Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TRANSPOP (The Transformation of Popular Politics in Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century)

Teaser

The project studies how ordinary people in Europe developed and adopted, in increasing number, the practices of political participation through civil society and social movement initiatives creating thus an important institutional component of modernity. Empirically, the...

Summary

The project studies how ordinary people in Europe developed and adopted, in increasing number, the practices of political participation through civil society and social movement initiatives creating thus an important institutional component of modernity. Empirically, the project aims to recover the neglected richness of civil society initiatives across Western Europe in the long 19th century. Theoretically, the project strives to develop a conceptually robust alternative to predominant class-based and single cause accounts of social change by taking into account, in the case of these movements, the inherently polyphonic heterogeneity of modernity and capture the inherently path-dependent and agent-specific causality of change.

The subject matter of the project contributes to the important task of rediscovering and elucidating the common European heritage of popular involvement in politics, of democratization, and of ordinary people taking their fate in their hands. To insist on this legacy of increasing and progressive popular empowerment has proven particularly timely against two challenges that arose after the project\'s inception: the concomitant rise of authoritarian politics and of new forms of demagogic and paradoxically anti-democratic populism. We want to present to academic and wider audiences the positive heritage of democratic civil society (with all its problems) and amplify its positive and resilient potential against increasing subversion of democratic norms and demagogic manipulation of reality.

The interrelated objectives of the project are:

(1) to create innovative data sets of public mobilization in the European long nineteenth century and offer them to the scholarly community, thus spurring further research on the topic,
(2) analyze the data sets created in order to uncover causal dynamics obscured by prevalent accounts,
(3) experiment with methodological innovations in the coding and analyzing the data, and,
(4) create a new theoretical framework for explaining the rise of popular politics

Work performed

The work performed thus far falls under five general areas: data collection and coding, analyses, conceptual advances, knowledge transfer and interdisciplinary collaboration, and publications. Although we have made progress in all of these areas, we have devoted most of our time during this first half of the action to data collection and coding. We have compiled and processed an extensive range of data that will serve as the stepping stone for the analyses and conceptual work we will prioritize in the later stages of the the research.

Data Collection and Coding
Significant progress has been made in developing and consolidating a number of original databases. We have collected and processed four types of data: network, practices, newspapers and temporal data. Network data refers to information about the relationships between actors involved in popular politics. Practices data captures how people went about engaging in politics. Our newspaper database contains materials printed in newspapers from various countries and periods. Finally, temporal data are timelines created from close reading of a variety of historical sources. These databases will allow us to study the social movements we are interested in through a variety of vantage points, from exploring their internal interactional dynamics to understanding the movements’ cultural underpinnings as well as their importance in informing later practices of political protest. Different kinds of data complement each other.

The databases that will be made available through the host institution’s (UC3M) library online repository (https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/). We are are working closely with the university’s library and information services to ensure open and sustained access to the databases that result from this project.

The databases are original insofar as the information they contain is derived from historical documents that have never been processed until now. We are working on the following databases:
A relational database containing the names of all the actors involved in abolitionist movements across the Atlantic world (UK, France, Spain, the US, Spain, the Netherlands)
A database of activities and practices within the central national organizations of the movement, extracted mostly from the minutes of these organizations.
A database of newspaper coverage of concepts related to Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in the 19th century. The challenge in coding and organizing this database is to be able to distinguish and code the various uses of the concept of “slavery” and their transformation in the period.
A database of petitioning events and political meetings in the UK and the territories of the Austrian empire, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The final of the databases is now in its initial conceptual state. We are working on setting the parameters of a database tracing the conceptual change of ideas of “mass” or “popular” political participation extracted from 19th century newspapers in the Habsburg empire, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Network Data
Abolitionist Societies
We completed a database on eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionist networks in Britain and France. It contains data on 150 activists, including information about religious affiliation, occupation, place of birth, relationship to parliament (for the British case), and state (for the French case). We are in the process of expanding the database to cover abolitionist movements in Spain as well. This data will allow us to make evidence-based arguments about the underlying social dynamics that influenced the movements’ development, from transnational advocacy ties to recruitment strategies.

Data on Practices
Internal Interactional World of Abolitionist Societies
We are currently developing a database that codes the practices contained in the meeting minutes of the British and French abolitionist societies and are in the process of compiling information on the Spani

Final results

\"Despite a substantial body of research, the rich history and legacy of popular politics in the European past remains unexplored. The field has been dominated by structural approaches that privilege class as the primary category of analysis and by a general fixation on the present of protest activities. Both of these approaches fail to meaningfully connect present day social movements to their historical roots. Further still, the field largely conceptualize popular political activities as national movements rather than acknowledging their transnational character.

Our project has brought forward the study of historical social movements by collecting new data allowing us to observe and analyze developments that have not been registered by existing approaches, thus creating richer and innovative perspectives in the study of social movements. Most notably, our data will help us elucidate the connections between activists and ideas transnationally, recovering the processes of interchange, transfer and diffusion between national contexts and, ultimately, recovering the history of inherently transnational activism.

We have developed a new methodology of semantic coding that facilitates the systematic study of practices. Practices, crucial to understand processes of popular political engagement, remain difficult to define and conceptualize. This is in part paradoxical because there has been a sustained interest in studying practices and culture as practical knowledge as opposed to as the assemblage of ideas in people’s heads. What we have done with the coding procedure is offer a way to extract from texts information and data on what people do (as opposed to what people think). Our procedure is superior to existing approaches (e.g., Tilly, Franzosi, and the “political claims” approach) because it tries to reconstruct carefully the entire interactional universe of practices by situating these practices in the social web created by relevant actors and interactants.

In addition, we try to uncover and verify the deeper meaning structure of these practices. Existing approaches (e.g., Tilly, Franzosi) are inherently formalistic and take the contemporaries\' designation of a practice (e.g., in newspaper reports) as the unit of analysis. In other words, they take just the surface syntactic structure (e.g., the verbs used) to denote the distinct units of meaning. We believe it is important to preserve the original language of documentary evidence and in this effort we implemented a deeper semantic decomposition of the surface structures of the language by coding the language used as representing a deeper analytical typology of practices. We develop, thus, a more robust and analytically grounded coding of the meaningful units of practice-as-culture.

Another contribution we have been working on is an emerging theoretical framework on popular politics and social movement that we have tentatively called \"\"agentic theory of advocacy networks.\"\" It presents progress in the fields of social movement studies and in the fields of network analysis.

Addressing social movement studies, it proposes a forceful re-conceptualization of the ontology of the social formations and corporate actors that enact popular politics. Our theoretical framework (1) posits a networked structure of connectedness as the fundamental ontological reality of such formations and (2) examines the interactional complexes through which such connectedness is created by actors.

Addressing network analysis, our theory describes and explains the processes of tie creation and maintenance instead of assuming social networks as ontological givens. This is an important contribution because theoretical conceptualizations of network formation and network change are far and few between. In fact, the only existing paradigm for tracing network change relies on mathematical manipulation of data that comes with a host of assumptions about the meaning individuals impart on th\"

Website & more info

More info: http://www.transpopproject.eu/.