Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America
Hahrie Han, Liz McKenna & Michelle Oyakawa
216 pages, University of Chicago Press, 2021
How do leaders translate collective action into political power—or not? How do they build a constituency of people that stands behind them, and then wield the power of that constituency in political negotiations? These two questions are at the heart of our book, Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First Century America, which helps develop the science of social change by looking systematically at outlying cases of successful social change efforts in the US. Through the research, we identify the characteristics that social movement organizations building power on behalf of Black and brown communities share.
Most previous research—and, relatedly, common assumptions in the public debate—assumes that the central challenge of collective action is to generate numbers. The more people a leader has standing behind him and his cause, the more powerful he will be, the conventional wisdom holds. Yet a community that “stands behind” a leader does not just vote, rally, or march once. The following excerpt is from a chapter in which we probe the meaning of “stand behind” by developing alternative measures for understanding whether the movement organizations in our study were able to more durably shift power.
Our approach expands on previous work that conceives of power as more than just winning elections or passing policies; it is also about getting a seat at the decision-making table, shaping the terms of the debate, and impacting the underlying narratives that determine the way people interpret and understand political issues. By treating power as interactional and dynamic (as opposed to a static trait) and operative at multiple levels, we demonstrate additional pathways through which collective action can become powerful.—Hahrie Han, Liz McKenna & Michelle Oyakawa
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In 1902, state delegates gathered for the Virginia Constitutional Convention and proclaimed their intent to suppress the black vote. Representative R.L Gordon put it bluntly: “I told the people of my county before they sent me here that I intended…to disenfranchise every [black person] that I could disenfranchise…and as few white people as possible” (Ford 2016). The delegates ratified a constitution that permanently disenfranchised Virginians with felony convictions. Because the carceral state has always disproportionately targeted African Americans, stripping former offenders of the right to vote was and is one of many tools used to disenfranchise black communities in Virginia and, indeed, across the United States. In 2014, advocates for criminal justice reform estimated that 6.1 million Americans were disenfranchised by such laws, including nearly one in five black residents of Virginia, the birthplace of American slavery (The Sentencing Project 2016).
In August 2016, more than a century after the 1902 convention, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe stood outside the same capitol building where the state’s constitution had been ratified. McAuliffe declared that he had individually restored the rights of more than 13,000 formerly incarcerated Virginians, over half the number of people whose rights had been restored over a 76-year period. As he made the announcement, he stood in front of—but seemed overshadowed by—the civil rights memorial behind him. “It seemed like reaching for the moon,” read the granite inscription above McAuliffe, a quote from legendary civil rights organizer Barbara Johns, whose bronze statue was cast in a defiant stance. Virginia’s rights restoration effort was part of the largest voter registration drive in state history. By 2018, the McAuliffe Administration had helped restore the franchise to 172,000 returning citizens. In an interview, the data director of Virginia’s Civic Engagement table, called attention to the “unprecedented [number] of registrations” that resulted from the rights restoration campaign, “both in raw numbers and percentage-wise,” he continued, “outside of, like, women getting the right to vote when suddenly you doubled your eligible population,” he said.
By most accounts, New Virginia Majority (NVM) and its co-executive director, Tram Nguyen, were two of the key forces behind the rights restoration campaign. Much of NVM’s clout came through its electoral work. The organization successfully filed 148,025 voter registration cards in the 2016 electoral cycle, 1,524 of which were collected by one fifty-four-year-old NVM organizer. Of the people this organizer registered, about 800 were formerly incarcerated citizens. “As an ex-felon, myself, I couldn’t vote and I didn’t feel—as a citizen I didn’t feel whole,” he said. “I was paying taxes. I had to follow laws, and I had no say in what these laws were.” One man he had helped register had been convicted of a felony in the 1950s for stealing a chicken. “What they have done with mass incarceration, and by putting a felony on us [black men] every chance they got, is that they have froze us out of most of the world,” the NVM organizer said. In 2016, he voted for the first time in his life.
In this case, as in our other cases, we argue that NVM was able to secure a visible victory—rights restoration for formerly incarcerated citizens—in a way that not only secured a policy win but also shifted the underlying power dynamics in Virginia. It did so by putting the organization and its leaders into relationship with power players, including the state’s current and former governors. How do we make such shifts in power visible?
Measuring the Outcomes of Collective Action
Methods for assessing power in both academic scholarship and the world of practice range broadly. At one level, those interested in assessing power disagree about what should actually be measured. In other words, how should we conceptualize the outcomes of collective action? What does it mean for collective action to be successful?
Past efforts to assess social movement outcomes include (but are not limited to): examining the visible policy gains or electoral campaigns an organization or movement can win (Uba 2009; Amenta, et al. 2010; Andrews 2004); assessing the extent to which movements and organizations can influence agendas or dominant narratives (Polletta and Ho 2006); cataloguing organizations’ ability to develop capacities or resources (such as large numbers of people) known to make long-term policy wins more likely (McCarthy and Zald 2001); or tracing how they shift public opinion or media content (Ferree, et al. 2002; Ferree 2003; Gottlieb 2015). These outcomes are often challenging to obtain (let alone demonstrate), and past scholarship has shown that social movements only rarely have direct effects on policy (Olzak and Ryo 2007; Giugni 1998; Burstein and Freudenburg 1978; Amenta, et al. 2005).
Of course, movements do more than just win concrete policy and electoral victories. They can also influence broader cultural attitudes. For example, one undocumented leader in Arizona told us:
I had a Lyft driver not long ago, and he came to drop me off and he's like, ‘Hey, your street isn't that lit up.’ And he was from like, I don't know, some other state, he had just moved here. And I was like, ‘Well it seems fine to me—what are you talking about?’ And so that's kind of like an example of like, where it seems so normal to me because I grew up and I lived in those kinds of neighborhoods my whole life. But to someone from the outside they're like, ‘This is not normal, why don't you have more light on your streets?’ And then you wonder [about other things:] the crime rate and potholes or [why it] flood[s] when it rains. Our neighborhood streets are flooded and that's not going to happen in another place like Scottsdale. Their streets are not flooded there when it rains.So, systems are in place to just maintain or, keep sorting the communities just to the side. You have the war on drugs that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline, and then you blame the kids that are in school for behaving badly…that's been playing since the 70s, the late 60s, and it all goes back to like, what was there before? With immigration, the system [is] broken but also…is it really broken? It [didn’t] stop working the way that it's supposed to, with private prisons and the privatization of the whole process. Who's really benefiting from that? …And then you get into it and you realize, ‘Man, it is working exactly the way that it was meant to be all along instead of actually solving a problem.”
This leader was describing a denaturalization of her worldview, a recasting of what she believed was possible. The transformation she describes in her understanding of the world, repeated throughout a constituency and diffused into the broader public through social networks, cultural narratives, and sometimes art (Isaac 2008), is a crucial part of the power shift that can emerge from collective action. These shifts are very difficult to measure, but that difficulty does not make them any less significant.
New Virginia Majority
In studying the work of the New Virginia Majority, we wanted to understand how the organization was able to position itself in the political arena relative to other organizations in the state. As mentioned above, NVM is co-led by Jon and Tram. Jon is a cerebral organizing nerd who likes to read books about grassroots politics. Tram, by contrast, is an operative. She leads NVM’s lobbying efforts in state government and commands attention in a room that belies her short stature. When we shadowed her in the state legislature, a colorful shawl adorned her shoulders as she maneuvered deftly through the halls, balancing multiple requests for attention from legislators seeking her help.
In an interview, Nancy Rodrigues, a former cabinet official in the McAuliffe administration, said something we found striking: “I know that there are some people in the legislature right now who if Tram calls them up and says, ‘I need you to carry this bill,’ they probably wouldn’t even ask what the bill is. They would just carry it because they have that kind of respect [for NVM].” This statement was similar to many others made by interviewees in Virginia state government and by NVM’s ally organizations. How systematic were these sentiments, however?
Curious to corroborate interview data that spoke to NVM’s influence in the statehouse—and to better understand whether and how NVM wields power with respect to its Democratic targets—we designed a network survey, which we sent to all forty-nine Democrats serving in the Virginia’s 2018 General Assembly. We received twenty completed surveys for a 40 percent response rate. Our cover letter to the delegates did not identify NVM as our research object in order to avoid response bias that might favor certain responses over others. Instead, we requested delegates’ participation “in a research project examining how grassroots and advocacy organizations interact with elected officials and exercise influence on behalf of their constituencies.”
The first set of questions asked delegates to characterize the nature of their relationship with each of thirty-nine grassroots and advocacy organizations active in Virginia along five dimensions: had they heard of them, met with or exchanged information with them, received electoral support from them, strategized together directly or in coalition, or experienced any form of opposition from them. We chose the organizations listed on the survey based on responses from informants from multiple viewpoints (elected officials, progressive advocates in Virginia, NVM organizers) who identified influential grassroots organizations in the state.
As we expected, delegates indicated that they had “heard of” nearly all of the organizations in the survey. On these lower-barrier measures, we did not see much differentiation between the groups—delegates were as likely to have heard of New Virginia Majority as they were to have heard of groups with greater national name recognition, such as Planned Parenthood or Indivisible. We were more interested in the more intensive measures of movement-target interactions, such as the extent to which delegates indicated “strategizing with” a particular organization. Who were the organizations, in other words, with whom Virginia state delegates were strategizing about passing policy? Our analysis of the data showed NVM at the center of the network graph, along with other delegates.
These findings indicate that NVM was punching above its weight. Using a numerical measure called an eigenvalue, which is a measure of a node’s relative influence in a network (Bonacich 2007), we found that NVM had the fifth-highest score compared to all other organizations. All four of the groups that had higher scores than NVM on this measure were national groups with state affiliates: the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, and Virginia’s teacher’s union, a state affiliate of the National Education Association. By way of comparison, NVM was only ten years old, while the teacher’s union was founded in 1863 and represents more than 50,000 teachers throughout the Commonwealth. Three delegates reported that they only strategized with NVM and one or two other organizations listed in the survey.
NVM not only carries weight in the statehouse equivalent to these national groups, it also plays a brokerage role in the network. Our survey data show which of our respondents help link, or create bridges between, delegates and organizations that do not otherwise share direct connections. On this centrality score, called “betweenness” because it measures the shortest path between nodes, NVM ranked higher than any organization in the survey, a finding reflected in the size of its node, as shown in Figure 1. The only two others in the survey with a higher betweenness score were elected delegates, not organizations (represented by the two larger grey nodes).
Figure 1: Brokerage Network of Virginia House Delegates and Movement Organizations on the Measure: “Strategized Together”
From this data, we can see that NVM was on par with the largest national groups and long-serving elected officials in terms of the role they played in shaping strategy on progressive policy issues in Virginia. NVM plays a particularly important role in creating bridges and brokering the flow of information and strategy between elected officials and organizations in the state. In addition to substantiating the qualitative findings from our interviews, the network survey made visible the degree and kind of influence that NVM wields among Democratic members of the Virginia House of Representatives. A decade before McAuliffe signed the executive order to restore voting rights, NVM did not exist. According to statehouse delegates who responded to our survey, NVM is now among the most influential grassroots organizations in Virginia.
Figure 1 is based on a survey of Democratic members of the Virginia State Assembly collected in 2018 that asked about the organizations with whom they strategized. In this figure, nodes are weighted based on their betweenness centrality score, described in text.
This and other power outcomes we document in this chapter provide insight on the different ways scholarship can make the outcomes of collective action more visible and, thus, a more focused object of study. There is good reason for scholars to regard studies of one, visible political outcome—such as winning a vote, passing a ballot initiative, or securing an executive order—as an inadequate measure of movement success. Many other factors, such as McAullife’s myriad motivations for restoring the voting rights of 200,000 Virginians, contributed to each of those victories. Without carefully considering those factors, scholars can overplay our hands, making implicit suggestions that overstate the power or influence of collective action. While we acknowledge the fragility of these power shifts, this chapter also suggests that understanding movement influence only through the lens of visible wins or losses understates the level and type of change for which a movement may be responsible.