Social Movements and Rhetorical Change in Public Policy

Defining Social Movements and Rhetoric

Charles Tilly defines social movements as a series of contentious performances, displays, and campaigns by which ordinary people make collective claims on others. For Tilly, social movements are a major vehicle for ordinary people's participation in public politics. Furthermore, Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as collective challenges to elites, authorities, other groups, or cultural codes by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents, and authorities. He specifically distinguishes social movements from political parties and interest groups.

The concept of "new rhetoric" complicates this landscape. As one scholar observes, the term "new" can mean recent, innovative, better, improved, or innocent, while "rhetoric" carries predominantly negative connotations: political lies, corporate spin, purple prose, emotional appeals without reason. Given the history of rhetoric from Plato and Aristotle onward, it is difficult for contemporary theorists to propose anything that does not echo something from the past. Yet ancient rhetorical theory continues to influence rhetorical practice regardless of conscious efforts to break away from it. From this foundation, new rhetorical practices in public policies can redefine social movements and their effectiveness.

Discussions of democratic governance have been a hallmark in the public administration literature. Many scholars argue that bureaucracy and leadership are antithetical to democratic governance in our society. Many of these dichotomous arguments have repeated themselves throughout the history of public administration, with some scholars offering prescriptions that temper the constricting, negative effects of leadership and bureaucracy in order to preserve democratic values. Others have suggested that adequate checks and balances are built into our system of governance to dampen the excesses of either leadership or bureaucracy.

Rhetoric and Democratic Governance

Important scholars have identified key values such as accountability, responsiveness, equity, efficiency, effectiveness, and the public good, which are often grounded in the founding period of the country, specifically in the Constitution. Through this approach, public administrators incorporate democratic values in carrying out the policy mandates of the people, chosen through their elected representatives. Democratic values are absolutely critical to public administration, and continued deliberation must occur to ensure their integration into policy practice.

The United States Government has traditionally depicted itself as an ardent supporter of principled global engagement. As official policy statements suggest, American leadership has inspired trust and confidence among allied governments because the nation pursued common actions reflecting common interests, remained committed to global engagement, and exercised power with restraint. Though imperfect and marked by differences with allies, this approach contributed to world stability and the spread of freedom and prosperity. However, reconstructing the structure of public policy requires a deliberate rhetorical plan that aligns messaging with actual democratic values and governance outcomes.

Americans seek a future with greater economic prosperity, yet the structure of the American middle class is under unprecedented pressure. Since the late twentieth century, economic changes have threatened the stability of middle-class employment. U.S. corporations transferred production and service jobs to low-wage workers abroad, while export-oriented development strategies in many developing countries expanded the global market for both skilled and unskilled labor. Reducing the cost of imports—toys from China, shoes from Indonesia—destroyed domestic jobs across manufacturing and service sectors. Technological innovations have compounded this trend, eliminating an ever-growing number of manufacturing and service positions, a trend that will likely prove more important than public policy over time.

Economic Change and the American Middle Class

Technologically driven increases in productivity and advances in manufacturing and automation have slashed the prices of consumer appliances such as televisions and personal computers. However, productivity growth threatens the middle class and other social classes in three critical ways due to the poor structure of globalization. If restructured correctly, globalization could increase economic growth while distributing benefits more equitably. Yet current arrangements allow vast disparities: a worker in a foreign country may earn more than many American workers, a paradox most economists fail to recognize as a systemic problem.

The U.S. economy has shifted dramatically in its labor force composition and population distribution. The transition has moved away from farms to cities, from fields to factories, and increasingly toward service provision. The providers of personal and public services far outnumber producers of agricultural and manufactured goods. Statistics reveal a sharp long-term trend away from self-employment toward working for others. These structural changes necessitate corresponding changes in public policy to address the realities of economic transformation.

Scholars of public policy often assign social movements a role in the agenda-setting process, although the mechanisms by which this occurs are rarely specified. Something outside institutional politics affects the agenda within; however, the interaction of both substantive and symbolic changes in policy with the development of a challenging movement is undertheorized and understudied. Fundamentally, social movement scholars treat the policy process as a black box within the state, which movements may occasionally shake into action, whereas policy scholars treat movements as undifferentiated actors who respond by disruption. Yet in their areas of central concern, scholars offer much more nuanced recognition of complexity and contingency.

Social Movement Coalitions and Policy Outcomes

Mobilization can affect policies that enable new actors to be present in the implementation and subsequent renegotiation of policies. Research has shown that crime victims, by mobilizing for themselves, not only changed criminal justice policy but ensured their own presence in negotiations for subsequent reforms. In other words, they won a place as established actors within the policy domain. Monitoring the implementation of policy affects the success and evaluation of that policy and the subsequent mobilization by affected persons. The absence of mobilization from a recognized constituency can also have an effect on policy. By altering the balance of power within a policy domain, organized interests can change outcomes—or prevent them.

Social movement coalitions respond to policy changes, often by redefining themselves, their claims, and their allies. Policy reforms split movement coalitions, and fracture and demobilize movements. Because participating groups enter social movements with a range of goals, it is not surprising that they view acceptable outcomes differently. Coalition dynamics are inherently unstable, as participants are constantly aware of the changing viability and value of particular alliances. In liberal polities, where political institutions are relatively permeable, coalitions are particularly fluid.

A recent example illustrates this dynamic. While laboratory research on the human genome rarely gets much public attention, periodic decision windows offer opportunities for concerned groups to weigh in. The decision about whether to fund research on human stem cell lines reconfigures old coalitions from the abortion debate. Research scientists, largely absent from the abortion debate, mobilized heavily on the question of stem cell research, enlisting victims of diseases that might be treated with new scientific discoveries. Some portion of the anti-abortion movement, viewing research on embryonic cells as disrespectful of life, threatened to mobilize if such research were legitimated. This example demonstrates how policy decisions simultaneously reshape movement coalitions and create new mobilization opportunities.

According to scholarly analysis, changes in policy—particularly in the composition of policy monopolies—mean the terrain on which social movements mobilize is constantly shifting. Opportunities for inclusion always threaten to undermine the urgency of particular claims or the perceived necessity of extra-institutional mobilization to make them. Government need not satisfy even the largest portion of a movement coalition to make subsequent social mobilization much more difficult. For elected officials, understanding this reality means constantly searching for equilibrium points on policy to stabilize monopolies and palliate political constituencies, giving enough to quell disturbances but not so much as to generate disruption from the other side. For activists, understanding this interaction means making hard calculations about the costs and benefits of concessions on matters of policy, recognizing that prospects for continued mobilization are limited due to coalition dynamics.

Government Economic Intervention and Stabilization

The federal government pursues several mechanisms to stabilize and direct economic activity. Through these interventions, government seeks to maintain steady growth, high levels of employment, and price stability.

Stabilization and Growth. The federal government guides the overall pace of economic activity by adjusting spending and tax rates through fiscal policy, or by managing the money supply and controlling credit through monetary policy. These tools allow government to slow down or speed up the economy's rate of growth, affecting the level of prices and employment in the process.

Regulation and Control. The U.S. federal government regulates private enterprise in numerous ways. Regulation falls into two general categories. Economic regulation seeks, either directly or indirectly, to control prices. Traditionally, the government has sought to prevent monopolies, such as electric utilities, from raising prices beyond the level that would ensure them reasonable profits. Following the Great Depression, the government devised a complex system to stabilize prices for agricultural goods, which tend to fluctuate wildly in response to rapidly changing supply and demand. A number of other industries—trucking and, later, airlines—successfully sought regulation to limit what they considered harmful price-cutting.