Guys in Washington: Political Culture in the Tea Party Network

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Right Wing Social Movements and Guns

Abstract

Among activists and sympathizers in the Tea Party network, politicians should be “guys” – they should be your guys. That is, they should represent you and your demands; ideally, you’d get to know them, you’d build a relationship with them, and maybe you’d even take a turn “going up to Washington” for a couple of years to represent your friends and family back home. Of course, in a complex society with millions of people, this ideal is impossible. However, through ethnographic research in the Tea Party movement, I found that attempts to approximate this ideal dominated conversations about the way individuals should participate in politics. Indeed, reflecting this idealized model, most Tea Party groups and activists in the network I studied had shifted from traditional protest tactics to institutional forms of participation in the mainstream political system. While structuralist accounts of the Tea Party identify shifting dynamics in political power as the primary cause of such shifts – particularly between major political parties – my research points to the salience of a shared political culture that encouraged such a transformation. Furthermore, I argue that this model of political culture is a particularly salient explanatory force in this particular context: a movement dominated by new activists without previously knowledge of political organizing, on the right end of the spectrum, where protest movements of the 1960s are still rejected, and where a diffuse organizing model means that the movement manages a constant flux of people with varying levels of political experience, interest, and/or dedication.

Author

• Elizabeth Anne Yates, University of Pittsburgh