Engaging citizens: local interactions, policy discourse and courses of protest against mobile phone cell site deployment

C Bröer,M B De Graaff,J W Duyvendak,R A Wester

doi:10.1080/23254823.2016.1201427

C Bröer, M B De Graaff + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1201427

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Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article puts forward an interactionist discourse approach for studying the course of local political protest. We argue that how local policy-makers engage with the (anticipated) demands of citizens and mediate national policy produces distinct framing and feeling rules about potentially controversial issues. These framing and feeling rules open up or close down opportunities for citizen concerns to develop into collective action and policy change. Our contribution refines cultural approaches to social movement theory, focusing on local interactions in the formation of discourse, and allows us to better understand within-country variation in the course of contentious collective action. We develop our argument through a comparison of sixteen cases of installing mobile phone cell sites in the Netherlands. We show that the interaction between municipalities and citizens establishes a specific framing of the issue, of the role of citizens in decision-making and of the rules concerning what citizens may legitimately feel about mobile phone masts being erected in their neighbourhoods. This gives rise to four typical patterns of engagement between municipalities and citizens.

Highlights

This article seeks to understand differences in courses of local protest from an interactionist discourse perspective by focusing on local policy
Elaborating on Karapin (2007) and our earlier work, we examine here how local policy discourses mediate between national contexts and contentious action by citizens
We argue that distinct local policy discourses develop when municipal policy-makers anticipate citizen protest or respond to citizens’ claims while translating national policy and collaborating with industry and other stakeholders

Summary

Introduction

This article seeks to understand differences in courses of local protest from an interactionist discourse perspective by focusing on local policy. The sixteen cases we analysed for this article reveal diverging courses of protest, which we typify through how municipalities engage with citizens’ current or expected objections to the deployment of cell sites: by rejecting all citizen claims, by tolerating them, by mediating them and, by cooperating with citizens. We show which feeling and framing rules are established when local governments and industry engage citizens, and how these rules influence opportunities for opposition to grow into collective action and policy change.

Results

Conclusion