EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS*

Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam

In recent years, scholars have come to recognize emotions and emotional processes as central
to an understanding of contentious politics. The study of emotions was not absent from early
analyses of collective behavior and social movements, but it was typically accompanied by a
number of problematic assumptions that no longer inform most research on the subject. This
earlier work typically equated emotions with irrationality and assumed that emotions and
rationality are incompatible. This often led to a narrow focus on the emotional content of sudden outbursts of crowd behavior. The work represented in this collection rejects the false
dichotomy of emotions and rationality and adopts a much broader perspective on the role of
emotions. These articles address a wide range of issues, including the role of emotions in
sustaining movements over time, the complex and often contradictory nature of emotion work
within movements, and the activities that produce the emotional energy needed to forge and
maintain collective political identities. They clearly document the centrality of emotions to the
process by which people engage in contentious politics. Much of the recent research on emotions and political conflict has entailed micro-level analyses and ahistorical case studies,
mainly in the United States and Western Europe. The articles collected here embrace a
broader scope, moving across diverse cultures and incorporating attention to long-term and
large-scale processes, such as the institutionalization of electoral practices in England, democratization in Mexico and Korea, the global spread of nationalism, and the revolutionary transformation of regimes in China.
These articles suggest that the historical study of emotions can lead us to question
commonsense understandings, address silences in the existing literature, and rethink conventional categories of analysis. Close historical inspection of the circumstances surrounding the
*

The idea of devoting a special issue of a journal to the role of emotion in contentious politics developed during a
very special four year collaborative project on contentious politics, sponsored jointly be the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and the Mellon Foundations Sawyer Seminar Program. The project ran
from 1995 to 1998 and involved, over its life, participation by seven core faculty, fourteen graduate fellows, and
twenty-two invited scholars. Most of the authors represented here fall into one of these three categories. Ron
Aminzade, Doug McAdam, and Elizabeth Perry were core faculty, Jorge Cadena-Roa, Debbie Gould, and Hyojoung
Kim were graduate fellows, and Verta Taylor was an invited scholar. What made the project so special was that,
almost from the outset, these distinctions meant little in the context of the exciting collaborative conversation in
which we were all engaged. The aim of the project was simply to broaden the conversation among scholars concerned
with various forms of non-routine (or contentious) politics. This broadening involved blurring disciplinary lines,
traditional typological distinctions among categories of contention (e.g., social movements, revolutions, democratization, etc.), and conventional topics for study. This special issue is very much in the spirit of the overall project.
We seek to highlight work on emotions and contention, a topic that has been largely neglected in the study of social
movements and revolutions and which, we came to accord great importance over the projects course.
In introducing the issue, we want to acknowledge several debts of gratitude. The first is to Mobilization and its
editor, Hank Johnston, for affording us the perfect setting for these articles. The second is to the two cosponsors of
the aforementioned project, CASBS and the Mellon Foundation, without whose support none of this would have been
possible. And the final vote of thanks is to the other members of the (Invisible) College of Contentious Politics,
whose voices echo in the articles that make up this volume.

Ron Aminzade is Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology,
Stanford University.
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Mobilization

adoption of the secret ballot, for example, suggests that common explanations centering
around reformist desires to combat corruption are problematic. Barbalets research reveals the
importance of the role of emotions, especially fear on the part of ruling elites, in the adoption
of this electoral practice. More importantly, his research also makes us aware of the social
consequences of the spread of this institutionalized political practice, an implicit and rarely
perceived set of embedded emotional dynamics that serve to individualize and isolate workers. The introduction of secrecy into voting altered emotional dynamics among working-class
voters, thereby inhibiting the mobilization of those emotions that had helped to trigger the
riots and violence that accompanied early elections. Goulds study of ACT-UP sheds light on
a number of neglected topics. In particular, Gould eschews the dominant focus on movement
emergence and explores the critical role of emotion in helping to sustain contentious politics.
Perry challenges conventional explanations of social change, including accounts of the triumph of Communist activists over their Guomindang rivals in China as due to structural conditions, especially organizational and political factors. An important piece of the explanation,
in her account, is the emotional styles and emotion work of movement leaders and their
ability to develop rituals, like speaking bitterness or criticism-self-criticism, that mobilize
emotions among potential followers. Successful leaders deploy complex cultural knowledge
in their quest to connect abstract cognitions of injustice to emotions of anger, fear, grief, and
revenge and thereby harness emotional energy to their projects of political change.
Emotions can impede as well as stimulate collective political action and foster
reformist as well as revolutionary strategies of collective action. As Deborah Goulds research
demonstrates, so long as grief was the dominant emotional response to the AIDS crisis, the
gay community was unable to sustain a more confrontational approach to the issue. Emotions
can also provide solid foundations for oppositional practices that challenge the major political
developments of the modern world, such as the formation of nation-states. The research of
Taylor and Rupp shows that alongside the bitter hatreds and violent conflicts accompanying
this key process in the making of the modern world, there were less well documented transnational gendered practices that created alternative bonds of solidarity and a loving community that challenged nationalist rivalries. These challenges were rooted in a distinctive transnational emotion culture that built on the shared experiences and emotion work of women
around the globe, encompassing expressive public rituals of reconciliation, intense affective
cross-national ties, and an emotional template of mother love. The success of this emotion
culture in building a transnational collective identity among women, they suggest, may help to
explain why women peace activists had more success in sustaining their organizations than
did their male counterparts.
Emotion cultures are a key dimension of any movement and rituals typically play a
central role in a movements emotion culture. Rituals were central to the transnational
womens movement against war and nationalism, as Taylor and Rupp clearly document. In
Cadena-Roas account, the emotions aroused by rituals associated with the popular spectator
sport of wrestling help to explain public responses to the framing efforts of urban social
movements in Mexico. As the accounts of Perry, Taylor and Rupp, and Cadena-Roa make
clear, emotionally laden rituals are a key means for dramatizing injustice, building solidarities
and affirming identities, and generating the emotional energy necessary for high-risk activism
and sustained commitment to the cause. Their analyses of movement rituals shed light on the
emotional dimensions of the interpretative processes that underpin collective political action.
To argue for the central importance of emotion in political contention is not to suggest that its effects are always facilitative of collective action. On the contrary, these articles
provide ample evidence of the ambivalent, contradictory, and unstable character of emotions.
Efforts to manage the ambivalent emotions that lesbians and gays in the U.S. had toward their
homosexuality and the larger society, argues Deborah Gould, shaped movement responses to
AIDS. They help to explain the initial failure of a militant collective action frame and the
adoption of non-confrontational politics dominated by lobbying and community service pro-

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vision. The same emotion, she argues, can have strikingly different consequences. Articulations of gay pride, for example, can be linked to militant, confrontational activism or to
efforts to resurrect respectability, suppress anger, and discourage militant activism. Hyojoung
Kims research also highlights the potentially contradictory and unstable consequences of
specific emotions, depending on the nature of their object. In his study of the process by
which emotional experiences and expressions shape activist preferences among visitors to the
tomb of a suicide protestor in South Korea, Kim argues that the same emotion, shame, can
have very different preference effects. When the evaluative object of shame is an overall
identity, he argues, it is likely to have a demobilizing effect, but when it is addressed to specific behavioral deficiencies, it is likely to strengthen further commitment to movement
activism since there is considerable room for reparation of the identity involved. Elizabeth
Perrys analysis of the success of Chinese communist revolutionaries also captures the
ambivalent character of emotions. She points to the Communists ability to appreciate and
capitalize on the ambivalence and malleability of human emotions and argues that the plasticity and ambivalence of emotions can help make sense of some of the more shocking aspects
of the Cultural Revolution.
This collection of articles testifies to the diversity of emotional rules and climates
across movements and cultures and the play of different emotional processes and dynamics
during the emergence and development of social movements. They suggest that environmental circumstances, including strong organizations and favorable opportunities, will not
produce a movement in absence of heightened emotions; in other words, that widely
acknowledged facilitators of mobilization operate in large part through the emotional dynamics they set in motion. We are not yet at a point in the study of emotions and contentious politics where we can clearly identify the typical emotional dynamics that characterize the different phases of movement emergence, growth, and decline. (Though in a chapter for a volume
entitled Silence and Voice in Contentious Politics we have offered some detailed speculative
hunches about the role of emotions over the life of a movement.) Any characterization of a
typical movement life cycle is likely to be extremely problematic, given the tremendous emotional variation within movements and the ongoing conflicts among movement activists over
emotion rules and repertoires. Further research is needed before we can make any strong generalizations concerning the relationship between appeals to particular emotions and particular
types of movements, movement cultures, or collective action repertoires. But this diverse
collection of articles helps to move us down the path toward a better understanding of the
causal power of emotions and the emotional dynamics of collective political action.