Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 28 No.

1 March 2015
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12063

Editorial Introduction
Activism, Mobilisation and
Political Engagement:
Comparative Historical Perspectives
GARY RIVETT*
Abstract This editorial introduction discusses and explains the broader research
context underpinning the essays, namely the Leverhulme Trust-funded Research
Network, The Comparative History of Political Engagement in Western and African
Societies. It provides a brief overview of the intellectual background to the networks
agenda, and, in particular, argues that comparative sociological approaches to the
study of political engagement have left it inadequately historicized. The introduction
then discusses the general theme of Activism, mobilization and Political Engagement, which all contributors to the international conference were asked to consider.
It argues that these essays, when taken together, offer new comparative historical
perspectives for investigations into the history of political engagement, providing
highly suggestive points of departures for future research.

*****
This special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology contains
essays first delivered as papers at a two-day international workshop at the University of Sheffield in June 2011. The workshop
focused on the theme of Activism, Mobilisation and Political
Engagement, and was the first of three such workshops, forming
part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded International Research
Network, titled The Comparative History of Political Engagement in
Western and African Societies, c.1500c.2000.1 Eighteen papers
were presented by scholars from Britain, France, United States of
America and South Africa. Six of those presentations are included
here, representing the diversity of the contributions, ranging in
historical period, geographical region, and topic. A specially commissioned essay draws out the major themes of all six essays,
making connections to the broader problematic of the research
network.2 This introduction discusses the general aims of the
network, providing an overview of its intellectual agenda, before
outlining the specific theme that framed the workshop and served
to guide and unify the individual papers.
* Dr Gary Rivett is Lecturer in Early Modern History at York St John
University and may be contacted at g.rivett@yorksj.ac.uk

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Gary Rivett

Democratic Deficit?: Utopianism and Jeremiads

In 2001, in the UK, the Hansard Society commissioned a pamphlet
on e-democracy titled Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement
in Policy Deliberation, which claimed that new relationships
between citizens and institutions of governance must emerge if a
crisis of democratic legitimacy and accountability is to be averted.3
For the authors, Stephen Colman and John Gtze, the reason was
a pervasive contemporary estrangement between representatives
and those they represent, manifested in almost every western
country by falling voter turnout; lower levels of public participation
in civic life; public cynicism towards political institutions and
parties; and a collapse in once-strong political loyalties and attachments. For Colman and Gtze the internet, as an important information and communication technology and networking tool, would
make it easier for people to engage in political processes, thereby
improving links between elected officials and their constituents.
Indeed, beneath all these positions rests an assumption and hope
that digital democracy can re-engage a politically disenchanted
electorate in the democratic process.
Over a decade later, the issue remains open. On 15 January
2013, the UKs Guardian newspaper asked: Avaaz: can online
campaigning reinvent politics?4 Prompted by the organisations
attempt to identify from its then 17 million-strong membership
an agenda for the year ahead, the question addressed a critical
issue surrounding the nature of twenty-first-century democracies:
can the Internet, and online activist organisations like Avaaz,
connect people with politics, inform governmental decisionmaking, assert policy preferences, and influence how policy is
confronted, constructed and implemented? Avaaz, like similar
online activist organisations, uses petitions to raise and discuss
issues chosen by its members for the purposes of awareness promotion and launch challenges to specific policy plans. Whilst
advocates claim online-petitioning represents a dynamic and
direct approach to political participation, sceptics question how
far it constitutes a real intervention and whether it marks a significant shift in how politics is practiced, or merely indicates how
specific populist issues can attract attention at particular times,
with few enduring consequences. As one critic noted several years
ago, if people are not interested in politics in toto, and do not
want to participate, then no amount of nudging towards
e-democracy will encourage them to do so.5 Conversely, advocates
pursue a vision of the Internet that allows for the creation of
online, decentralised and non-hierarchical public forums (for
example, social media websites) where citizens can congregate,
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Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement

connect and develop networks that offer opportunities to develop

political movements. Political parties, governments and policy
think tanks have not ignored the possibilities that online campaigning and social media pose for transforming traditional democratic structures and processes. On the contrary, the UK, US,
German and Australian governments, for example, have engaged
with the potential of the Internet, instituting extensive
e-petitioning programmes. Some commentators have suggested
that new communications technologies could strengthen current
models of representative democracy, thereby enriching the democratic process.6
Colman and Gtzes critique of late-twentieth-century political
engagement is indebted to Robert Putnams highly influential
Bowling Alone.7 Putnam considered the extent to which levels of
civic engagement in America had declined across the latter half of
the twentieth century. He employed the concept of social capital
to explore how far connections and reciprocity between people had
weakened, and assessed whether participation in community
organisations and political life had declined accordingly. At a
national and local level there was, Putnam observed, a decline in
the involvement of people in conventional democratic practices:
petitioning, campaigning, letter-writing, running for office, and
membership of political clubs. Bowling Alone identified a direct, if
multiple set of links between the decline in social capital and civic
engagement, and subsequent participation in politics. Whether his
findings can be expanded to account for any perceived or actual
decline in political participation in other democracies is difficult to
discern. Nonetheless, as Colman and Gtze demonstrate, a similar
set of observations about the health of democracies, and the associated fears it conjures for democratic legitimacy and accountability, exist elsewhere: it is undoubtedly the case that most developed
democracies are experiencing a collapse of confidence in traditional
models of democratic governance.8
Contemporary discussions surrounding the potential of
e-democracy to increase levels of political engagement illustrate the
significance of the general themes that animate this special issue.
In so-called western states, which are held up as exemplars of
modern democracy, there is an apparent crisis in the health of
political society and the legitimacy of governments. Meanwhile, in
the so-called developing world, these models or variations on
them are deemed to have failed when they have not succeeded in
maintaining acceptable democratic standards as ordained by
external, usually Western states. At the core of these problems is a
concern about the vibrancy of meaningful political engagement in
states with democratic constitutions.
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Gary Rivett

Political Engagement and Comparative Perspectives

Political engagement, on these terms, is assumed to be synonymous with the existence of democratic constitutions, and its institutions and practices. The Network explicitly challenges this
assumption. Political engagement has not always been coterminous with the presence of democratically representative institutions. Early America, and Early Modern England and France all
had vibrant, deeply embedded sets of political engagement practices that pre-date processes of democratisation. It is therefore
instructive to think about modern democracy as merely one historically particular set of political and ideological arrangements in
which specific processes of political engagement exist.
The focus on political engagement as our central analytical
category broadens out the contexts and practices that are available
for study and comparison. The examples surrounding e-democracy
cited above discussed political engagement in normative democratic terms: electoral campaigning, the ballot box, petitioning and
so on. Moreover, these discussions are part of a wider debate
designed to increase the health of democracies. We have no agenda
to question the validity of democratic constitutions as viable
systems of political governance. Nonetheless, we are sceptical
about the extent to which finding and assessing the nature and
strength of political engagement across time and space can only be
understood within this framework. Furthermore, scholarly analyses of democratisation tend to circumscribe and legitimise a narrow
range of political activities, which may not account for the abundance of innovative politically-engaged practices that citizens
create and perform some of which may not be produced within
formal democratic constitutions.9 The Network (and the authors
below) therefore employs an expansive conception of political
engagement. Examining political engagement in terms of longer
historical trajectories may provide new insights into the emergence
of modern democracies, and the societies and cultures from which
they developed and continue to sustain them. For the Network it
means asking: what are the historical conditions and processes
that foster political engagement?
Preferring political engagement to democracy as our principal
category of analysis benefits our comparative agenda. Nominally,
our six case study areas Britain, France, the USA, South Africa,
Zimbabwe and Botswana have particular experiences with
modern democratic constitutions. The so-called western states are
usually considered central to our understanding of how modern,
advanced democracies have developed, with the paths to, and the
subsequent shape of, their democratic models identified as exem 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement

plars for so-called developing countries to follow. Ostensibly,

Britain, France, and the USA are considered stable democracies,
albeit with moribund or low levels of political engagement. African
societies are, on the other hand, purportedly still in the early stages
of democratic development, with differing degrees of success. Zimbabwean democracy is often understood to have failed, whilst
Botswana is its antithesis, with the apparent durability of democratic institutions assured. The political and historical importance
of South Africa to the region ensures that its experiments with
democracy are crucial to the advancement of the entire subcontinent. Statements of this kind are normative and generalising,
founded on the analytical category of democracy.
Anchoring our comparative agenda to the concept of political
engagement offers possibilities for trans-historical comparisons
that are less constrained by narratives of modernisation and
democratisation common in political and social science studies.
Within a particularly influential strand of comparative historical
analysis in the social sciences is an emphasis on identifying the
origins of modern nation states and the processes explaining the
emergence of different political systems.10 Macroscopic analyses of
large scale political and social shifts in the history of states are
frequently preoccupied with discerning patterns and forming
general theories of change that explain pre-determined substantially important outcomes.11 Despite the continued and increasing
sensitivity to questions of causal analysis, a detailed attention to
historical sequences and unfolding processes overtime, and an
engagement in systematic and contextualised comparisons, comparative historical analysis in this tradition remains constrained by
essentially teleological theories of historical change.12 Amongst
these could be included historical institutionalism, pathdependency theory and rational choice theory.13
Whilst these studies deal with important questions, the narrowness of the research agenda to, in Theda Skopols formulation,
develop, test, and refine explanatory hypotheses about events or
structures integral to macro-units such as nation states can result
in reductive and determinist approaches towards specific historical
contexts.14 Indeed, it begs the question: how can we identify the
processes and practice of politics that do not result in substantially important outcomes, but nonetheless contribute to a broader
culture of political engagement? Of course, Skocpols and others
aims and questions are quite different from our own. However, they
point to a continued tendency in the fields of Political Science,
Comparative Sociology, Developmental Studies and International
Relations to overlook the finer textures of local historical contexts
and longer-term trajectories.
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Gary Rivett

A further advantage to our focus upon political engagement is

the degree of parity it affords in historical comparisons between
different Western states, and between these so-called advanced
states and developing ones, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The
Network undertakes a comparative approach that illustrates a
further rejection of metanarratives surrounding modernisation and
democratisation with their tendency to view the success or otherwise of African democracies in unfavourable lights. In Political
Science and Developmental Studies literature, the experiences and
practices of democracy in African societies are frequently assessed
in negative terms when compared with Western democracies. Such
analyses overlook important, historically- and culturally-specific
forms of political engagement that, in fact, indicate highly sophisticated democratic cultures. We therefore argue that comparisons
between different practices of political engagement across all our
case studies can be successfully achieved when value-laden
notions of democracy cease to be our central analytical category.
The Networks approach to comparative history facilitates this
aim, and marks a departure from conventional methods. Whilst
social scientists and historians may differ in their approach to
comparative work, their intentions and aims are the same: to seek
the origins, causes and explanations for particular outcomes.15
Case study societies are subsequently chosen with an eye on potential analogies, parallels or points of equivalence that can be drawn
between the areas under study, with the aim of illuminating similarities or differences, or raising new questions that do not offer
themselves in isolated, or parochial studies. Critically, identifying
variables and criteria for comparison between cases drawn from
preordained outcome can lead to the entrenchment of teleological
assumptions into the analysis, in spite of careful rationales and
explanations for specific choices.16 Studies of democratization are
particularly susceptible to this framing, predicated, as they tend to
be, upon Western models of democracy. Questions that work from
such premises may pay insufficient attention to specific historical
experiences.
Framing our comparison with a question about practice and
process political engagement rather than a narrative democratization leading to a particular democratic outcome, may reveal
similarities and differences between countries that have been overlooked. Our approach makes a virtue of, and appreciates, radical
differences between our case study societies: in time and space, in
their economies, social stratification, religious beliefs, political
arrangements, and conceptions of gender.17 To be sure, each of the
articles below is a snapshot of vastly different societies taken at
particular historical moments. Our aim is partly to assess how we
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Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement

can understand a society through a particular practice that can be

shown to have existed in all case study areas, and which was
frequently detached from conceptions of democracy, as we now
understand it. In turn, we can investigate the cultural and other
factors that underpin, or undermine, political engagement without
relying upon conventional variables for studying democracy. The
results may depict incoherence between the cases and engender
difficulties telling a unifying story that is mutually illuminating for
every case. That is to be expected when the lens of a dominant and
delimiting metanarrative is removed as the central analytical determinant. Indeed, we may discover that older stories of democracy,
which drew connections between different democratic experiences,
concealed more than they revealed.
By challenging the presumption that democracy or, at least, the
process of its pursuit must exist for political engagement to occur,
we aim to reveal and understand the history of political practices
that are highly context-specific. Furthermore, this emphasis produces insights into forgotten, or suppressed, forms of political
engagements that had significance for historical subjects but are
missing from metanarratives of democratisation. The virtue of our
approach is aptly described by the Africanist Frederick Cooper,
who, in another, though related context, stated that,
[W]hat gets lost in narrating history as the triumph of freedom followed by failure to
use that freedom is a sense of process. If we can, from our present-day vantage
point, put ourselves in the position of different historical actors . . . we see moments
of divergent possibilities, or different configurations of power, that open up and shut
down. Just how wide were those possibilities? And how much did actions taken at
any one of many conjunctures narrow trajectories and alternatives? In thinking
about such questions, we can never distance ourselves entirely from our present,
but we can imperfectly look at different people in their different presents imagining
their futures.18

The focus of the network is to lay the groundwork for a new

comparative agenda. It aims to problematise how we historicise
societies and their political arrangements. The outcomes may not
be known but comparisons of the nature we propose can produce
insightful points of departures for reflecting upon the relationship
between political engagement and democratic constitutions in
general.
Activism and Mobilisation
The Network explores the central problematic through three main
themes that, whilst explored through localised case studies,
encourage more general discussions. Our first theme and that of
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Gary Rivett

this issue Activism, mobilisation and political engagement asks:

under what historical conditions has active political engagement
been fostered in the countries under study, and what role did
formal political institutions play at those moments? What relationship does active political engagement of this kind bear to formal
constitutional arrangements?
From early modern France and Britain to post-revolutionary
France, and from nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA, to
twentieth- and twenty-first century sub-Saharan Africa, each of the
following essays identify specific forms of activism and modes of
mobilisation. Contributors examine how activists mobilised, or
were mobilised at the level of local, communal political engagement to confront national and, in one case, colonial and postcolonial, political institutions that had failed to adequately govern
in ways that aligned with their interests. To do so, activists often
drew upon shared political or religious values, languages or frames
to identify enemies or promote their calls for reform. The precise
nature of these engagements differed. However, as Michael
Braddicks closing reflections suggest, they all demonstrate an
abiding recourse to local, non-institutional forms of selfgovernment or self-organisation to mobilise for action on collective
problems, whether formal democratic constitutions exist or not.
Taken together, the articles that follow are not to be viewed as a
comprehensive attempt to chart a coherent historical trajectory of
different practices of political engagement. They are individual, and
in most instances, highly particular case studies. Like the larger
Network from which they emerge, none of the articles seek to identify
a general theory of political engagement. Nor is there any attempt to
develop new metanarratives that will replace those of modernisation
or democratisation. Instead, they are highly instructive interventions that complicate our understanding of what should be considered political engagement and how it might be studied. The
individual attention to specific historical experiences of politics,
within a comparative framework, offers a robust case for proble
matizing totalising and teleological macro-social and -political
analyses of democratisation. Furthermore, and finally, they also
demonstrate an acute sense of the fecund inventiveness of activists
engaged in political struggles, and an important appreciation of how
people experienced politics and power across time and space.

Notes
1
The Research Network is based in the Centre for the Study of Democratic Culture at the University of Sheffield, UK. Alongside the Principal
Investigator, Michael Braddick, the network has partners at the Universit

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Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement

du Maine, Le Mans, France (Laurent Bourquin and Cdric Michon), and at

the University of Pretoria, South Africa (Alois Mlambo). Subsequent events
took place in Le Mans (September 2012) and examined Writing, Communication and Political Engagement, whilst a final event held in Pretoria
(September 2013), focused upon Equality, Justice and Political Engagement. The Networks website, where details of each event are archived, can
be visited here: http://www.historyofpoliticalengagement.dept.shef.ac.uk.
2
Several of the other papers will be published elsewhere, with a selection included in a planned end-of-network collection, tentatively titled
The Comparative History of Political Engagement in Western and African
Societies.
3
Stephen Coleman and John Gtze, Bowling Together: Online Public
Engagement in Policy Deliberation (London, 2001), 4. For a list of similar,
turn-of-the-century efforts to define the potential of e-democracy, see the
titles named on p. 7 of the report.
4
James Ball, Avaaz: Can online campaigning reinvent politics?,
Guardian, 15 January 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/
jan/15/avaaz-online-campaigning-reinvent-politics?
[accessed
15
January 2013].
5
James Crabtree, Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracy
originally published on 12 June 2007 at http://www.opendemocracy.net/
debates/article-8-85-1025.jsp. Republished in Tony Curzon Price (ed.),
Open Web, Open Society?: Liberty, Democracy and the Net (London, 2010),
146153.
6
For an early commentary on this possibility see: Peter Kollock and
Marc A. Smith, Communities in Cyberspace, in Peter Kollock and Marc A.
Smith (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace (New York, 1999), 325.
7
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000). It should be noted that Putnams arguments and claims are far more subtle and considered than represented by
Coleman and Gtze. See especially chapter 9 and his discussion of important countercurrents.
8
Coleman and Gtze, Bowling Together, 4.
9
For a recent discussion of formal and informal, highly specific context
see Steve Connelly, Constructing Legitimacy in the New Community Governance, in S. Griggs, A. Norval and H. Wagenaar (eds.) Decentred Governance: Democracy, Conflict and Participation (Cambridge, forthcoming
2014). See also Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills, Insurgency and Spaces
of Active Citizenship: The story of the Western Cape anti-eviction campaign
in South Africa, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 25 (2000),
200217, for a helpful, if slightly schematic way of thinking through
this distinction is one between invited and invented spaces of citizen
participation.
10
Seminal works include, of course, Barrington Moore Jr.,
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966); Charles Tilly, The Vende: A
Sociological Analysis of the Counterrevolution of 1793 (New York, 1967);
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974);
idem., Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); Theda Skocpol
States and Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, and China (Cambridge, 1979). For a critique of these approaches see William Sewell Jr.,
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005),
81123.

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Gary Rivett

11
James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer, Comparative Historical
Analysis: Achievements and Agendas, in James Mahoney and Dietrich
Reuschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences
(Cambridge, 2003), 11.
12
Ibid., 1015.
13
For an overview see: Sven Steinmo, Historical Institutionalism, in
Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating (eds.), Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2008), 113138.
14
Skocpol, Social Revolutions, 36.
15
For perspectives on this point see Marc Bloch, Toward a Comparative
History of European Societies, in Fredric C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma
(eds.), Enterprise and Secular Change (Illnois, 1953), 494521; William H.
Sewell, Jr. Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History, History and
Theory, 6, 2 (1967), 208218. J. H. Elliot, History in the Making (New
Haven, 2012), 168196.
16
Elliott, History in the Making, 173.
17
This list of potential differences between comparative units is
informed by Sewells analysis of Skocpols work. See Sewell, Logics of
History, 96.
18
Frederick Cooper, Possibility and Constraint: African Independence
in Historical Perspective, Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 16796.

2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 28 No. 1 March 2015