Political Appeals to Narrow and Broad Groups: Biko for Blacks, Woolf for Women, Mannheim for Mobilizations…

A political campaign tends to succeed if the spectacle of struggle mobilizes previously uninvolved people to support the movement’s cause (Schattschneider 1960). Mobilizations for racial justice (Biko 1978, Douglass 1852, Du Bois 1903, Fanon 1961), for women’s rights (Wollstonecraft 1792, Woolf 1938, Waring 1988), for the poor (Piven and Cloward 1979, Bhave 1955, Fei 1971) or other causes simultaneously make particular appeals to coerced groups and general appeals to broader audiences. Strategies of inclusivist movements (Alinsky 1971, Tarrow 2011) resemble those of exclusivist or nationalist campaigns (Xi 2017), even if their goals are diametrically different. Twenty-first century politics are increasingly dominated by rising economic inequalities (Piketty 2014) and by the strength of unresponsive bureaucracies (Weber 1919), in both rich and poor countries (Bermeo 2016, Rodan 2018). Karl Mannheim (1936) generalizes parallels among mobilization strategies, distinguishes ways in which they are based on either existential choices or evidenced interests, and stresses the role of activism for increasing knowledge in social science.