scholarly journals Fueling the Populist Divide: Nativist and Cosmopolitan Preferences for Representation at the Elite and Mass Level

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Campbell ◽  
Oliver Heath
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Mass Level ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

AbstractAlthough populist leaders often employ an anti-elite discourse which presents the elite as unable or unwilling to represent ordinary citizens, we know very little about who elites actually think should be represented, or how this differs, if at, all from what ordinary citizens want. In this article we find that there is a considerable difference between the groups that voters want to see represented in parliament and those which political elites want to see represented. In particular, we find that political elites tend to hold far more ‘cosmopolitan’ preferences than ordinary voters, and prioritize the representation of greater diversity in parliament based on the groups politicised by the new social movements and identity politics of the 60s and 70s, such as women, ethnic minorities, LGBT and the disabled. By contrast, voters more often hold nativist preferences than political elites and more often prioritize the representation of groups such as the working class, and white local people. Moreover, British voters who hold nativist preferences of political representation are more likely to be politically alienated and more likely to support Brexit.

Research Frontier Essay: When Are Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women

1981 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Sapiro
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Political Research ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Increasing Demand

Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand by women for political representation of women. This demand points the way toward a number of important problems for political research, many of which remain unsolved primarily because of the segregation of women's studies from the dominant concerns of political science. This discussion focuses on the problem of group interests and representation, drawing on and suggesting further research on public opinion, interest groups, social movements, international politics, political elites, and public policy.

Structure, Strategy, Sustainability: What Future for New Social Movement Theory?

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alana Lentin
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
Western Politics ◽  
New Social Movement Theory

The theoretical domain developed for the study of New Social Movements (NSMs) in the early 1980s has recently been largely abandoned by its main advocates. Increasingly, the cross-class, ‘post-materialist’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s, typified by the issues of environment, peace and feminism, cease to pose a radical challenge to contemporary western politics. This paper revisits the theoretical work of three of the European voices central to understandings of the emergence and success of New Social Movements. Claus Offe, Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine succeed in amalgamating an essential emphasis on structural transformation and an understanding of the importance of identity in bringing about ‘new’ collective action in the 1970s and 1980s. In response, to the significant decrease in European work on the NSM phenomenon today the paper proposes that the existing body of theory may be insufficient for describing collective action at the turn of the Millennium. The increasing predominance of ‘identity’ politics (e.g. in the realms of ethnicity and sexuality) in the arenas previously dominated by ‘universalist’, post-particularist themes; the institutionalisation of elements of NSM action and concerns; and the perceived appropriation by transnational agencies of the issues dominating original state-NSM struggles are cited as reasons for the need to develop a new language to describe contemporary collective action phenomena.

Afterword

Ideal Minds ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 172-190
Author(s):  
Michael Trask
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
The Sixties

This afterword reflects on the afterlife of neo-idealism and clarifies the author's stance on questions of social justice, utilitarian ethics, and the nearly universal repudiation of statism. The author's argument has been focused on the degree to which the collective consciousness that formed a staple of the New Social Movements — perhaps its key catalyst — gives way in seventies culture to a profound displacement onto subjectivity. But it would be a mistake to see this as a perversion of sixties thinking. The appeal to subjectivity was always the latent grounding of social change among important movements of that earlier decade; hence the coming to dominance of identity politics in the generation after the sixties. It is no surprise that the effort to reclaim consciousness's underappreciated power in sixties discourses should give rise to celebrations of unfettered power in seventies thinking. The afterword examines how the market became the megastructure for a wide array of antistatist impulses.

Engaged History

1994 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 81-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stein
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Affairs

Ira Katznelson urges labor historians to respond to a crisis in their field by returning to political, institutional, and state-centered history. This state of affairs has come about, he and others tell us, because of the dual challenge of “new social movements” and then the decline of labor movements, the crisis of social democracy, and collapse of communist states. Labor history is in crisis, he concludes, because class no longer provides the best categories with which to describe the world and the working class is no longer the principal historical actor.

scholarly journals Two Theories of Hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in Conversation

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110193
Author(s):  
Gianmaria Colpani
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Critical Conversation

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology.

Other People's Struggles

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
British History ◽  
Original Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Do So

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not? The work proposes an original theory to answer these questions, crossing discipline boundaries to draw on the findings of social psychology, philosophy, and normative political theory, in search of explanations of why people act altruistically and what it means to others when they do so. The theory is illustrated by examples from British history, including the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage and liberation movements, labor and socialist movements, anticolonial movements, antipoverty movements, and movements for global justice. Other People’s Struggles also contributes to new debates concerning the rights and wrongs of “speaking for others.” Debates concerning the limits of solidarity—who can be an “ally” and on what terms—have become very topical in contemporary politics, especially in identity politics and in the new “populist” movements. The book provides a theoretical and empirical account of how these questions have been addressed in the past and how they might be framed today.

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