‘Yes we can’: identity politics and project politics for a late-modern world

Abstract

There is widespread agreement in mainstream participation studies that social capital and civic engagement in Western democracies are in steady and continuous decline. How did it happen, then, that Barack Obama was able to mobilize tens of millions of volunteers and supporters for his spectacularly successful and novelty-creating presidential campaign? Part of the answer is that his campaign was directed to building political capital for solving common policy concerns. This marks a creative shift in political communication from being oriented towards keeping government effective and legitimate to getting people freely and actively to accept and help in executing what has to be done in order to solve common concerns. The paper discusses why this shift has not been detected by mainstream participation studies, following their development in Almond and Verba's civic culture, through Putnam's social capital framework, to Norris's cause-oriented politics. Later, Marsh et al.'s new politics of lived experience is introduced and connected to the project politics model for studying ‘everyday makers and expert citizens’. The conclusion is that Obama's rhetoric in particular appeals to everyday makers and expert citizens, and that their reciprocal resonance opens for a fusion of identity politics and project politics in a new, much more communicative and interactive democratic model for doing what neither neoliberalism nor statism apparently can do: getting things done in prudent manner by establishing more balanced and discursive two-way relations of autonomy and dependence between political authorities and lay people.