What Does Democracy Mean to You? Linking Democratic Identities to Democratic Organizational Forms in Social Movements

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 23. The Occupy Movement

Abstract

In this dissertation project, I explore how local movement participants incorporate national movement brands and organizational forms to fit local grievances, identity, and culture and what happens if they fail. I use ethnographic data from the local Occupy Tallahassee movement that was collected between October 2011 and May 2012 that consists of participant observation, interviews, and internet archives. The analysis for this project uses both thematic and specific coding strategies to work through the data systematically, and I derived the codes from themes that emerged organically from the data during both collection and preliminary analyses for other projects. In broad terms, this project draws from the literature on macro- and micro-level social movement processes and participatory democracy to examine the development of the national movement brand “Occupy Wall Street” and how the local Occupy movement adopted it. My first aim is to explore what democracy means to participants and how important an agreement on practicing democracy is for the development of collective identity based in a participatory organizational form. For this particular submission, I use respondents’ constructions of democracy in interviews and participant observation to examine the tensions activists experience between their individual perceptions of democracy and the implementation of a democratic organizational form in their social protest activities. I find that the local Occupy movement used a unifying identity surrounding democracy that both engaged participants and instilled collective responsibility for consensus-based decision-making.

Author

• Jesse Klein, Florida State University