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.
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 their actions within networks. We propose a different theoretical paradigm for understanding network formation, change, and even dissolution that is sensitive to the meanings created in the interactions that form and maintain social networks.
One of the objectives of this project is to understand one of the hallmarks of European modernity: the transformations through which ordinary people were able to become active political agents in a long-term process of democratization of popular politics. In other words, our project seeks to get at the core of European democratic heritage. This focus has been brought to unexpected prominence by two intertwined processes that came to light after the project started: an erosion of democracy and democratic norms globally and the misuse of mass participation for the achievement of anti-democratic goals. Our research has unexpected relevance to these processes. Overall, there was until recently among analysts and writers a general complacency about the inevitable ascendance of liberal democracy, especially after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Now we are in a situation where Russian leadership and its allies in Europe and beyond are actively undermining the ideals of liberal democracy. While our research is not explicitly political or normative, one implication of the histories of popular political participation we have uncovered is the fact that previously disenfranchised groups of people and their representative (religious minorities, middle classes barred from direct participation in parliamentary politics, women, champions of the liberation of enslaved individuals) engaged in long, hard yet ultimately successful battles in order to not just represent their interests but also, in the process, change of the rules of the political games so that they can express their views in the political arena. With the surge of anti-democracy and demagogic populism, these achievements are threatened. We trust that our research will contribute to to increase public awareness of an European heritage that needs to be nurtured and salvaged.
