Emotions and Contentious Politics
Authors: Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam
Introduction to the Special Issue
In recent years, scholars have come to recognize emotions and
emotional processes as central to an understanding of contentious politics.
The study of emotions was not absent from early analyses of collective behavior
and social movements, but it was typically accompanied by a number of problematic
assumptions that no longer inform most research on the subject. This earlier
work typically equated emotions with irrationality and assumed that emotions
and rationality are incompatible. This often led to a narrow focus on the
emotional content of sudden outbursts of crowd behavior. The work represented
in this collection rejects the false dichotomy of emotions and rationality
and adopts a much broader perspective on the role of emotions. These articles
address a wide range of issues, including the role of emotions in sustaining
movements over time, the complex and often contradictory nature of emotion
work within movements, and the activities that produce the emotional energy
needed to forge and maintain collective political identities. They clearly
document the centrality of emotions to the process by which people engage
in contentious politics. Much of the recent research on emotions and political
conflict has entailed micro-level analyses and ahistorical case studies, mainly
in the United States and Western Europe. The articles collected here embrace
a broader scope, moving across diverse cultures and incorporating attention
to long-term and large-scale processes, such as the institutionalization of
electoral practices in England, democratization in Mexico and Korea, the
global spread of nationalism, and the revolutionary transformation of regimes
in China.
These articles suggest that the historical study of emotions can lead us to
question commonsense understandings, address silences in the existing literature,
and rethink conventional categories of analysis. Close historical inspection
of the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the secret ballot, for example,
suggests that common explanations centering around reformist desires to combat
corruption are problematic. Barbalet’s research reveals the importance
of the role of emotions, especially fear on the part of ruling elites, in
the adoption of this electoral practice. More importantly, his research also
makes us aware of the social consequences of the spread of this institutionalized
political practice, an implicit and rarely perceived set of embedded emotional
dynamics that serve to individualize and isolate workers. The introduction
of secrecy into voting altered emotional dynamics among working-class voters,
thereby inhibiting the mobilization of those emotions that had helped to trigger
the riots and violence that accompanied early elections. Gould’s study
of ACT-UP sheds light on a number of neglected topics. In particular, Gould
eschews the dominant focus on movement emergence and explores the critical
role of emotion in helping to sustain contentious politics. Perry challenges
conventional explanations of social change, including accounts of the triumph
of Communist activists over their Guomindang rivals in China as due to structural
conditions, especially organizational and political factors. An important
piece of the explanation, in her account, is the emotional styles and emotion
work of movement leaders and their ability to develop rituals, like “speaking
bitterness” or “criticism-self-criticism,” that mobilize
emotions among potential followers. Successful leaders deploy complex cultural
knowledge in their quest to connect abstract cognitions of injustice to emotions
of anger, fear, grief, and revenge and thereby harness emotional energy to
their projects of political change.
Emotions can impede as well as stimulate collective political action and foster
reformist as well as revolutionary strategies of collective action. As Deborah
Gould’s research demonstrates, so long as grief was the dominant emotional
response to the AIDS crisis, the gay community was unable to sustain a more
confrontational approach to the issue. Emotions can also provide solid foundations
for oppositional practices that challenge the major political developments
of the modern world, such as the formation of nation-states. The research
of Taylor and Rupp shows that alongside the bitter hatreds and violent conflicts
accompanying this key process in the making of the modern world, there were
less well documented trans-national gendered practices that created alternative
bonds of solidarity and a loving community that challenged nationalist rivalries.
These challenges were rooted in a distinctive trans-national emotion culture
that built on the shared experiences and emotion work of women around the
globe, encompassing expressive public rituals of reconciliation, intense affective
cross-national ties, and an emotional template of mother love. The success
of this emotion culture in building a transnational collective identity among
women, they suggest, may help to explain why women peace activists had more
success in sustaining their organizations than did their male counterparts.
Emotion cultures are a key dimension of any movement and rituals typically
play a central role in a movement’s emotion culture. Rituals were central
to the transnational womens’ movement against war and nationalism, as
Taylor and Rupp clearly document. In Cadena-Roa’s account, the emotions
aroused by rituals associated with the popular spectator sport of wrestling
help to explain public responses to the framing efforts of urban social movements
in Mexico. As the accounts of Perry, Taylor and Rupp, and Cadena-Roa make
clear, emotionally laden rituals are a key means for dramatizing injustice,
building solidarities and affirming identities, and generating the emotional
energy necessary for high-risk activism and sustained commitment to the cause.
Their analyses of movement rituals shed light on the emotional dimensions
of the interpretative processes that underpin collective political action.
To argue for the central importance of emotion in political contention is
not to suggest that its effects are always facilitative of collective action.
On the contrary, these articles provide ample evidence of the ambivalent,
contradictory, and unstable character of emotions. Efforts to manage the ambivalent
emotions that lesbians and gays in the U.S. had toward their homosexuality
and the larger society, argues Deborah Gould, shaped movement responses to
AIDS. They help to explain the initial failure of a militant collective action
frame and the adoption of non-confrontational politics dominated by lobbying
and community service provision. The same emotion, she argues, can have strikingly
different consequences. Articulations of gay pride, for example, can be linked
to militant, confrontational activism or to efforts to resurrect respectability,
suppress anger, and discourage militant activism. Hyojoung Kim’s research
also highlights the potentially contradictory and unstable consequences of
specific emotions, depending on the nature of their object. In his study of
the process by which emotional experiences and expressions shape activist
preferences among visitors to the tomb of a suicide protestor in South Korea,
Kim argues that the same emotion, shame, can have very different preference
effects. When the evaluative object of shame is an overall identity, he argues,
it is likely to have a demobilizing effect, but when it is addressed to specific
behavioral deficiencies, it is likely to strengthen further commitment to
movement activism since there is considerable room for reparation of the identity
involved. Elizabeth Perry’s analysis of the success of Chinese communist
revolutionaries also captures the ambivalent character of emotions. She points
to the Communists’ ability to appreciate and capitalize on the ambivalence
and malleability of human emotions and argues that the plasticity and ambivalence
of emotions can help make sense of some of the more shocking aspects of the
Cultural Revolution.
This collection of articles testifies to the diversity of emotional rules
and climates across movements and cultures and the play of different emotional
processes and dynamics during the emergence and development of social movements.
They suggest that environmental circumstances, including strong organizations
and favorable opportunities, will not produce a movement in absence of heightened
emotions; in other words, that widely acknowledged facilitators of mobilization
operate in large part through the emotional dynamics they set in motion.
We are not yet at a point in the study of emotions and contentious politics
where we can clearly identify the typical emotional dynamics that characterize
the different phases of movement emergence, growth, and decline. (Though
in a chapter for a volume entitled Silence and Voice in Contentious Politics
we have offered some detailed speculative hunches about the role of emotions
over the life of a movement.) Any characterization of a typical movement life
cycle is likely to be extremely problematic, given the tremendous emotional
variation within movements and the ongoing conflicts among movement activists
over emotion rules and repertoires. Further research is needed before we can
make any strong generalizations concerning the relationship between appeals
to particular emotions and particular types of movements, movement cultures,
or collective action repertoires. But this diverse collection of articles
helps to move us down the path toward a better understanding of the causal
power of emotions and the emotional dynamics of collective political action.
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