Dropping off the bandwagon: a puzzle for the resource mobilisation perspective on civil society contestation networks

ABSTRACT

This paper builds on an implicit assumption of resource mobilisation theory in order to explain why civil society organisations stay on policy bandwagons. It demonstrates that, after the initial decision to engage with a policy issue, organisational maintenance explains ongoing contestation better than the structural factors which encourage them to get involved. It also adds three new findings which contribute to the existing literature on attention cascades: (1) at the actor level, the effect of salience on contestation is often short-lived; (2) organisational maintenance encourages factionalisation within groups of like-minded policy opponents; and (3) that survival strategies adapted to domestic political opportunity structures can limit CSOs’ capacity to participate in European policy debates. The argument is tested using measures of network centrality from an online forum (Twitter) as a predictor for ongoing participation in campaigns against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The findings are of immediate relevance to trade scholars seeking to understand the reactions of civil society organisations to contestation; interest group scholars focused on the determinants of issue prioritisation; and EU integration scholars seeking to explain variation in the domestication of EU policy issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Interest groups
• trade
• politicisation
• Twitter
• networks
• TTIP

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dirk De Bièvre, Andreas Dür, Erasmus Häggblom, Frederik Stevens, the participants of two workshops hosted by the Jean Monnet Network on Transatlantic Trade Politics in Salzburg and Antwerp, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and patient reflections through the development of this research article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Replication materials can be downloaded from the Harvard dataverse: Hamilton, Scott Michael, 2023, ‘Replication Data for: Dropping off the bandwagon’, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JITOJP, Harvard Dataverse, V1.

Notes

1 Interest groups are formal associations attempting to influence public policy (Dür, 2019).

2 For exceptions, see Burstein (2014) and Flöthe (2020) who observe participation in hearings.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University Research Fund (BOF) of the University of Antwerp in support of groundbreaking fundamental research, as well as the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Notes on contributors

Scott Michael Hamilton

Scott Michael Hamilton is a doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp.