Not in Your Backyard!: Structure, Ideology, and the Mobilization of Conscience Constituents against Fracking in Illinois

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Moral Outrage and Participation

Abstract

Social movements increasingly rely on conscience constituents—movement participants who contribute resources, but do not stand to benefit directly from the movement’s goals. We argue that two factors drive the growing role of conscience constituents in political contests in the United States: (1) the rationalization of social movement organizations’ mobilizing strategies and (2) the growing ideological polarization among Americans. Contemporary advocacy organizations use new mobilizing technologies to continually introduce new issues to prospective conscience constituents, while ideological framing allows conscience constituents to perceive a stake in a diverse set of contests. We test these propositions in the context of the contentious regulatory review of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Illinois. Using a unique dataset consisting of 37,559 geo-coded public comments submitted during the review, we distinguish between opponents whose proximity to prospective fracking sites puts them at risk of negative impacts and conscience constituents who submitted comments despite facing no direct threat. Using rich information on the commenters’ organizational affiliations we show that a web of large, progressive advocacy organizations recruited conscience constituents from across the state, mobilizing them on the basis of their liberal political identities rather than a perceived threat from fracking. Our results show that conscience constituents contributed the major share of the total public comments and they tended to come from communities with strong Democratic majorities. The study contributes to research on social movement mobilization and to scholarly debates about the consequences of ideological polarization for political representation in the United States.

Authors

• Fedor A Dokshin, Cornell University

• Amanda T. Buday, Fort Hays State University