral Economy of Labor Protest in Egypt," World Politics, 46 (October 1993): 83-120.

65. For examples from the women's movement, see Steven M. Buechler, "Beyond Resource Mobilization? Emerging Trends in Social Movement Theory," Sociological Quarterly, 34 (1993): 217-35.

66. Interview, Geneva, July 25, 1993. 67. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958);

Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).

overturn established meanings-for that to happen, the crisis must challenge specific tenets of the official story. Thus, the conjunction of economic stagnation, rapid urbanization, and political marginalization in the Middle East created anomalies "solved" by Islamic fundamentalism (charging interest is evil, women should not compete in the work- place, peripheral nations gain dignity through participation in Holy War).68 Similarly, we can see the explosion of social movements in Latin America in the 1980s context of economic crisis, transition to democracy, and the attendant "triple rupture" of culture, state, and development models (generating women's movements, neighborhood movements, and environmental movements, respectively).69

Listener characteristics serve as a final filter for paradigm shift. Com- munication psychology research shows that impact depends on persuasive communication (analyzed below), motivation to process information (salience of anomaly), and ability to process information.70 While candidates for collective action need not be educated or sophisticated, they must possess a level of cognitive competence sufficient to entertain a rival paradigm. This tends to exclude the neurologically dis- organized or impaired (such as drug addicts).

Most actors confronted with an anomaly will first attempt some ad hoc modifications of the socially relevant story. Some social institutions like churches are charged with repairing the cannon; the failure or "subversion" of such institutions is an especially powerful predictor of paradigm shift. If modifications are not robust and anomalies are com- pounded, we become receptive to new forms of symbolic communication.

V. Which Stories Work?

What makes a new story about politics persuasive? First, symbolic politics must speak to the heart: successful symbols must be culturally appropriate, have historical precedent, be reinforced by other symbols, and signal a call for action. In Vietnam, the Mandate of Heaven mobilized

68. Nikki R. Keddie, "The Revolt of Islam and Its Roots" in Comparative Political Dynamics, ed. Dankwart Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erickson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 292-308.

69. See Rafael de la Cruz, "Nuevos movimientos sociales en Venezuela," in Los movimientos populares en America Latina, ed. Daniel Camacho and Rafael Menjivar (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1989).

70. Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986).

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nationalist resistance in this way.71 During the 1960s, Che Guevarra failed to bring culturally appropriate revolutionary ideology to Bolivia (as well as improperly assessing objective conditions), while Peru's Sen- dero Luminoso did adapt Maoism to indigenous communal traditions.

Once attention to communication is established, narrative efficacy depends on qualities of the speaker, message, narrative structure, and media. Since the credibility of information is judged in part by the credibility of the source, we would expect speakers with greater social legitimacy to succeed more often at persuading others. Legitimacy is strong- est for those to whom society has already allocated a special protective or interpretive role, either generally or on a particular matter (such as mothers, priests, warriors, and doctors). This is related to both Weber's and Geertz's treatment of charisma; in its original meaning, charisma derives from proximity to the center of the social order.72 This framework systematizes and expands Brinton's observation that revolution is often catalyzed by the "desertion of the intellectuals" (interpreters).73 Thus, it is not surprising that collective action is mobilized by charismatic clerics in Latin America and the Islamic world. Physicians for Social Responsibility and various scientists' groups played a legitimizing role in the anti-nuclear movement. The Mothers of the Disappeared, the U.S. temperance movement, the Test Ban Treaty protests, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving all draw on the charisma of maternalism.

The content of the message also matters. A successful message offers meaning to experience the dominant order ignores or dismisses. The meaning offered carries a new account of identity (roles and values) and desert. In some sense, messages that resonate answer fundamental religious questions: Who am I? What is the good life? Why do bad things happen to good people? Will the meek inherit the earth? A mobilizing message creates (or rediscovers) standards that condemn and explain suf- fering, redefine friend and foe, and redirect internalized oppression out- ward.74 The content of a message can affect narrative resonance in three different ways.

First, a message can foment political change by creating an alternative reality, transferring daily experience to a different realm in which it is valued and thus opening the recipient to consider a new social order. Turner called this "liminality," while Alberoni labels it "the nascent

71. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).

72. Geertz, "Centers, Kings and Charisma," pp. 122-23. 73. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). 74. See Barrington Moore, Injustice, pp. 87-89.

state."75 Liberation theology, Islamic fundamentalism, some forms of Marxism, and counterhegemonic celebration of indigenous religious traditions clearly bridge levels of experience in this way.76

Second, a message can resonate because its content ties issues and events to values that are already widely accepted, such as the growing international acknowledgement of universal human rights. For example, indigenous peoples throughout the world face cultural destruction, loss of land rights, underdevelopment, lack of political representation, environmental degradation, and human rights abuse. But appeals based on the latter two (especially environmental appeals) are much more effective than representations of other, equally real conditions.77 This does not mean the message will be accepted automatically, just that it will receive more and more favorable attention than messages reflecting more contested values. Thus, American advocates of abortion rights shifted their appeal from the feminist "abortion on demand" to the civil liber- tarian "pro-choice." Defensiveness and hypocrisy by those challenged indicate the power of these widely legitimate messages, which often inspire preemptive reform that provides later opportunities for further challenge-such as Soviet acquiescence to the Helsinki Accords or crea- tion of a Human Rights Office in Mexico.78

Finally, a message may resonate within a political system because the message challenges the regime by showing that it fails to satisfy its own central legitimacy claims. Thus, the Solidarity movement in Poland effectively contested the communist party's claim that the country was a workers' state. Women's human rights movements in Latin America challenged the paternalist pretensions of military authoritarian regimes. The U.S. civil rights movement hoisted by its own petard a republic in

75. See Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, and Francesco Alberoni, Movement and Institution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

76. See Jameson, Political Unconscious, p. 40; Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Rowan Ireland, Kingdoms Come:

Religion and Politics in Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Anita M. Waters, Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics

(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985). 77. See Alison Brysk, "Acting Globally: Indian Rights and International Politics in

Latin America," in Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Donna Lee Van Cott (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

78. See Daniel Thomas, "International Norms and Political Change: The Helsinki Process and the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, 1975-1990," Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1995; Kathryn Sikkink, "Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks and Sovereignty in Latin America," International Organization, 47 (Summer 1993): 411-41.

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which schoolchildren pledge allegiance to "liberty and justice for all." Narrative structure or plot also influences the power of a story. To be

read as a coherent narrative, events must be selected, semanticized, and temporally ordered.79 The multiple indignities of Jim Crow are plotted as Rosa Parks being denied a seat on a bus. Emplotment may be achieved through a variety of vehicles other than a written text, including ballads, pilgrimages, political theater, and eulogies. Political funerals serve as symbolically charged sites of ethnic and religious mobilization, especially in apartheid-era South Africa, Northern Ireland, and zones of Palestin- ian-Israeli conflict. Through the lens of symbolic politics, the body is valuable as an object of memory that encodes powerful heroic narratives. An effective plot should build affective ties with a clear protagonist who experiences changes amenable to human intervention. Thus, complex struggles are linked to the fate of a single cause celebre; the movement against apartheid becomes "Free Nelson Mandela." Plot may be implied rather than expressed, as many symbols or slogans work by evoking an entire narrative. For example, revolutionary movements are named for a historic figure (the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadoran Farabundo Marti, or Peruvian Movimiento Tupac Amaru) or date (Palestinian Black September, Colombia's M-19), which lend the guerrillas the legitimacy of a heroic epic.

Finally, messages must be transmitted. Media access and appropriate- ness influence their reception.80 Physical control of public space facili- tates the projection of symbolic politics. Dissidents enact political theater in village squares, urban plazas, and the borders of contested areas: the Greenham Common nuclear facility, abortion clinics, military bases during mutinies in the Philippines and Argentina. Travel, immigration, and global media have broadened access and internationalized appropriate imagery. In the global village square of CNN, Chinese demonstrators in Tianamen Square can build a Statue of Liberty to tie their protest to the American Dream. On the anniversary of Tianamen, China banned CNN broadcasts to forestall use of this medium.81 Visually distinctive speakers and affective slogans are also effective, while the lack of images that project well in public space handicaps groups that are numerous but increasingly indistinct in developed societies-such as workers.

79. See Maines, "Narrative's Moment," p. 21. 80. For a sustained treatment of the influence of media on all forms of collective action,

see Tarrow, Power in Movement. 81. See Gladys D. Ganley, The Exploding Political Power ofPersonal Media (Norwood,

NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992) for a variety of examples, including Tianamen and the Iranian revolution.

VI. Symbolic Politics and Social Change

In order to translate changes in consciousness into changes in politics, symbolic politics must transform individuals (both activists and audience), social norms, and relations with the state. The most powerful way in which symbolic politics changes individuals is through rewriting and refraiing elements of identity.82 Identifications can shift to larger or smaller communities: populism amalgamates social groups as "we the people," nationalism creates an "imagined community" that cuts across local and global categories, the assertion of lesbian identity produces a distinct community within the feminist movement. Narratives can inspire changes in roles and values through identification with a protagonist, "reemplotment" of one's own life story, or a message that leads to reprioritizing some element of existing identities.83 Randall Robinson, founder of the anti-apartheid group Transafrica, describes reframing his experience of alienation in the Jim Crow South after reading Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man.84

Changes in roles, values, and collective identity often lead directly to mobilization. New social movement studies of a variety of groups point to the importance of consciousness-raising for the formation and representation of a collective identity that inspires collective mobilization. As one Mother of the Disappeared put it, "The big change has been in us, to come to protest for other peoples' children."85 Student protest in China has been interpreted in similar terms.86 Even within the parameters of an economistic model, changes in identity may explain the catalyst for collective action. Those whose hearts and minds have been transformed by symbolic politics will become the "movement entrepreneurs," Kanti- ans,87 or altruists whose path-breaking protests transform the calcula- tions of more conventionally rational actors.

82. See Guillermo O'Donnell, "Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State and the Question of Democracy," in The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, ed. David Collier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 285-318 on "lo popular"; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Shane Phelan, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

83. On "reemplotment," see Roth, "Interpretation as Explanation," pp. 184-88. On reprioritizing norms, see Francesca M. Cancian, What Are Norms? A Study of Beliefs and Actions in a Maya Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

84. Peter Claver McAlevey, "Invisible No More: Randall Robinson Is a Quiet Force for Change," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1994, p. El.

85. Interview, Northern Argentina, November 1988. 86. George T. Crane, "Collective Identity, Symbolic Mobilization, and Student Protest

in Nanjing, China, 1988-1989," Comparative Politics, 26 (July 1994): 395-413. 87. Elster makes the point regarding Kantians as a catalyst for cooperation in The

Cement of Society, p. 205.

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At the social level, symbolic politics often produces agenda change. This is important because invisibility or marginalization of issues and activists is the first barrier to change.88 Symbolic politics can facilitate the recognition that a social circumstance is a public and political problem. Silence-breaking narratives like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Gulag Archipelago, The Feminine Mystique, or I, Rigoberta Menchu, transform petty criminals, disturbed misfits, crazy housewives, and hapless peasants into resisters of newly problematized social systems of racism, totalitarianism, patriarchy, and ethnic exploitation. Success- ful agenda change ultimately establishes a problem or claim as a permanent referent for political discourse, mobilization, and behavior. Human rights secretariats, environmental impact reports, and consumer watchdog groups become institutionalized elements of policymaking.89

Symbolic politics can also inspire collective action aimed at changing institutions and policies by challenging their legitimacy and authority. The use of symbolism and reframing are critical elements in delegitimat- ing authority; claims about principles such as fairness may influence assessments of legitimacy more than personal benefit. 9 By challenging the rationale for the state's legitimacy, persuasion can cause a collective withdrawal of obedience, which reduces the ability to govern. As Arendt notes, "where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use, and the question of this obedience is not decided by command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it."91

When power-holders lose legitimacy, other power-holders withdraw support, institutions lose cohesion, and subordinates may directly con- front authority figures. This can lead to attempts at various types of social change, from preemptive reform to civil disobedience to revolution.92 Gandhi's challenge to British rule in India is the best-known

88. Bachrach and Baratz, "Decisions and Non-Decisions," p. 632. 89. For an early discussion, see Cobb and Elder, Participation in American Politics.

Frank Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones have recently chronicled the interaction of "policy image" with political institutions to produce agenda access, in "Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems," Journal of Politics, 53 (November 1991): 1044-74.

90. William Gamson, Bruce Fireman and Steven Rytina, Encounters With Unjust Authority (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1982), esp. pp. 10-16, 125; Tom R. Tyler, "Justice, Self-Interest, and the Legitimacy of Legal and Political Authority," in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Mansbridge, pp. 171-79.

91. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford, 1947), pp. 324-29; Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 148.

92. Francesco Alberoni, Movement and Institution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 218. Symbolic aspects of confrontations between subordinates and power- holders are explored in Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority, esp. p. 10.

example of success, but it can also be seen in the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the Philippines' "people power" challenge to Marcos, the Sandinista revolution, the transition to majority rule in South Africa, and U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Future Czech presi- dent and dissident Vaclav Havel characterized the 1968 Prague Spring uprising against Soviet domination in terms of this type of loss of legitimacy, as "merely the final act and the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and conscience of society."93

VII. Applying a Symbolic Politics Approach

The study of symbolic politics as a motor of social change dictates a distinctive research strategy. We must look for nonrational political action and unexplained variance in outcomes. Symbols and narratives to exam- ine can be selected by frequency of use by collective actors, intensity of social response, and fungibility of context. In order to read collective action hermeneutically, we must map stories' plots, messages, speakers, and media. Then we must make the case for a particular reading. If political change is understood as persuasion, the influence of symbolic collective action can be traced through changes in the transformation of collective identities, collective mobilization, new public agendas, changes in public policy, establishment of new institutions, and challenges to authority relationships. Studies of specific episodes of symbolic politics can build and test hypotheses concerning the general conditions in which it is possible and effective. For example, I have suggested above that socially legitimate speakers and multivalent messages will contribute positively to the efficacy of symbolic politics. Preliminary readings of several genres of collective action are sketched below to suggest further applications.

The study of symbolic politics improves our general understanding of social movements. First, a symbolic politics approach helps us understand social movements' behavior. Many ecology movements seek to "speak for the Earth" by contesting the dominant paradigms of Prog- ress legitimated by science, commerce, and Western religious traditions.94 Defenders and opponents of the right to abortion struggle to establish

93. Vaclav Havel, Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern

Europe (New York: M.E. Shape, 1985), p. 43. 94. See Maria Garcia Pilar, "The Venezuelan Ecology Movement: Symbolic Effective-

ness, Social Practices, and Political Strategies," in Escobar and Alvarez, eds., The Making

of Social Movements, pp. 150-70.

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the protagonist of the narrative: fetus or pregnant woman? The success of anti-abortion protest in shifting the social agenda despite pro-choice majorities in the U.S. is largely due to symbolic projections that recast the debate to focus on the perspective of the fetus: the film "The Silent Scream" is a powerful, literal illustration. A symbolic politics approach helps us understand the use of "repertoires" as sites of semantic struggle. Chilean women marched through the streets banging pots under Allende to tell a story of the guardians of the hearth pushed into the public sphere by the state's failure to provide sustenance. Under Pino- chet, different women appropriated the same repertoire to show that a regime legitimated by economic growth and traditional family values was failing in the same way as its radical predecessor.

A model of symbolic politics can also help account for the unexpected- ly persistent role of religion in shaping political protest in modernizing societies. Religious institutions are charged with creating and manipulat- ing symbols to produce order and meaning in social life. They draw on sacred texts (and oral traditions) replete with canonized narratives that provide a rich pool of plots applicable to different audiences and political challenges.95 Liberation theologists such as Haiti's Aristide consciously seek to reinterpret traditional Biblical stories or mine the sacred text for counterhegemonic tales. Clergy are legitimate and charismatic speakers, while churches and mosques provide highly visible public space (stage and props), along with scheduled, scripted performances. The community of believers itself acts as a medium for transmission of new messages. Eschatological themes rewrite identity in a way that encour- ages mobilization by overriding rational calculation regarding risk- taking: martyrs go to heaven.

Symbolic politics can contribute to the study of ethnic conflict and the resurgent forces of nationalism. Ethnic conflict involves the construction of identity-based collectivities to struggle for both material and symbolic resources. Many separatist movements, such as those of the Quebecois and Basques, are economically irrational, but motivated by the maintenance of group identity. Ethnic identity is rooted in and maintained by a common story of origins. Perhaps the most dramatic example can be found among the Afrikaans-speaking whites of South Africa, with their ritualized history of "taming of the wilderness," the Long Trek, Boer

95. On the role of religion as symbolic integrator in disparate systems, see Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater-State in Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and Leonardo A. Villalon, "Sufi Rituals as Rallies: Religious Ceremonies in the Politics of Senegalese State-Society Relations," Comparative Politics, 26 (July 1994) 415-37.

War, and founding of the apartheid system. Collective identity is mobilized for agenda recognition, protest, and violent challenge to state authority by a common perception of threat.96 Threat perception is often evoked through narratives of persecution. Persecution narratives are prominent in the establishment, projection, and mobilization of ethnic identities by groups as diverse as Serbs, Armenians, and Israelis.97

Revolutionary movements and regimes seem especially prone to use symbolic politics to inspire, consolidate, and deepen social transforma- tions. Both the French and Cambodian revolutions reset the calendar to radically interrupt the historical narrative of national identity. Most revolutions rename public spaces and erect statues and monuments to spatially inscribe the revolutionary epic and claim a permanent public stage for parades, anniversaries, and festivals. The Russian Revolution appropriated symbols from earlier uprisings as well as the Russian Shrovetide celebration. The French Revolution emphasized anti-clerical pagan symbols and celebrations, as well as public rewriting of the life stories of enemies. The reemplotment of "self-criticism" was later used extensively by the Chinese communists, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.98 Even the corpses of revolutionary leaders such as Mao and Lenin were preserved as embodiments of national transformation, en- coding powerful heroic narratives.

The incidence and impact of international reform campaigns can also be traced to symbolic politics. The spearhead non-governmental organization of the "international human rights regime," Amnesty International, frames human rights violations as a series of stories about individual political prisoners. Transnational identification with each month's "prisoner of conscience" and the inherent legitimacy of non-

partisan rights of the person with Western publics shape Amnesty's influence. Similarly, the international boycott of Nestle Corporation over marketing practices for infant formula, and the subsequent adoption of corporate codes of conduct probably constitutes the most successful grassroots attempt to regulate the conduct of multinational cor-

96. Elizabeth Crighton and Martha Abele MacIver, "The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Group Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon," Comparative Politics, 23 (January 1991): 127-42.

97. See Jenny Phillips, Symbol, Myth and Rhetoric: The Politics of Culture in an Armenian American Population (New York: AMS Press, 1989).

98. For a discussion of the French experience, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, Toward the Postmoder, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, trans. Kenneth Berri (London: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 87-114; on Russia, see Richard Stites, "The Origins of Soviet Ritual Style: Symbol and Festival in the Russian Revolution," in Symbols of Power, ed. Arvidsson and Blomqvist, pp. 23-42.

Alison Brysk 585

porations in the Third World.9 While Nestle's activities were decidedly unethical and detrimental to Third World consumers, the selection and success of this particular campaign had more to do with non-governmental organizations' projection of a story depicting a threat to the archetype of maternal sustenance than the relative weight of this single multinational activity in the determinants of infant mortality in the Third World. International environmental activists focus on the rainforest rather than equally imperiled and ecologically significant zones because the jungle is fertile, houses attractive animals, and can appeal to a story of Paradise Lost.

A symbolic politics approach can even help us to make sense of forms of political action not recognized as political by rational actor models- in this case, the symbolic struggle for political corpses. In Argentina, the sign of the corpse became a well-developed "repertoire" of collective action: rightists and leftist guerrillas alternately kidnapped the remains of Evita Per6n, Mothers of the Disappeared searched for and simultane- ously denied the death of the bodies of their loved ones, an eccentric activist detached the hands of populist leader Juan Per6n's corpse, and Argentina's foreign relations with Britain were complicated by demands for the repatriation of the body of nineteenth-century dictator Juan Rosas. Lest this be thought an idiosyncrasy, we should consider the four- year struggle between the Philippines' Imelda Marcos and Corazon Aquino over the burial of deceased dictator Ferdinand Marcos, replete with embalming, refrigeration, regular viewings, and a series of memori- als. Reference has been made above to the cross-cultural phenomenon of the irrational energy devoted to social movements for burial rights such as the MIAs, political funerals as a site for mobilization, and the revolutionary preservation of leaders' bodies. Egyptian mummification began as a device to preserve the power of the Pharoah. The seemingly futile political preoccupation with absent actors who have passed beyond interests is actually a struggle by the living to wrest meaning from mortality, to situate the dead in history, to tell a story that can reshape hearts and minds.

Bringing symbolic politics back in sheds light on the dark side of politics, too often slighted by those who view collective action as a marketplace rather than a contest for hearts and minds. Scholars of collective action must begin by according our subjects the same interpretive facul- ties by which we apprehend them. Perhaps then we can make sense of those moments in which the powerless make history-by making sense.

99. See Kathryn Sikkink, "Codes of Conduct: The WHO/UNICEF Case," Inter- national Organization, 40 (Autumn 1986): 815-40.

Hearts and Minds\": Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In

Documents

BRINGING OUT - Greggs Corporate

Choices - Minds@UW

SAMPLE - Mighty Minds

Bringing Culture Back In

Feminist Periodicals - Minds@UW

Bringing Corporate Welfare In

ARTIFICIAL HEARTS

FREIGHT AUDIT AUTOMATION - Happiest Minds

Nine Abiding Minds Master Jiru

Warmer Hearts, Warmer Rooms

feminist collections - Minds@UW

Process Costing.pdf - Master Minds

AUTHORITY CONTROL? - Minds@UW

Annual Return - Happiest Minds

BAILMENT & PLEDGE - Master Minds

Fresh Minds - NXT GEN Innovations

Budgetary Control - Master Minds

Artificial Hearts - ece.mcmaster.ca

Winning Hearts and Minds

master minds - 5. marginal costing