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Online Mobilization and Maintenance: A Study of Women’s Interest Groups
Anne Whitesell
Fowler Paper Competition
Table of Contents
Introduction
Literature Review
Group Formation, Membership, and Strategy
Interest Groups and the Internet
Hypotheses
Methodology
Analysis
Websites and Interest Group Staff
Strategies in Mission Statements
Characteristics in Mission Statements
Conclusions
Bibliography
Appendix 1. Website Features
Appendix 2. Mission Statement Features
Introduction
New communications technology has fundamentally altered the way in which individuals organize and mobilize around common interests. Examples abound of protestors in the Middle East using social networking media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to connect with other protestors and organize anti-government demonstrations. The most dramatic consequences of this mobilization present themselves in Middle East countries such as Egypt, where anti-government protests led to the removal of President Hosni Mubarak(Kirkpatrick 2011). While social networking for the purposes of political mobilization is a relatively recent phenomenon, interest groups have been using the Internet to mobilize and maintain their organizations since the 1990s. The research concerning how interest groups use the Internet to recruit members, provide benefits, and ultimately achieve public policy change, has been limited. Current literature on the subject attempts to analyze the Internet as a great equalizer for interest groups. Does the Internet allow groups with fewer resources and smaller membership to compete with larger organizations for the attention of the public and government officials? Does the Internet invite more citizens to become politically active? According to Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (2008), the answer to both of these questions appears to be no. Larger organizations still have more experienced staff members, and inside connections to the government. Moreover, while young adults are more likely to donate to political campaigns online than offline, those who are involved are still better educated and wealthier, on average, than a non-involved citizen.
This research explores how interest groups, specifically those concerned with women’s issues, use the Internet to publicize their mission and interact with their members. Forty-eight women’s interest groups were selected for the sample, and earlier versions of their websites were compared with the current versions. I analyzed the differences in the websites over time to understand more fully when interest groups began to incorporate more action-oriented features on their sites. These features include opportunities to donate to the group or “take action” (often in the form of a letter sent to member of Congress), e-mail alert sign-ups, and links to the group’s social networking pages. In addition, I collected the earlier versions of the mission statements and compared them to the current versions. Through their mission statements, interest groups broadcast their policy priorities and may include their strategies for achieving change. Over time, mission statements may change, as many groups in one policy area begin to adopt similar priorities, or carve out separate policy niches. Posting such information on the Internet creates a much larger audience than if the same statement was printed in a monthly newsletter or in a letter disseminated among members. Technological advances, such as the Internet, will continue to shape the methods of interest groups, though the extent of this influence remains to be seen.
Literature Review
The literature concerning interest groups and the women’s movements contains several key terms, the nuances of which should be clarified before any analysis. The first term is women’s interests, which includes the entire population of people and organizations concerned with policy issues affecting women. Such interests exist in many other policy sectors as well, such as agricultural interests (including farmers, agribusiness, and food safety groups) or education interests (including teachers, charter school supporters, and parent organizations). Within the broad category of women’s interests, there exist social movements and interest groups. Social movements, explained in greater detail below, are loosely organized groups of people sharing a common concern. Interest groups may share some of the same concerns as social movements, but these groups are structured and oftentimes recognized as tax-exempt organizations. Finally, within the women’s social movements there are three distinct waves. The differences among these waves are explained below, but it is important to know that the literature separates these waves based on time. The first wave started in the late nineteenth century, the second wave in the 1960s, and the third wave in 1980. While these three waves share many policy concerns, they are distinct in how they address these issues.
The emergence of women’s groups in United States public policy is the result of three waves of the women’s social movement sweeping throughout the country. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani write in Social Movements: an Introduction (2006) that three factors distinguish social movements from other forms of organization (20). First, social movements typically take the form of two sides that disagree on a certain public policy. The second characteristic that sets social movements apart from other organizations is the strong collective identity shared by members of the opposing sides. That is, the people that mobilize in these movements are dedicated to the cause—they are drawn in by a collective good, or purposive benefit. The third characteristic of social movements is the lack of central organization. The two sides of the movement, while passionate about the cause, do not create formal structures, but rather exist as informal networks of individuals.
Social movements begin with a large following of individuals advocating for broad social and political change, but over time, the movement may become more structured (Costain 1981, 100). Social movements that move towards a more structured organization risk alienating their members who joined the organization when it was a loose network of individuals with a common goal. According to Anne Costain (1998), social movements and their members value their status as “outsiders” and are often reluctant to take on traditional strategies (172). One of the strategies adopted by structured organizations includes inside lobbying strategies (described in more detail below) to achieve policy change. Lobbying requires greater resources, forcing the group to prioritize their concerns. Eliminating concerns from their lobbying agenda has the potential to create divisions within the original movement (Costain 1981, 103). One of the major divisions during the first wave of feminism, for instance, arose around the issue of women’s suffrage. Part of the movement wanted to focus on the failure of the two political parties to take action on the issue of suffrage, while the other part of the movement wanted to align itself with the labor movement (Costain 1998, 172).
Women’s interests have proven to be one of the most difficult movements to organize, because it represents such a large and varied segment of society (Costain 1980, 476). While all women share an obvious bond through their gender, their interests vary depending on characteristics such as age, race, religion, and political affiliation. The first women’s organizations, including the American Association of University Women, Business and Professional Women’s Association, and League of Women Voters, emerged in the late nineteenth century and encouraged moral reform on such issues as temperance and marriage laws (Costain 1981, 108). At their inception, these groups acted more as charitable organizations than political groups, but as they grew, they came to adopt the strategies of other organized lobbies. Early in their existence, for instance, these groups used personal services as the way to achieve political action, but over time they began fundraising and using money as a way to influence policies (Clemens 1999, 91). The groups also became more structured and bureaucratic, taking away from the original social feeling associated with these organizations (Clemens 1999, 94).
The women’s movement fell into a lull after the passage of the nineteenth amendment, and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a new crop of women’s interest groups mobilized. These organizations, forming the second wave of feminism, were responding to the Civil Rights movement sweeping across the United States. Rather than instilling moral values on the rest of society, these organizations focused on attaining equality for women, from educational equality to equal access to credit (Costain 1980, 478). Not only were these organizations interested in different types of policies from their predecessors, but the second wave of feminism engaged in more unorthodox strategies of influencing policy, such as mass marches and protests (Costain 1981, 103). The groups gained momentum, and credibility among government officials, with the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 (Costain 1980, 478). This legislative success proved that Congress was receptive to women’s issues and that social movements could coordinate their efforts in order to attain long-term changes (Costain 1981, 107).
Changing from a social movement to an organized lobby provides both advantages and disadvantages. While social movements have a strong common identity, organizations provide a permanent face to the cause. They provide a centralized location for the movement to collect and coordinate resources, ranging from member dues and government grants to experts on the subject (Della Porta and Piani 2006, 137). In addition, formal organizations give the movement continuity. It is easy for movements to gather members when the subject is being widely covered by the media and conflict is high. It is more difficult though, to keep those supporters energized when the issue is no longer on the public agenda. An organized structure to the movement keeps the participants together as enthusiasm for the cause ebbs and flows (Della Porta and Diani 2006, 138). With these advantages also come challenges in moving from an informal social movement to a structured lobby. Keeping together the vast interests represented by women’s groups was no easier once these groups had achieved substantial policy change. As formal organizations, those advocating on behalf of women had to decide which groups should be responsible for which issues. Some members of the movement, for instance, did not feel comfortable advocating for reproductive rights (Costain 1980, 480). In addition, the organized groups had to divide their resources between those in favor of reproductive rights and those interested in other issues (Costain 1980, 478).
In spite of the challenges faced by these groups, many of them began actively engaging in lobbying, and are still politically active today. It was during this period, for instance, that the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and the National Organization for Women (NOW) opened offices in Washington, D.C. (Costain 1980, 478). NOW is the most widely known women’s organization today, with over 500,000 members (women and men) and local chapters in all fifty states (Dolan, Deckman and Swers 2011, 32). In response to the liberal position of NOW, Concerned Women for America (CWFA) was established in 1979. CWFA, with over 500 local chapters that encourages women to engage in grassroots efforts to inspire policy change, is now the largest conservative women’s group in the United States (Dolan, Deckman and Swers 2011, 36). As explained by Anne Costain, these groups were able to transform themselves into influential lobbies because of three criteria: first, the groups had established a presence on Capitol Hill during the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Second, the groups could provide a wealth of information to members of Congress. Furthermore, through their grassroots movements, these groups remained in contact with congressional constituencies (Costain 1981, 107).
While groups such as NOW and CWFA advocated on behalf of women’s issues in general, more specialized interest groups began to organize. These groups focus on how public issues affect women differently depending on their race, sexual orientation, level of education, and socioeconomic status (Haslanger and Tuana 2011). For example, both the Older Women’s League and the Black Women’s Health Imperative, groups interested in issues pertaining to specific demographics, were established in the 1980s (Dolan, Deckman and Swers 2011, 34). By the mid 1980s, these groups became known as the “third wave” of feminism (Coleman 2009, 9). The third wave is distinct from previous waves in its rejection of the values of the second wave of feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, which had become labeled as “anti-men, anti-feminine, anti-family” as well as “humourless, dowdy, and puritanical” (Coleman 2009, 10). These three waves encompass the vast majority of interest groups advocating on behalf of women’s issues. While this research focuses on how women’s interest groups use the Internet for organizational mobilization and maintenance, it is important to understand how interest groups as a whole attract and retain members, and craft their strategies.
Group Formation, Membership, and Strategy
An analysis of the impact of the Internet on interest group mobilization and maintenance must first begin with an understanding of how interest groups organize their members, provide them with benefits, and mobilize them to political action. Interest groups come into existence through a process that is similar to that of social movements. David Truman wrote of the formation of interest groups in his book The Governmental Process (1951), and asserted that any industrialized society is bound to have interest groups because of specialized labor. Workers in a specific industry band together because they have common concerns; the meetings among these people become more frequent when there is a time of disturbance, such as an economic crisis or period of political change (97). For example, during the second wave of feminism, this time of disturbance was the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
The concerns of interest groups range across all policy areas, and yet there are some common threads among all organizations. As noted in Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action (1965), it is the “essence of an organization that it provides an inseparable, generalized benefit” (15). Thus, the first challenge presented to an interest group is providing this collective good. As Olson explained it, the collective good cannot be excluded from anyone—those who join the interest group, as well as those who are not members, will reap its benefits (15). Olson acknowledged his critics’ objections, mainly that a rational individual would continue to support an organization from which he receives some collective good. If he ceases to support the group, then what keeps other individuals from doing the same, and eventually leading to the group’s demise (12)? Olson responded to these critiques by noting that, especially in large groups, the loss of one member’s contribution is not likely to be felt and thus an individual will not feel compelled to work toward the group’s common interest (44).
How then, does an interest group overcome this problem of collective action, in which individuals do not feel the need to join the organization to benefit from its efforts? Olson theorized that in order to entice individuals to become members, the organization must provide some non-collective good, also known as a selective incentive (16). In particular, Olson stresses the importance of material benefits for members, including discounts or access to goods and services for which individuals would usually have to pay (Schlozman and Tierney 1986, 129). Such non-collective goods are crucial for the maintenance of large organizations, because as the number of members increases, each individual receives a smaller portion of the collective good. In contrast, members of small groups perceive themselves as receiving a large portion of the total collective benefit, because there are few others (Olson 1965, 34). Olson’s work offered an economic perspective on the maintenance of interest groups, but further research suggests that non-collective goods are not as crucial as Olson believed.
In his book Mobilizing Interest Groups in America, Jack Walker (1991) found that interest groups rose to the challenge presented by collective action, and through a process of trial-and-error, discovered a combination of benefits that best attract their prospective members (85). Walker categorized Olson’s selective incentives as either professional or personal benefits. Through Walker’s survey of interest groups, it appeared that, contrary to what Olson had predicted, few interest groups provided these incentives to entice their members. Walker classified interest groups as citizen, non-profit, or for-profit groups (59). Out of the citizen groups surveyed by Walker, only 18 percent offered discounts on consumer goods, one popular type of personal benefit (87). Most interest groups reported that offering collective benefits to their members was more important than selective benefits. Ninety four percent of citizen groups, for instance, cited advocacy as a benefit provided to members, and 80 percent of these groups cited representation before government as a critical benefit (88).