Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2004). Emotional dimensions of social movements.

The
Blackwell companion to social movements, 413-432.

Emotions are a part of all social action, yet they have been given little or no place in most social-
scientific theories. They have been considered too personal, too idiosyncratic, too inchoate, or
too irrational to be modeled or measured properly. This neglect has characterized the study of
social movements since the 1970s. In the structural and organizational paradigm that has
dominated research, emotions have been dismissed as unimportant, epiphenomenal, or
invariable, providing little explanatory power. Even cultural analysts of movements have largely
ignored emotions. Since the 1990s, however, the silence has been broken by a rising chorus of
researchers describing emotions in protest, social movements, and political conflict (Taylor
1995; Groves 1997; Ferna

Emotions have been inadequately studied for several reasons.: Second, as the following section
argues, a generation of researchers, eager to establish the rationality of participants as a way of
rejecting earlier crowd theories, associated strong emotions with irrational behavior (just as their
predecessors had). They took a handful of sudden, reflex emotions as the exemplar of all
emotions. Most categories of emotion, however, do not especially encourage irrational acts, and
even reflex emotions do so only occasionally. More strategic errors arise from cognitive mistakes
or missing information, we suspect, than from emotions.

The field of collective behavior, under whose rubric social movements were studied until the
1960s, placed a central emphasis on emotions, especially those thought (not always correctly) to
characterize crowds or mobs. When gathered in large numbers, individuals were thought to
become impressionable, angry, and violent, easily led by demagogues to regress, doing things
that they would normally not consider or which were against their long-run self-interests.
Rationality and emotionality were sharply contrasted, with the former attributed to politics
through normal channels and the latter to extra-institutional activity. Some authors saw certain
kinds of individuals as particularly susceptible to emotionality, including those with a need to
belong (Hoffer 1951) or with other problems of personal identity (Klapp 1969). Others at least
blamed certain social structures for making people vulnerable to the emotional appeals of
demagogues (Kornhauser 1959; Smelser 1962). Campus unrest in the 1960s further convinced
many scholars that protestors were immature and unduly emotional, perhaps as a result of
unresolved Oedipal issues (Smelser 1968). The putative contrast between emotion and rationality
continues to haunt the social sciences (Massey 2002).

The generation of scholars who came of age in the 1960s were more sympathetic to the social
movements they saw around them, viewing them as a fully rational type of politics by other
means. In order to demonstrate that these mobilizations were rational, however, scholars began
to deny – or simply ignore – that participants were emotional, thereby accepting the contrast laid
down by the earlier crowd theorists whose work they otherwise rejected. The frustration that led
protestors away from institutional channels and into more radical ones reflected a reasoned
judgment of what would work rather than an emotional process (Kitschelt 1986). Issues of
motivation and grievance formation disappeared from the agenda in resourcemobilization
research, in part because they were viewed as ubiquitous and constant rather than varying
(Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McCarthy and Zald 1977). 
As this structural paradigm evolved into political process theory, incorporating greater attention
to the impact of states and elites on social movements, emotions remained conspicuously absent.
McAdam’s (1982) concept of cognitive liberation, meant to capture the subjective dynamics of
participation, was presented and interpreted as an instrumental calculation of the odds of
repression and the costs of action (also Klandermans 1984). Strategic rationality, which also
dominated game theory, seemed to preclude strong (or even weak) emotions. Without admitting
it, political process theorists had at the heart of their models the coolly calculating actors of
rational choice theory.

Dissatisfaction with the narrow rationalism of political process theory encouraged attention to
the cultural aspects of social movements beginning in the late 1980s. However, the framing
processes through which recruiters appealed to potential recruits (Snow et al. 1986) were seen as
almost entirely cognitive by researchers who used the concept (Benford 1997). One exception
was Gamson et al.’s (1982) injustice frame, in which righteous anger was central. In experiments
that exposed ordinary people to transgressions by authority figures, the authors found that
suspicion, anger, and other emotions often arose even before blame was allocated through more
cognitive processes. Yet this insight was not taken up by other students of framing. The concept
of collective identity, for its part, became popular in part because it promised to get at the
passions behind the culture, but it too was often defined as a cognitive issue of boundary
formation with little attention to the strong emotions that protected those boundaries (with the
work of Melucci [1995]) an exception). Nor have discourse approaches, with roots in structural
literary theory, readily integrated emotions into their research.

Nonetheless, the cultural turn in the social sciences opened the way to incorporating emotions
into our explanations of social movements, as much of the work that organizers and leaders do to
animate movements involves emotion work. Organizers reinforce group loyalties (Hirsch 1986,
1990), inspire pride (Gould 2001), and calm fears (Goodwin and Pfaff 2001), among other
activities that we will examine below. Once we see emotions as, for the most part, cultural
accomplishments rather than automatic physiological responses, we can treat them as normal
variables or mechanisms in our models of social movements. (For a more detailed history of how
social-movement scholars have treated emotions, see Goodwin et al. 2000.)

We have suggested in this chapter that various types of emotions that matter for movements can
be analyzed with the same theoretical tools that have been used by scholars to understand
cognitive beliefs and moral visions. 

Bringing emotions back in will not only result in thicker descriptions of social movements and a
better understanding of their microfoundations. Because emotion, like culture generally, is a
dimension of all social action, attending to emotions will illuminate more clearly all of the key
issues that have exercised scholars of movements: Why do people join or support movements?
Why do movements occur when they do? Why and how are movements organized the way they
are? Why do some people remain in movements, while others drop out? What strategies and
tactics do movements employ? What ends do movements attempt to realize? Why do movements
decline? After years of neglect, the study of emotions is experiencing a resurgence among social
movement scholars. It should become a routine aspect of movement analysis.