Cultural Opportunity Structures Research Articles

A Pragma-Dialectical Approach to Memory Politics: Spanish Contemporary Memory Politics, Populism Studies, and Argumentative Dialectics

Abstract This paper establishes a dialogue between populism studies, typologies of reconstruction of the past, and argumentative dialectics. The paper analyzes what types of argumentative strategies are employed in the context of the discussions regarding Spanish memory politics and how those strategies can be associated with typologies of re-elaboration of the past (Caramani and Manucci 2019). Building from argumentative dialectics (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), the paper studies argumentation structures uttered after the endorsement of the 2007 Spanish Historical Memory Law and the proposal of the 2021 Draft Democratic Memory Law. Departing from the distinction between diverse strategies of re-elaboration of the past, namely, heroization and cancellation (Caramani and Manucci 2019), the paper questions if Spanish decision-makers’ rhetorical strategies and political decisions in the field of memory politics disclose the adoption of particular types of populist behavior. The paper claims that the argumentative tactics used, in the domain of memory politics, by Spanish left-wing leaders reveal the adoption of a heroization strategy. In contrast, the rhetoric of Spanish right-wing leaders favors a strategy of cancellation. The paper also claims that, in the Spanish case, mainly from 2018 onwards, the adoption by Spanish left-wing leaders of a heroization strategy had two consequences. First, it did not reduce the cultural opportunity structure for right-wing populism. Second, it fostered a cultural opportunity structure for the affirmation of left-wing populism. The paper selected argumentative dialectics as a methodological framework (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). The paper discusses the scientific significance of analyzing memory politics through the lenses of populism studies.

The shift to cause framing in Egyptian LGBT advocacy after the January 25 revolution

This study sheds light on LGBT activists’ recourse to the rights frame as a means to overcome social and political restrictions and develop an effective advocacy in an authoritarian context. While the literature has de-emphasized social movements’ recourse to cultural resources in authoritarian contexts, this study presents cause framing and its interactionist approach, cultural opportunity structure, as a means of adaptation to repression. Thanks to the rights frame, activists used cultural resources in the formulation of their cause based on feelings of common injustice and the development of a flexible transnational cyber-advocacy calling for the end to the state’s violation of individual rights.

Divide and Rule: Discursive Authority, Identity Dissonance, Ethnic Lobbies, and US Foreign Policy, or How President Obama Defeated AIPAC over the 2015 Iran Deal

AbstractThis article addresses the influence of diaspora lobbies on US foreign policy by analyzing the failure of the paradigmatic lobby—AIPAC—to block the 2015 Iran deal. The literature on the efficacy of diaspora lobbies focuses on structural material factors. In contrast, this study introduces an agency-orientated constructivist approach focused on ideational factors. While the material institutional setting contributed to AIPAC's defeat by establishing a high bar to overcome, this was not insurmountable. Consequently, such material factors must be combined with ideational factors to fully explain AIPAC's defeat. In this vein, the prevalence of negative affective partisanship generated a “cultural opportunity structure” for the President to wield party loyalty to obtain the support of Congressional Democrats. Yet, this too was not insurmountable for AIPAC, had opposition to the deal not become tainted by partisanship. However, the “Republican first” strategy pursued by the public face of the campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, undermined AIPAC's “discursive authority.” This generated “identity dissonance” within the American Jewish community and for other Democratic supporters of Israel, by casting their identification with Israel against their identification with the Democratic Party. In contrast, President Obama successfully framed the issue to minimize identity dissonance.

Activating the socialist past for a nativist future: far-right intellectuals and the prefigurative power of multidirectional nostalgia in Dresden

ABSTRACT A widespread view on the success of populist far-right parties is that they mobilise economically left-behind voters via a backward-looking, nostalgic and thus illegitimate agenda. Yet, recent research has shown that it is often wealthy areas that vote for the German populist far-right AfD. Drawing on nationalism, memory-studies and social-movement literature, this article examines how nostalgia drives the activism of well-off local intellectual far-right groups. Based on ethnographic data gathered in Dresden, I argue that far-right intellectual activism in East Germany is facilitated by the convergence of two distinct but related forms of nostalgia. First, a positive nostalgia for a guilt-free past. Second, a negative nostalgia characterized not by a celebration of socialism, but the resistance to it. As multidirectional nostalgia this convergence makes the far right’s political memory resonate with local individual and social memories providing the cultural opportunity structure for electoral success. Infused with a forward-looking ‘anxious hope’, it prefigures an alternative far-right future.

Anti-gambling policies: framing morality policy in Italy

AbstractRecent research on morality policy has focused on policy change, morality framing and the presence of favourable cultural opportunity structures (COSs). The resulting literature describing various aspects of morality policy has failed to discuss the impact of multilevel dynamic in this field. This contribution examines gambling policy in Italy, applying a multilevel approach to detect the presence of favourable COSs, and whether policymakers frame policies morally. Italy offers a particularly fertile field for the study of morality policy, featuring a liberal national approach versus local restrictive policy. By applying a methodology based on semistructured interviews and secondary sources, we examine the national and local political spheres, demonstrating that morality framing, when detected, is more likely to be found at the local level where the influence of experts and interest groups on legislators may result in the transformation of a health policy based on paternalistic considerations.

National past and populism: the re-elaboration of fascism and its impact on right-wing populism in Western Europe

The electoral performance of right-wing populism depends on the type of re-elaboration of countries’ national past and their collective memories. Complementing socio-economic and political-institutional factors, the article analyses cultural opportunity structures. Given the link between fascist and populist visions of power, it shows that different collective memories of the fascist past and World War II open up or close down the space for right-wing populist parties. Theoretically, the typology includes four types of re-elaboration: culpabilisation, victimisation, heroisation and cancellation. Results of a comparative analysis of eight West European countries based on a novel measurement method point to (1) culpabilisation and heroisation as types of re-elaboration limiting right-wing populist parties’ electoral performance, (2) cancellation as a type having an undetermined effect, and (3) victimisation as a type triggering the success of right-wing populist parties.

Country-Level Investment in Cultural Opportunity Structures. A Potential Source of Health Differences Between 21 European Countries

Individual’s participation in cultural activities may positively affect health through a pathway mediated by social capital. We examine whether country-level investment in cultural opportunity structures was associated with between-country differences in self-rated health and, if so, whether these associations were mediated by citizens’ confidence in societal institutions, i.e., by institutional trust, regarded as a dimension of social capital. For 24,887 respondents in the European Social Survey, 2006, data on self-rated health, institutional trust (individual-level and country-level), and sociodemographic variables were linked with statistics-based country-level data on 10 indicators of cultural opportunity structures and mediator variables (gross domestic product (GDP), Gini index, and welfare state regime). Over and above the sociodemographics, six cultural indicators contributed to between-country health differences in logistic multilevel regression analysis: the percentage of arts students, the RC index, the percentage of writers and creative artists of total employment, exports of cultural goods, imports of cultural goods, and the number of feature films produced per capita. Controlling, furthermore, for trust, and country-level mediators, only imports of cultural goods contributed to between-country differences in health. No associations with other cultural indicators remained after controlling for GDP or welfare state regime. Institutional trust may partially mediate the significance of cultural investments for self-rated health. However, both cultural investment and trust may be concomitants of general prosperity and welfare policies. Future studies should investigate whether the countries’ welfare policies influence the transformation of cultural investment into institutional trust and which types of indicators best depict associations between investments and health.

The Eurozone crisis and citizen engagement in EU affairs

While the Eurozone crisis has contributed to Europeanisation trends in the domestic politics of EU member states, it has not to the same extent triggered citizen mobilisation in EU-level democratic procedures. Theories that treat politicisation as an undifferentiated phenomenon tend to miss this important distinction. This article suggests that the weakness of supranational citizen mobilisation is linked to factors that restrict the citizens’ receptiveness to EU-related messages: limited knowledge of the EU and a weak sense of political efficacy, a discursive framing that conceptualises the EU as a consortium of member states rather than a supranational entity, and attributions of responsibility for the crisis that de-emphasise the role of EU policies. These factors constitute cultural opportunity structures that influence politicisation patterns; they imply that politicisation is, under present conditions, more likely to result in a renationalisation than in a supranationalisation of EU politics.

Brake rather than Barrier: The Impact of the Catholic Church on Morality Policies in Western Europe

Previous research on morality does not present a clear picture regarding religious effects on abortion and same-sex partnership policies. An examination of the level of permissiveness in the two policy fields across Western European countries reveals that Catholic states do not significantly differ from their Protestant counterparts in terms of policy outputs. Our descriptive analysis of the reform processes in the two fields from 1960 to 2010 shows that Catholicism has no direct impact on morality policy outputs, but may slow down the pace of reforms. The delaying effect, however, is contingent upon the presence of additional conditions. In order to inductively develop theoretical insights into this relationship, particular emphasis is placed on the case of Austria, which was quick to liberalise abortion but a laggard in introducing legal recognition of same-sex couples. The Austrian case reveals that the influence of the Catholic Church may impede reforms so long as institutional and cultural opportunity structures do not promote secular efforts to politicise the issue and build consensus for policy change.

From Wage Slaves to Wage Workers: Cultural Opportunity Structures and the Evolution of the Wage Demands of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, 1880-1900

This paper examines the reasons behind a historic shift in the language couching the wage demands of two North American labor movements during the last twenty years of the 19th century — the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. We trace how the once dominant imagery of “wage slavery” lost its connection to producerist labor ideology and eventually was replaced by the more pragmatic symbolism of “wage work” This linguistic shift is of particular scholarly importance because it occurred during a time when producerist labor politics, with its emphasis on a radical reorganization of work and private property, lost significant ground to a more consumerist/economistic version of labor politics. We show that this pivotal rhetorical shift was linked to changes in the cultural opportunity structure. These were, in turn, shaped through movement sector dynamics and through changes in the empirical referents which add meaning and resonance to social movement claims.

Between the State and the Market

This article brings together two research traditions: social movement theory and theories of corporate social responsibility. The study is an attempt to widen the perspective on the relationship between a business/business sector and its external stakeholders in order to include social movements. We depart from a three-part model of political opportunity structures, including state, cultural and economic opportunity structures. In order to illustrate our model, the article is centred on the case of the Swedish animal rights movements’ political pressure on domestic fur-farming. The animal rights movement has had considerable success by engaging with a relatively open cultural opportunity structure, winning a framing war in regard to the moral issues raised. Despite the fur industry’s attempts to counter-mobilize, the animal rights movement has found a hearing in formal political channels and has achieved considerable success. However, since the movement is faced with an economic opportunity structure that is not vulnerable to the demands of stakeholders, and where there is great inconsistency between the interests of the industry and the demands of the stakeholders, it is not surprising that the farmers have been non-compliant.

Religion, Transnationalism and Turks in Europe

This essay focuses on organizations of Turkish labor migrants in the Netherlands from 1960 onwards. It seeks to analyze how the orientations of migrant organizations have changed over time by religion‐based organizing principles. The study distinguishes between organizations operating directly out of the sending country and organizations arising out of the political and cultural opportunity structure in the destination country. The ultimate aim is to explore to what extent “religion” matters for immigrant organizations and how those in turn may influence the role immigrant organizations play in the integration of migrants.

Anti-Abortion Activism In The U.S. And France: Comparing Opportunity Environments Of Rescue Tactics

We explore how opportunity environments, conceptualized to include political-legal and cultural components, help explain the trajectories of movement tactics and frames employed in differing contexts. Using data from interviews, newspaper accounts, and web sites, we document how opportunity environments affected the trajectory of "rescue" tactics and frames. When abortion opponents in France attempted to block access to abortion providers in order to "rescue unborn children, " the tactic and associated frames met with a different fate than in the U.S. The legal context under which abortion was available in each nation affected the use of specific direct action tactics. Also, how abortion was culturally constructed and embedded—its "cultural opportunity structure"—affected responses to rescue by pro-life activists, the media, and the countermovement.

Welfare Recipients or Workers? Contesting the Workfare State in New York City

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of “cultural opportunity structures” can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.

The Individualization of Society and the Liberalization of State Policies on Same-Sex Sexual Relations, 1984-1995

Over the last half century, social life throughout much of the world has been reconstituted around individualized persons, conceived to embody ultimate authority over their own lives. As individuals have become more central to society, and as models of individuated personhood have been claimed by women as well as by men, many changes have ensued, including a dramatic transformation of sex. Sex has ceased to be dominantly associated with the family and procreation and has come to be associated with the individual and pleasure. One expression of this shift is the recent rise and public legitimation of same-sex sexual relations. Gay and lesbian social movements have appeared worldwide, and many nation-states have liberalized theirpolicies on homosexual relations. Using regression models on cross-national data, we show that (1) high levels of individualization and gender equality provide a cultural opportunity structure that gives rise to active lesbian and gay social movements and liberalized state policies on same-sex relations and that (2) active lesbian and gay social movements and liberal state policies each facilitate the other. Competing explanations for the changes, such as economic development and democratization, receive little support.