Convention, Protest, or Violence? Estimating the Influence of Repertoires of Contention over Tactical Choice
From Firenze University Press Journal: SocietàMutamentoPolitica
Takeshi Wada, The University of Tokyo
Yoojin Koo, International Christian University of Tokyo
Yoshiyuki Aoki, Dokkyo University
To address grievances, seek material benefits, or demand rights, con-tentious social actors often follow institutionalized routines of conventional claim-making such as voting, lobbying, or taking judicial actions. On some occasions, however, they decide to go into the streets to protest collectively and disrupt ordinary flows of traffic or everyday operations of businesses or governments. In still other instances, they turn to more violent means, sometimes incurring damages to private or public property or to human lives. A quick inspection of cross-national and cross-sector patterns reveals a great deal of variation. The pie charts show the proportions of convention (institutionalized and undisruptive political actions without public mobilizations), protest (non-violent street mobilizations that are often disruptive to the economy, society, and politics), and violence (entailing the use of force) used by social actors between 2000 and 2004. In certain societies, conventional forms of action are predominantly employed (e.g., Switzerland, USA, Japan), whereas in others, there is a higher inclination towards protest forms (e.g., Italy, Venezuela, Bangladesh). Meanwhile, in some societies (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda), actors exhibit a pro-nounced inclination towards violent forms at very high rates. The three pie charts on the right show that, even within the same country (Italy), the forms of action chosen by actors vary widely.Why are the forms of collective action, or “tactics”, chosen so drastically different? Existing studies have identified a range of factors influencing tactical choice: political opportunity structures (Kitschelt 1986), pat-terns of social cleavages (Olzak 2006), levels of economic development (rich and poor societies) (Muller and Selig-son 1987), the strength of the state (Johnston 2012), or the practices of media reporting (Barranco and Wisler 1999). We argue that these answers remain unsatisfac-tory because the concept of repertoires of contention has been under-theorized and under-explored empiri-cally. Theoretically, the concept of tactical familiar-ity — an essential component of the repertoire concept originally defined by Charles Tilly — has not been fully utilized in analyses. The idea suggests that contentious actors in different historical contexts have learned different ways of doing politics, acquired different degrees of familiarity with different tactics, and thus developed strikingly different repertoires of contention. We take such cultural dimensions of learning and familiarity seriously and empirically investigate whether tactical familiarity genuinely contributes to people’s decisions to employ familiar tactics and, if so, to what degree. To assess the significance of tactical familiarity, we will conduct a comparative analysis with the impact of political regime characteristics (democracy and state capacity), recognized as two major explanatory factors in the literature. In other words, our inquiry will seek to answer the question: which serves as a more influential predictor of tactical choice, repertoires of contention or institutional regime characteristics? Our findings arguably indicate that the repertoires of contention, operationalized as tactical familiarity, are stronger predictors than regime characteristics. While it might sound self-evident that repertoires of contention explain contentious tactical choices, the argument is far from trivial. Only a small number of empirical studies have fully adopted the definition of repertoires of conten-tion as tactical familiarity and designed research plans accordingly to examine the links between repertoires and tactical choices (Ring-Ramirez, Reynolds-Stenson and Earl 2014). The unpopularity of such an approach to repertoires is especially evident in quantitative empirical studies, including those using protest event analysis in which strategic and rational accounts of tactical selection have gained salience (Maher and Peterson 2008).This study attempts to contribute to the literature on two fronts, theoretical and empirical. First, build-ing upon theories of repertoires of contention, social learning theories, and social practice theory, this study proposes a theoretical model of repertoires of conten-tion built around the idea of tactical familiarity. Sim-ply put, for those who own a toolkit (i.e., a repertoire), not all tools (i.e., tactics) are the same. If you are good at using specific tools, you frequently choose these; if you struggle with the others, you may be reluctant to use those. This is a matter of course, but nonetheless few studies have incorporated the idea into their actu-al research design (Wada 2016). We consider that, for each of the tools (tactics) in a toolkit, contentious social actors possess different degrees of familiarity, mastery, or — borrowing a concept from the social practice theory — “competence” (Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012). We will use “tactical familiarity” as a central theoretical and empirical tool across this paper.We then make a clear conceptual distinction between actual tactics chosen by social actors at a moment of contention and repertoires of tactics as accu-mulated knowledge, a distinction that has not always been made clearly in the literature, as assured in the literature section. The distinction enables us to demon-strate the effects of repertoires of contention on actors’ tactical selection empirically, something rarely done in quantitative studies of protests and violence. This dis-tinction between tactics and repertoires permits us to introduce three major mechanisms of repertoire famili-arity — feedback, diffusion, and memory — to complete our theoretical model. The second and empirical contribution of this study is to employ a quantitative approach and compare rep-ertoires’ impact on tactical choice with that of other potential factors, including political regime charac-teristics. To accomplish this, we first create an empiri-cal measure of repertoires of contention building upon the idea of tactical familiarity. Most studies adopting a cultural definition of repertoires of contention have employed qualitative methods empirically, such as in-depth interviews (Baumgarten 2017; Coe and Sandberg 2019), historical methods (Edelman and León 2013), and participant observation (Gade 2019). Admittedly, these qualitative approaches offer subtle and enriched descrip-tions of cultural process of learning and meaning con-struction in tactical selection, but we also claim that the difficulty of measuring repertoires should not justify the exclusion of the theoretically relevant factor from quan-titative analyses of convention, protest, and violence. This study presents a method of scaling the “familiarity” aspect of repertoires of contention.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-15495
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/smp/article/view/15495