Lothar Krempel 3 and Michael Schnegg 4
Abstract:
This paper examines how existing social networks are transformed into political action in times of rapid social change. This general theoretical problem is exemplified for the 1848/49 Revolution in Esslingen, a middle-sized German town. We use data from more than 200 historical sources to identify patterns of activity and social linkages for more than 2000 inhabitants of Esslingen at the time of the revolution and during the 15 years preceding it.
Results indicate that existing social structure plays a key role for mobilization processes. Further, they show that the picture needs to be differentiated. Structure does not have the same effect at each stage of the process and for every person involved. Mobilization does not only take place through the existing structure but also occurs in more distinct regions of the network where a common situation and an equivalent position in society at large are the driving forces behind the organization of protest.
Introduction
This paper examines how existing social networks are transformed into political action in times of rapid social change. Social networks' potential as an important carrier and as driving force behind political protest has long been recognized by mobilization researchers. The idea recently experienced a revitalization through sounder empirical and theoretical work (see Diani 1997, Klandermans, Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988 as good recent examples).
While we strongly support the empirical and theoretical weight that is put on the relationship between social structures and political action, we find it often neglects other important relations between the social world and the political domain. More specifically, political action and protest can also occur in the absence of social linkages, and existing social networks can have barely almost no effect on the formation or prevention of political protest.
In this paper we aim toward an enhancement of the understanding of mobilization processes by introducing a more general, yet formally precise, model of the role of social networks in the processes. The proposed approach uses insights from diffusion research to account for different processes under a single analytical framework.
Research on the diffusion of innovations has demonstrated that social structures are an important variable in the overall explanatory equation. How a structure contributes to a diffusion process varies with different points in time and with every person involved in it (Coleman 1957). One of the oldest and most fundamental theoretical concept developed in diffusion research is the concept of exposure. The exposure model postulates that an individual engages into a collective behavior based upon the proportion of people in his personal environment that are already active. An individual's tendency to adopt a specific behavior is assumed to be a function of the behavior of others in his immediate social environment (cf. Granovetter 1978, Valente 1995).
Yet, the strength of a relationship may vary over time and is not equivalent with each individual involved in the process. More specific parameters, such as the amount of external contacts an actor has or individual attributes and beliefs (cf. Tilly 1978,p. 59-64), are often needed to specify the model and can account for the observed variations between individuals and over time.
Such an approach to dynamic processes - that combines structural and individual parameters - has proven to be a powerful theoretical and analytical tool in diffusion research and can fruitfully be adopted for mobilization processes. This combination directly translates into the research agenda we propose and we will exemplify it with one extremely interesting empirical case: the Petition Movement during the 1848/49 Revolution in a German town.
It is first necessary to determine to which extent the movement can be explained as a process that takes place within existing social structures. Then, when we know which parts of the overall process can be explained within such a general, structural model, the second step is to use additional information about the actors to identify mechanisms of recruitment and mobilization taking place beyond the scope of the general structural model. In combining both approaches we reach a maximum statistical and substantial explanatory power.
As said, the political movement studied here is the German Revolution of 1848/1849. The geographical focus is Esslingen a middle-size town in the southwestern part of Germany. In many respects, Esslingen stands for the rest of Germany and can serve as a prototypical example: At the time of the revolution it was dominated by craftsmen and small scale (family owned) industries that quantitatively outscored the existing industrialized production plants. At the same time Esslingen was embedded into a predominantly agricultural hinterland. In this blend of crafts, industries, and agriculture, we find all the social groups that had a crucial impact on the revolution. In fact, the relationships between merchants, craftsmen, workers, and vintners were often used as an explanation for the happening of the revolution. In this regard, we had to make sure that the events in Esslingen were representative of many of the local communities of that period: with a few exceptions mentioned in the analysis, Esslingen is a prototypical micro-cosmos, well embedded into larger society, which adequately reflects the most fundamental developments on the national scale.
One of the means used to express new ideas and to make claims to the different political agents during the Revolution of 1848/49 was the Petition Movement. Petitions, citing new political ideas, including the call for rapid changes, were addressed to the government, the monarchs of the State, and the National Assembly (Nationalversammlung) in Frankfurt. During the revolution more than 17.000 Petitions were addressed to the Nationalversammlung in Frankfurt alone and an additional 13.451 to the Assembly in Berlin. The fact that these petitions could have up to 10.000 petitioners stress the range and the importance of the phenomena for the revolution (Siemann 1985: 182). Although these petitions cover a broad span of subjects, they all have in common that they document active political involvement. In times of rapid social change the personal signatures on these petitions represent far more than a normal democratic interest: they express revolutionary practice.
This paper shows how the extreme rise of the petition movement observed during the years of 1848/49 can be explained within the proposed agenda. More specifically the following two questions will be used as guidelines: 1. What circumstances are generating the broad interest on new political ideas, and 2. who and what plays a central role for the diffusion of these new ideas....
... Mobilization Within and Outside Social Structures
Diffusion research convincingly demonstrated the importance of the web of social linkages as an carrier of innovative behavior. This influence of personal contacts is not restricted to innovations such as family planning methods and the prescription of certain medicine (cf. Coleman 1957 and Rogers and Kincaid 1981 for these classical examples): personal interactions also have an impact on political orientation, beliefs and behaviors as it has been acknowledged in political science a long time ago. To the surprise of the general public, media, and academia alike, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate the great impact of social interactions on the change in voting preferences (cf. Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948). The early attempt to include structural variables into the research agenda clearly showed the extend to which social linkages matter for political processes and decisions on a dyadic level.
Within mobilization research this structural view is most explicitly expressed in the resource mobilization approach. Kriesi (1988), as one representative of this approach, notes: " (...) that understanding organizational structures is of crucial importance to understanding mobilization processes" (cf. Kriesi 1988: 41).5
Though the results of both studies are convincing at first site there is one major theoretical and methodological drawback inherent in either example cited. Social networks are by far more than the random combination of individuals interacting in dyads: as these interactions are patterned they form structures of higher order, that entail opportunities and constraints for individual actors and groups. This point has recently been advocated by Diani (1997): "From our perspective, an important question relates to the integration of social movement actors in their broader communities, and to their capacity to mobilize consensus outside movement subcultures (Diani 1997: 139). To our knowledge no empirical study was able to follow that call and tackle these important but complex, structural effects.
The fact that collective social phenomena are often characterized by their steep growth (which is also true for the petition movement as is shown in Figure 1) can in part be explained by the multiplicative properties of social structures.
From a methodological point of view, the multiplicative properties can only be understood if one studies the embeddedness of individual actors in the structures surrounding them: depending on where an actor is located in the social structure he experiences more or less strongly the growth of activity in his personal social environment. Sooner or later he will come in touch with activists and the amount of exposure will determine his likeliness to become active himself. This argument can be reformulated into a more general hypothesis: The more contacts an actor has to other actors who are already active in the revolution, the more likely he will become active himself. This process of mobilization can continue within a given structure for as long as there are actors who experience a rise of activity in their personal surroundings. With the extension of these contacts to activists, peer group pressure rises and the question whether or not to become politically active is stated again and again for the individual actor. The extension continues to accelerate as long as these newly activated actors interact with people who have not yet become involved in the political movement.
Social structures describe who interacts with whom and who can become potentially important for whom. While we assume that social structures matter for the diffusion of new political ideas, it would be oversimplified to put deterministic weight on structural explanations alone. Not all recruitment necessarily takes place within an existing social structure. Similar experiences and an equivalent positions within society in large are very often assumed to cause political change. Such equivalent positions can result from the same access to power and representation, access to property, and same legal positions. People who are tied in such equivalent positions do not necessarily need to be tied in the sense of social networks or social structures. It is even more likely to assume that this is not the case. In a social situation where power and privileges are unevenly distributed the ruling class has strong interests and often the potential to work against the establishment of effective organizational structures on the side of their political opponents.
Taking into account the two sources of mobilization presented above, we presume that the center of revolutionary activity is located where structure and equivalent positions resulting in similar interests come together.
Footnotes
... 41).5 In his analysis of the Dutch petition movement against the deployment of cruise missiles, he found a convincing relationship between the likeliness of an individual to sign a petition and his or her integration into "counter-cultural networks". Kriesi defined counter-cultural networks as social circles of people who are in the core of this particular petition movement or any other of the so called "New Social Movements" (NSMs) (the women's movement and the homosexual movement are other examples) (Kriesi 1988: 50-54)....
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