Local leaders in national social movements: The Tea Party

ABSTRACT

The literature on Tea Party activity is a debate between structuralist and culturalist interpretations of the movement’s macro-processes – its origin and meanings – that neglects the micro-processes of organizing Tea Party activity (meetings, rallies, and so on). To address that gap, this article presents the results of a six-year ethnographic comparison of Tea Party chapters in Western North Carolina, focusing on the role of chapter leaders. It finds that these leaders are best understood through micro-process theories that locate them on the border between two different arenas: a national context in which elite-driven advocacy groups seek policy change, and their local context of citizen activism. Chapter leaders’ ability to control the flow of messaging from national organizations to members, and the reverse flow of member activity to different causes, affords them space for agency to pursue idiosyncratic agendas. Like other social movements, the Tea Party is not solely determined by larger social forces, but instead created by interaction between a variety of inter-connected actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• micro-process
• tea party
• strategic action
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Unfortunately, I was unable to identify any systematic pattern about which issues leaders tended to pursue.

2. The figures I was quoted support Westermeyer’s (2016) description of a North Carolina chapter able to raise $10,000 internally to buy pocket copies of the US Constitution for distribution. The chapters in this study, however, did not handle similar sums.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George Ehrhardt

George Ehrhardt is an associate professor of government at Appalachian State University. His research primarily focuses on the political activity of rank-and-file voters in Japan, especially among members of a Buddhist social movement. His work has appeared in the Japanese Journal of Political Science, Religion and Politics, and New Political Science, among other places. He is the co-editor and contributing author of Komeito: Politics and Religion in Japan (2014).