We Had a Lot of Trouble with You: Assessing the Repressive Capacity of U.S. Congress, 1900-2000

• In Event: 21066 - Advances in Data and Methods for Collective Behavior/Social Movements Research

Abstract

When do states stigmatize social movements? Most research on state repression of social movements focuses on “hard” repression such as mass arrests or covert action to destabilize movement organizations. But “soft repression” as when the state uses its public fora to stigmatize social movements is less well understood. Using a new dataset of all congressional hearings which sought to stigmatize social movements organizations (SMOs) over the 20th century created by combining supervised machine learning and human qualitative coding, we study the conditions under which the US state uses soft repression against SMOs. We use this dataset to anchor an historical narrative which shows that Congress is most likely to repress when movements are ideologically aligned with threatening foreign governments or ideologies (primarily fascism and communism) or when they use violent tactics. We also find that Congress sometimes represses labor unions and organizations that use “unfair” tactics in partisan politics. We show how Congress builds repressive capacity which, although built to address one threat (such as fascism) can be reproposed to repress other threats (such as communism). Finally, we show that soft repression does not typically diffuse from more radical SMOs to more moderate groups, but rather that SMOs aligned with Congress’s goals are sometimes used to stigmatize other SMOs. Our key theoretical contributions lie in showing 1) that the state mostly stigmatizes movements in response to external threats coming from allying with foreign enemies, or internally from the use of violence, and 2) demonstrating how the state builds and repurposes repressive capacity.

Authors

• Charles F. Seguin, Pennsylvania State University

• Thomas V. Maher, Clemson University

• Yongjun Zhang, Stony Brook University

• Evan James Ferstl, Pennsylvania State University