Elite Strategies behind Popular Mobilization: Selecting, Opposing and Simplifying.

Drawing on insights from social psychological literature on identity formation and on social movement and contentious politics literature, this paper will look at elite strategies to achieve popular mobilization in polarized societies through perceptions of collective identity. Interactions involving communication are never as simple in the real world as they are posited to be in the theoretical world. Elite appeals for mobilization are not an exception. Strategies to mobilize a constituency, particularly through references to shared normative structures, should be expected to have varied effects empirically. However, in the way many analyses treat elite strategies to foster mobilization, these are quite often assumed to be effective: if messages are framed to resonate, elites will successfully mobilize their target population. The starting point of this paper is therefore to take into account that the social processes behind mobilization are more complicated than is often described. As a result, the argument developed is not as an overarching explanation of these tactics but focuses instead on some believed to be the more optimal ones. It is posited that if appeals are framed appropriately, there will be mobilization. In other words, the paper looks at what the effective mechanisms, or linkage rules, are to turn a population?s collective identity and cognitive background into appeals that can plausibly justify action, even violence, against another group and lead a constituency to a state of mind conducive to mobilization, or what could be called ?felt mobilization.?The framework focuses on three main strategies. The first is selecting. It involves activating collective forms of affiliation over individual ones, particularly political identities that suit political entrepreneurs? goals, and, in doing so, selecting elements from the group?s shared background that can construct a ?resonating? mobilization narrative. The second is opposing, or fostering antagonistic intergroup relations, both procedurally by collapsing the lines of inter-group competition so that a zero-sum environment is created and by developing binary schemas of categorization between groups. The final strategy is simplifying. Elites simplify interpretations of the situation and environment, both by globalizing categories and identities, extending them unequivocally to all members of a group, and by delegitimizing or silencing competing interpretations. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]