Fishing for Activists: How Community Organizing Shapes Partisan Tendencies

• In Event: Engagement in Civic and Charitable Organizations

Abstract

Existing accounts of rising political polarization offer either bottom-up explanations about broad demographic shifts or top-down explanations about changing political institutions and compositions of the political elite. This paper argues both approaches overlook how changing cultural conditions shape the composition of local political spheres. Drawing on a multi-method study of two groups of American libertarians, the author shows how group members’ understandings of their mutual bonds impose varying constraints on local organizers’ recruitment strategies. This, in turn, leads to meaningful differences in activist groups’ tendencies for bipartisan collaboration and compromise. When civic groups organize around shared ideological convictions, as in advocacy-group organizing, organizers can rely on a politically narrow, highly committed group of volunteers for organizing political action. However, when members imagine their bonds as communal, organizers are impelled to diversify their volunteer pool and organize political projects around diverse, bipartisan coalitions. Consequently, changing cultural conditions result in distinct active political spheres where members attribute different meanings to their partisan identity and politics in general.

Author

• Oded Marom, University of Southern California