Social Movements in Elections: UK Anti-Austerity and Environmental Campaigning 2015-19 3030762041, 9783030762049

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Social Movements in Elections UK Anti-Austerity and Environmental Campaigning 2015–19

Abi Rhodes

Social Movements in Elections

Abi Rhodes

Social Movements in Elections UK Anti-Austerity and Environmental Campaigning 2015–19

Abi Rhodes Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies University of Nottingham Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-76204-9    ISBN 978-3-030-76205-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my sister Nessy and my dad, for all the love you gave.

Acknowledgements

This project started with a Tony Benn quotation and the desire to understand what social movements do to change the political landscape. Benn said, “Social change has two prerequisites: the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope at a better world”, and I began to wonder how those two flames manifest in the world. This thought led me to write my PhD thesis, upon which this book is based. My thanks firstly go to my former supervisors at the University of Nottingham, Dr Jen Birks and Dr Colin Wright, for their support, academic insights and guidance over the years. Thanks also to Dr Franziska Meyer for her timely reminders of and belief in my intellectual abilities. To my examiners, Professors David Deacon and Andreas Bieler, a special thank you for an engaging viva and the recommendation that I turn my doctoral project into a book: here it is! Thanks also to Professors Dominic Wring and Einar Thorsen for giving me the opportunity to publish in their respective media and election analysis books. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers who helped me improve this manuscript, your comments, insights and recommendations were invaluable, and to my editor for their comments too. Many thanks are also due to Midlands4Cities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me a stipend, which allowed me the opportunity to focus full-time on the doctoral research that underpins this book. This gave me the opportunity to become integrated into university life, which transformed my PhD experience. Integral to that experience are all the friends that I made along the way and so a special thanks must go (in no particular order) to Sam Wilkinson, vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Emma Humphries, Izzy Story, Gianlluca Simi, Dave Young, Rob Stenson, Betti Bodi, Niki Cheong, Richard Bromhall and David Civil. You have been an invaluable source of personal, political and academic support to me throughout all of this and made the last few years an absolute pleasure. In solidarity! Another huge thank you to Louise Cooke and Phil Gunn who always believed in my ability and gave me the strength to believe that I was my own resource. And finally, a massive thank you to my wonderful husband, Gareth Carrol, who encouraged me to return to do my PhD and supported and motivated me throughout that and the writing of this book—you are my rock.

Contents

1 Social Movement–Voter Interaction: An Emerging Field  1 Social Movements and Elections   5 Definition of Movement-Voter Interaction   9 Outline of Chapters  12 References  12 2 Social Movements as Electoral Actors 17 Framing Social Movement Research  17 Social Movement Communication in the Digital Age  21 Online Participation and Elections  24 Linguistic Instruments and Electoral Campaigning Techniques  27 Research Questions and Method  31 Political Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis  33 References  35 3 Movement-Voter Interaction 2015–19 General Elections 43 Overview: Election Tactics and Data  44 Movement-Voter Interaction: Case Studies  46 Context of Action: Crises and Duties  46 A Concern with Values: Fairness and Trust  53 (Not) Voting and Political Pressure: Claims for Action  59 Goals: Setting the Agenda  61 Summary and Conclusions  64 References  69 ix

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Contents

4 Movements, Manifestos and the Media 71 Movements in the Media and Manifestos  72 Austerity and the Environmental Crisis: What the Papers and Parties Say  72 Duties to Vote and Protect Citizens: Pledges and the Press  78 Fairness and Trust in the Broader Political Landscape  82 Conclusions: Agenda Setting and Political Pressure  88 References  91 5 Conclusion 97 Movement-Voter Interaction: General Elections 2015–19  97 Movements, Elections and Democracy 104 References 106 Index 109

About the Author

Abi Rhodes  is an early career researcher and Teaching Associate in Media Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her academic research and publications examine the interrelationship of social movement communicative tactics, the mainstream and digital media and the political landscape in general election campaigns.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Movement-voter interaction as direct voter communication. Pressure is exerted upon the institutional context via the voter through movement communication to the electorate Movement-party interaction as indirect voter communication. Direct communication with institutional actors places pressure on the institutional context and indirect, mediated interaction with voters may occur as a result, which in turn may lead to additional pressure from the electorate

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1

The number of words analysed per section of the Conservative and Labour Party manifestos from the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections 33 The number of newspaper articles per title gathered in each election33 Movement group tactics: The People’s Assembly Against Austerity in the General Elections of 2015 and 2017 and Extinction Rebellion in the General Election of 2019 47

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CHAPTER 1

Social Movement–Voter Interaction: An Emerging Field

Once thought of as nothing more than sudden panics and crazes that sat outside of institutional politics, social movements have become a consistent and dominant feature of the political landscape in the twenty-first century (Bailey 2020; Cox and Nilsen 2014; della Porta and Diani 2006; Goodwin and Jasper 2009; Johnston 2014; Meyer and Tarrow 1998). Today social movements are thought of as rooted in the everyday reality of people’s lives and as phenomena that can bring about social, political and policy change. They can be thought of as an avenue for discontented individuals to engage with the issues that they feel strongly about and should not be solely considered as a subset of the political system (Goodwin and Jasper 2009). As Jack Goldstone (2003) argues, social movements can be conceptualised as an essential element of normal politics in modern society. Indeed, it is claimed that the boundary between institutional and non-institutional politics is fuzzy and that they are intertwined (Goldstone 2003: 2). Building on Paul Burstein (1999), Elizabeth Clemens (1997) and Sidney Tarrow (1998), Goldstone states that “one cannot understand the normal, institutionalized workings of courts, legislature, executives, or parties without understanding their intimate and ongoing shaping by social movements” (Goldstone 2003: 2). It was with Charles Tilly’s career spanning work on ‘contentious politics’ that the divide between institutional and movement politics was narrowed. In a seminal text, co-authored with two other stalwarts of the social movement field, Tilly sought to understand sites of resistance as a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6_1

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routine part of everyday politics (McAdam et al. 2001). Central to Tilly’s contentious politics perspective is the claim that social movements and the systems and processes of institutional politics are interrelated and dynamic. To understand the ebb and flow of movements is to acknowledge changes in institutional practices and, conversely, shifts in institutional processes can reflect the actions of movements (McAdam and Tarrow 2013). Social movements are a way to make collective claims in a society based on parliamentary democracy and, in many cases, the rights of individuals and citizens have been formulated and implemented thanks to movement organisations. We only have to think of gains by the Civil Rights Movement and Suffragettes to acknowledge the power of movements to change legislation (see Tilly 2012 for further examples of civil, human and gender rights and environmental protection movements). This insight situates social movements in the bigger picture of large-scale power relations and positions them as one of the processes of social change (Barker et al. 2014: 5). Here we see a shift from the micro-structural to the macro-structural as social movement research considers not only the ways in which movements mobilise participants but also the ways in which they can be a force for social change. Social movements are defined in multiple ways. For Hank Johnston (2014), they are key forces in social change that are characterised by change-orientated ideas, which are important factors in driving history. Cox and Nilsen (2014) conceptualise social movements as a process in which collective projects—centred on rationality—are developed within specific groups that attempt to maintain or change the dominant structure of society or address entrenched needs. Social movements are further described by Hanspeter Kriesi as “elusive phenomena” that are characteristically difficult to pin down (Kriesi in Diani and Eyerman 1992: 22). He describes them as “an organized, sustained, self-conscious challenge to existing authorities on behalf of constituencies whose goals are not effectively taken into account by these authorities” (Kriesi in Diani and Eyerman 1992: 22). Similarly, Sidney Tarrow (2011) and Charles Tilly (2008) define social movements as sustained collective challenges against elites and authorities by people with a common purpose. These abstract conceptions of social movements are augmented by more structural definitions of how social movements operate, mobilise and communicate. For example, Tilly uses the term narrowly to refer to the repertoire of tactics and strategies used to make collective claims forwarded by a movement, which depend on a base of connections among

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participants (Tilly 2008; Tilly and Tarrow 2007). Tarrow makes a similar claim when he describes social movements as “dense social networks and connective structures [that] draw on consensual and action-orientated cultural frames” (Tarrow 2011: 16; Tilly and Tarrow 2007). Together they describe social movements as “a sustained campaign of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities” (Tilly and Tarrow 2007: 8). Joe Foweraker, mirroring Cox and Nilsen (2014), argues that social movements can be defined as a ‘process’ rather than as a single actor, describing them “as a form of mass politics in close and strategic interaction with the state” and, I argue here, with society (Foweraker 1995: 3). More recently, Colin Barker describes movements as “collective achievements” that entail some kind of organisation of collective projects and the mutual sharing of ideas (Barker et  al. 2014: 47–48; emphasis in the original). Social movements can, therefore, be understood as a process that people collectively engage in to make and unmake cultural codes or frames and as a challenge to the meaning and interpretation of a political theme. This interpretation is elucidated by Donatella della Porta (2007: 6), who defines a fundamental characteristic of a social movement as its “ability to develop a common interpretation of reality” through communicative forms that challenge or change existing interpretations. Despite such agentic views of social movements in the field of social movement research, there is “strikingly little interest” in the relationship between electoral politics and movement communication, with scholars focusing on examining the source of opportunity or threat to movements that elections may present (McAdam and Tarrow 2013: 326–327). As important political actors, social movements can have a refining and reinforcing effect on conventional elections through the highlighting of specific issues—such as human rights, social and economic justice and equality—that shape both political party and voter behaviour (Burstein 1999; Clemens 1997; Goldstone 2003; Tarrow 1998), as well as altering party agendas and adjusting policy commitments (Gold and Peña 2019; Kriesi 2015; McAdam and Tarrow 2013; Piccio 2016; Trejo 2014). For example, since the financial crisis of 2007/08, waves of anti-austerity demonstrations have taken place across the globe, each sharing themes of anger towards institutional political actors and their complicity in enabling a global economy to grow unfettered (Bailey 2014, 2020). This anger at political elites has been reflected in institutional politics, as millions of

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voters have come out to vote for anti-establishment figures (such as Donald Trump) or against established institutions (such as the European Union). Yet, the role that social movements play in electoral campaigning largely remains absent in both the fields of social movement research and political communication. In the area of political communication, the literature has traditionally focused on the ways in which institutional political actors—political parties and politicians—have communicated, often via the media, with the electorate. Conversely, the social movement literature has tended to focus on interactions between movements and political parties during elections, over and above the movement-voter interaction (defined below) that is inherent in electoral communication. This study begins to address that lacuna by analysing the communicative tactics employed during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 UK general elections by the national People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) and Extinction Rebellion (XR), two campaigning groups that respectively form an active part of the broader anti-­ austerity and environment movements in the UK today. The book focuses on these politically orientated movements which lack institutionalised power but have a clear sense of collective identity and have been persistent in their mobilisations and claim making. Following Amenta et al. (2019), this study defines such movements as seeking to effect social change on issues through the mobilisation of regular citizens in institutional and extra-institutional action in order to place pressure on democratic governments. As such, this study excludes lobby or ‘interest’ groups due to the political power and access to politicians that these organisations possess. The analysis in Chap. 3 reveals that in all the elections in this study, PAAA and XR employed existing political communication techniques such as negative campaigning and political advertising, alongside more innovative tactics such as protest songs written specifically for the 2017 election, houses floating down the River Thames designed to highlight flooding in 2019 and the now ubiquitous hashtag campaigns on platforms like Twitter. Each communicative tactic was aimed directly at the voter and, for XR, also at parliamentary candidates and sought to shine a light on the issues of austerity and the environment while placing democratic pressure on a future government. What this pattern shows is that an active part of the UK anti-austerity and environmental movements were engaged in parliamentary politics in an attempt to communicate directly with the electorate. This insight contributes to the development of social movement–voter interaction as a dimension of social movement communication, which will be more fully defined following a discussion of movements in elections.

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Social Movements and Elections The study of social movements and elections as reciprocally interrelated phenomena is an emerging field of research within social movement studies. Building on Tilly’s contentious politics, McAdam and Tarrow (2013) call for the reciprocal link between movements and elections to become more integrated into social movement research. Within the framework of electoral contention, McAdam and Tarrow are referring to “that set of recurring links between elections and movements that powerfully shapes movement dynamics and electoral outcomes” (2013: 328). They identify five processes underpinning electoral contention: firstly, “elections as a movement tactic”; secondly and thirdly, “proactive and reactive electoral mobilisation by movements groups”; fourthly, the “longer-term changes in electoral regimes on patterns of movement mobilisation and demobilisation”; and fifthly, “movement-induced party polarisation” (McAdam and Tarrow 2013: 328). The first of these processes relates largely to the already established category of movement-parties in the field of social movement studies. Developed by Kitschelt (2006) the concept of movement-parties refers to the process by which social movements become political parties. One principal illustration of movement parties is the emergence of the Green parties from the 1980s onwards, as social movement actors, active in the anti-nuclear movements, realised that alliances with parties on the left were not bringing about the expected changes to energy policy (Hutter et al. 2019; Kitschelt 1989; Poguntke 1993). More recently, illustrations of this process come from studies of Latin America, where there was a rise in indigenous-based parties, supported by social movements, gaining votes from the incumbent left-wing parties forced to accept and impose neoliberal austerity measures following the 2008 financial crisis (Almeida 2007; Johnston and Almeida 2006; Shefner et al. 2006). A similar process took place in Europe as the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), the incumbent social-democratic party in Greece, lost most of its popular support and was eventually replaced as the party of the left by the challenger party Syriza in 2014 (see della Porta et al. 2017; Hutter et al. 2018). What McAdam and Tarrow’s electoral contention framework does is extend this concept into local, primary and/or national elections where turnout is low, but minority movement mobilisation can have a big impact. McAdam and Tarrow emphasise the influence that US movements have had in these electoral arenas, including creationist groups winning elections to local

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school boards to reform science curricula and movements against same-­ sex marriage overturning legislation legalising such a union through ballot measures (2013: 329–330). The second process, proactive electoral mobilisation, considers movements that increase their activity during elections if they perceive the election to be a threat to or opportunity for advancing group interests. Sobieraj’s (2011) study examines how activists court the media during elections and offers the example of activists using human blockades reinforced with steel and PVC piping to close down main roads during the 2000 Republican National Convention. As well as this, street theatre, dancing and drumming were used to capture the attention of the press and transmit a mediated message to the voting public. This process is closely aligned with the focus in this book on movement communication during elections, in that the groups within the anti-austerity and environmentalist movements became active during elections in order to promote group interests and attract media attention. However, the lens of movement-­voter interaction enriches it by focusing on the analysis of communicative tactics aimed directly at voters, which adds a self-­consciously unmediated form of communication during elections to the framework of electoral contention. An expanded definition of movement-voter interaction is given in the next section. Next is McAdam and Tarrow’s reactive electoral mobilisation framework that is closely related to the second process. This process aligns somewhat with the established movement research category of the protest-­ election interface, which analyses the impact of protests on party responsiveness to activists’ and citizens’ demands (Giugni and Grasso 2019; Gold and Peña 2019; Goldstone 2003; Trejo 2014; Walgrave and Vliegenthart 2012). Both voting and social protest are avenues of political action that open up the political arena to ordinary people and advance democratisation (Goldstone 2003). Participation in social movement activity, particularly demonstrations, is seen as a conscious way of influencing the political agenda (Giugni and Grasso 2019: 79). Research has shown that individuals who take part in protest and other movement activity, particularly in regard to economic issues, are more likely to participate in other modes of political activity, such as voting (Giugni and Grasso 2019: 87). Such findings reinforce the intersection between institutional and extra-institutional politics. As participants raise issue-specific concerns, elites can see citizens’ commitment to these preferences and, if the protest is big enough and/or gets into the news, the salience of the

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issue is amplified, which signals to political parties that they need to listen (see McAdam and Su 2002 on protest size and Walgrave and Vliegenthart 2012 on protest issues). Dependent upon the size of a demonstration, political parties may interpret the protest as an electoral threat (Burstein 1999; Lohmann 1993; Uba 2016). Despite not conducting any large-­ scale organised protests during the three election periods examined in this book, the goal of both PAAA and XR was to set the political agenda. As analysed in Chap. 3, for PAAA the aim was to change the debate on austerity through tactics that differed between elections. In 2015, the group released podcasts discussing the weaknesses of the argument for austerity and aimed to expose the fallacious nature of its premises. In 2017, the PAAA held a mini-protest outside the Conservative Party manifesto launch that coincided with the release of their hashtag #ManifestoOfMisery, crowdsourced anti-Conservative billboards and promoted a protest song. Each tactic aimed at drawing attention to the issue of austerity but also sought to negatively evaluate Theresa May through the use of ad hominem attacks. XR’s overall aim was to ensure that the 2019 election was the ‘climate election’ and the majority of their communicative tactics, whether aimed directly at voters or politicians, included this as their core message. The fourth process in McAdam and Tarrow’s electoral contention approach is the longer-term mobilisation or demobilisation of movement groups. In keeping with the political process perspective, it refers to the likelihood of raising political action by left- or right-wing movements depending on the political leanings of the party in power. The scholars point to American politics as illustrative of this. During periods of Democratic Party dominance, McAdam and Tarrow identify increased mobilisation of civil rights, labour and socialist movements, whereas Republican Party dominance sees pro-life and anti-immigration movements flourish (McAdam and Tarrow 2013: 332). Building on the fourth process, the fifth and final causal connection between movements and elections is that of movement-induced party polarisation, which the authors first described in their 2010 paper ‘Ballots and Barricades’. This process builds on the fourth, in that certain movements are encouraged/ discouraged to mobilise when a party that represents their broad ideological viewpoint comes to power, when they may, as a result, be granted institutional access to express their perspectives. What McAdam and Tarrow contend is that this movement access to institutional actors has a potentially negative impact on the party in the next electoral cycle. If electoral politics is centrist in its logics then political parties are incentivised to

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stick to the middle ground in order to appeal to a median voter, rather than embrace social movements’ preoccupation with single issue extreme views (McAdam and Tarrow 2013: 333). Aside from the second process (proactive electoral mobilisation), the focus of the framework of electoral contention discussed above is the dimension of movement-party interaction (the direct targeting of political parties by social movements). Indeed, this is the principal dimension of research conducted on the relationship between movements and elections. Other established social movement concepts include social movement partyism (Almeida 2010, 2014), wherein political parties align themselves with civil society organisations and practices, and movement-party support, which includes transferring activist energy to assist a candidate or political party (McAdam and Tarrow 2019; Trejo 2014). One recent example of both concepts was the Labour Party in the UK under Jeremy Corbyn and the political movement associated with it, Momentum. In the case of Momentum (defined here as a party-affiliated movement faction,1 rather than a social movement), they were credited with assisting Corbyn in his second successful campaign to become Labour leader in 2016 and the Party’s strong performance in the 2017 general election due to their onand offline campaigning (Dennis 2020; McDowell-Naylor 2019; Rhodes 2019a). Under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour adopted a social movement-­ style approach when engaging with Party members and the broader public (Bennister et al. 2017). But none of these studies capture how social movements communicate with the electorate, which is a fundamental feature of movement-voter interaction that this book begins to establish. A similar gap is found in the field of political communication, where electoral messaging by movements is still under-researched in favour of institutional actors. Since the 1980s, close academic attention has been paid to political communication between political parties, the media and the electorate (most recently Cowley and Kavanagh 2010, 2016, 2018; Wring et  al. 2011, 2017, 2019). What remains largely absent from this field is the role of communicative forms used by social movements during elections. Recent exceptions to the political communication canon include chapters on the interaction between movement-led activity and political parties (Wring et  al. 2019; 1  Following Dennis (2020), Momentum is understood as a movement with a distinct ideological perspective operating within the Labour Party, which mobilises strategically to ensure the election of that party.

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see Blumler 2017; Chadwick 2017; Rhodes 2019a, b). This book extends this emerging body of work by advancing the dimension of movement-­ voter interaction.

Definition of Movement-Voter Interaction At election times, social movements engage in communicative tactics to highlight specific issues and to convey ideas, values and beliefs about the world around us. They are politically impactful in that they present discourses that challenge or reproduce dominant definitions of the political environment and offer alternative arguments about what is to be done. These discourses can target political parties during elections by articulating citizen demands that call for institutional and policy changes. This understanding forms the basis of movement-party interaction. Discourses and messages that focus on drawing voter attention to a specific issue are understood as movement-voter interaction. Movement-voter interaction is inherent in the communicative tactics employed by social movements during elections: a movement, or a group within a broader social movement, that engages in parliamentary politics in a direct attempt to communicate with the electorate is participating in movement-voter interaction. Defining this aspect of movement communication during elections as an ‘interaction’ is important because, as McAdam et  al. note, interaction develops, establishes and alters relations among political actors (2009: 261). Understanding the concept as a ‘direct’ attempt at communicating with voters distinguishes it from movement-­ party interactive communications that may involve indirect voter communication. A salient example of indirect voter interaction is the use of tactics by XR to attract the attention of political parties in 2019. I explore XR’s tactics in Chap. 3, such as hunger strikes outside party headquarters, which were devised to elicit support directly from the political parties. These actions were picked up by the mainstream media and broadcast to the electorate, forming an indirect, mediated interaction with voters (see Chap. 4). By contrast, PAAA used billboards and a protest song to communicate directly with the voting public about austerity and the National Health Service (NHS), and issued instructions for whom not to vote. The communication process in movement-voter interaction is dialectical in that pressure is exerted upon the institutional context through the communication of competing concerns over an issue by movements to the

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electorate, which may ultimately effect change in the constitution of Parliamentary politics and/or policies as a result of the act of voting. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate the dimensions of movement-voter and movement-party interaction. The arrows demonstrate the element of direct (solid black) and indirect (dotted black) communication, and the potential flow of pressure exerted (grey). As Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 show, both interactions include all three political actors (movements, political parties and voters) and can exert pressure on political parties, but, unlike movement-party interaction that aims to communicate directly with and bring about change in institutional actors, movement-voter interaction is more concerned with communicating directly with the electorate. Such communicative tactics are intended to enter public debate and discourse and aim for societal and/or cultural change. Movement-voter interaction, therefore, is understood as seeking to raise awareness of specific issues (in this case, anti-austerity and the environment) among the general public in order to effect the political change that they seek (i.e. setting the political agenda in order to change the institutional actors in power and/or policy decisions). Such a definition follows the conception of Melucci (1989) and Castells (2013) of movements and movement participants as focusing on the processes of

Polical actor 1: Social movement

Polical actor 2: Voter

Polical actor 3: Polical party

Fig. 1.1  Movement-voter interaction as direct voter communication. Pressure is exerted upon the institutional context via the voter (grey arrow) through movement communication to the electorate (black arrow)

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Polical actor 1: Social movement

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Polical actor 2: Polical party

Polical actor 3: Voter

Fig. 1.2  Movement-party interaction as indirect voter communication. Direct communication with institutional actors (black arrow) places pressure on the institutional context and indirect, mediated interaction with voters may occur as a result (dotted arrow), which in turn may lead to additional pressure from the electorate (grey arrow)

meaning making in society and seeking ways of defining and interpreting reality. Through the cultivating or challenging of established definitions of social reality, movements can spark debate over the ways in which we should interact with and act towards events. Struggles over preferred meanings between agents in different circumstances, with different conceptions of how society is to be structured, can present different goals to be obtained and competing claims for action on how to achieve them. For example, XR’s goal was to ensure that the climate emergency was prioritised in public debate and they presented natural facts (severe weather events) and institutional facts (a duty to act accordingly) to voters as a way of challenging established understanding of the urgency of climate action. The movement group’s message on the urgency of the situation stood in contrast to party manifesto pledges around ‘green growth’ and decarbonisation goals that were set decades in the future. Chapter 4 discusses the relationships between movement messaging and the broader political landscape.

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Outline of Chapters Chapter 2 explores the history of communicative tactics by movements and linguistic instruments employed in electoral campaigns and illustrates how the two overlap, reinforcing the concept of movement-voter interaction. Chapter 3 will then analyse the communicative tactics of PAAA and XR during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections. Using methodological tools from political discourse analysis, the chapter deconstructs the global message of the tactics in order to determine each group’s articulated goals, claims for action, values and context for action on the key electoral issues of the NHS (PAAA, 2015 and 2017) and the environment (XR 2019), and illuminates how each group engaged in movement-voter interaction. In Chap. 4, the relationship between PAAA and XR’s communicative tactics and the broader electoral landscape is examined through qualitative content analysis of mainstream press reporting and manifesto chapters on the issues of healthcare (2015 and 2017) and the environment (2019). This analysis establishes the extent to which messages rooted in movement-­ voter interaction were amplified and endorsed or challenged in traditional electoral communicative practices. Chapter 5 summarises how the empirical findings in the preceding chapters contribute to the wider study of social movements in elections and the field of political communication. It argues that this ‘alternative’ messaging assists the dissemination of societal critiques that are essential for a functioning democracy.

References Almeida, Paul D. 2007. Defensive Mobilization: Popular Movements Against Economic Adjustment Policies in Latin America. Latin American Perspectives 34 (3): 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X07300942. ———. 2010. Social Movement Partyism: Collective Action and Political Parties. In Strategic Alliances: Coalition Building and Social Movements, ed. N. van Dyke and H.J. McCammon, 170–196. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttdjf. ———. 2014. Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Amenta, Edwin, Kenneth T.  Andrews, and Neal Caren. 2019. The Political Institutions, Processes, and Outcomes Movements Seek to Influence. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A.  Snow, Sarah A.  Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J.  McCammon, 2nd ed., 447–465. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119168577.ch25.

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Bailey, David J. 2014. Contending the Crisis: What Role for Extra-Parliamentary British Politics? British Politics 9 (1): 68–92. https://doi.org/10.1057/ bp.2013.26. ———. 2020. Decade of Dissent: How Protest Is Shaking the UK and Why It’s Likely to Continue. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ decade-­o f-­d issent-­h ow-­p rotest-­i s-­s haking-­t he-­u k-­a nd-­w hy-­i ts-­l ikely-­t o-­ continue-­125843. Barker, Colin, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf G. Nilsen. 2014. Marxism and Social Movements. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Bennister, Mark, Ben Worthy, and Dan Keith. 2017. Jeremy Corbyn and the Limits of Authentic Rhetoric. In Voices of the UK Left. Rhetoric, Politics and Society, ed. Judi Atkin and John Gaffney, 101–121. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­51902-­9_6. Blumler, J.G. 2017. Looking on the Bright Side for a Change. In UK Election Analysis 2017: Media, Voters and the Campaign Early Reflections from Leading Academics, ed. Einar Thorsen, Dan Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 11. The Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University. Burstein, Paul. 1999. Social Movements and Public Policy. In How Social Movements Matter, ed. Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, 3–21. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castells, Manuel. 2013. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chadwick, Andrew. 2017. Corbyn, Labour, Digital Media, and the 2017 UK Election. In UK Election Analysis 2017: Media, Voters and the Campaign Early Reflections from Leading Academics, ed. Einar Thorsen, Dan Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 89. The Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University. Clemens, Elizabeth S. 1997. The Peoples Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Groups in the United States, 1890–1925. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cowley, Philip, and Dennis Kavanagh. 2010. The British General Election of 2010. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan. Cox, Laurence, and Alf G. Nilsen. 2014. We Make Our Own History: Marxism in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. London: Pluto Press. della Porta, Donatella. 2007. The Global Justice Movement: Cross-National and Transnational Perspectives. London: Paradigm Publishers. della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006 [1999]. Social Movements: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. della Porta, Donatella, Joseba Fernández, Hara Kouki, and Lorenzo Mosca. 2017. Movement Parties Against Austerity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Dennis, James. 2020. A Party Within a Party Posing as a Movement? Momentum as a Movement Faction. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 17 (2): 97–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2019.1702608. Diani, Mario, and Ron Eyerman. 1992. Studying Collective Action. London: Sage Publications. Foweraker, Joe. 1995. Theorizing Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Giugni, Mario, and Maria T.  Grasso. 2019. Street Citizens: Protest Politics and Social Movement Activism in the Age of Globalization, Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781108693455.002. Gold, Tomás, and Alejandro M. Peña. 2019. Protests, Signaling, and Elections: Conceptualizing Opposition-Movement Interactions During Argentina’s Anti-­ Government Protests (2012–2013). Social Movement Studies 18 (3): 324–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1555751. Goldstone, Jack A. 2003. States, Parties and Social Movements. Cambridge: CUP. Goodwin, Jeff, and James Jasper. 2009. The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hutter, Swen, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Guillem Vidal. 2018. Old Versus New Politics: The Political Spaces in Southern Europe in Times of Crises. Party Politics 24 (1): 10–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817694503/. Hutter, Swen, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Jasmine Lorenzini. 2019. Social Movements in Interaction with Political Parties. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J.  McCammon, 2nd ed., 322–337. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119168577.ch18. Johnston, Hank. 2014. What Is a Social Movement? London: Polity Press. Johnston, Hank, and Paul D. Almeida. 2006. Latin American Social Movements: Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kitschelt, Herbert. 1989. The Logics of Party Formation: Ecological Politics in Belgium and West Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2006. Movement Parties. In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty, 278–290. London: Sage. Kriesi, Hanspeter. 2015. Party Systems, Electoral Systems, and Social Movements. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, ed. Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, 667–680. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lohmann, Susanne. 1993. A Signalling Model of Informative and Manipulative Political Action. American Political Science Review 87 (2): 319–333. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2939043. McAdam, D., and Sidney Tarrow. 2010. Ballots and Barricades: On the Reciprocal Relationship Between Elections and Social Movements. Perspectives on Politics 8 (2): 529–542. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592710001234.

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McAdam, Doug, and Sidney Tarrow. 2013. Social Movements and Elections: Toward a Broader Understanding of the Political Context of Contention. In The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, ed. Conny Roggeband, Burt Klandermans, and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, 325–346. Minneapolis and St Paul: University of Minnesota Press. McAdam, D., and Sidney Tarrow. 2019. The Political Context of Social Movements. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon, 2nd ed., 17–42. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781119168577.ch1. McAdam, Doug, and Yang Su. 2002. The War at Home: Antiwar Protests and Congressional Voting, 1965 to 1973. American Sociological Review 67 (5): 696–721. https://doi.org/10.2307/308891. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Comparative Perspectives on Contentious Politics. In Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure: Advancing Theory in Comparative Politics, ed. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, 2nd ed., 260–290. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDowell-Naylor, Declan. 2019. #GE2017: Digital Media and the Campaigns. In Political Communication in Britain, ed. Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, 187–205. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­00822-­2_13. Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meyer, David, and Sidney Tarrow. 1998. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Piccio, Daniela R. 2016. The Impact of Social Movements on Political Parties. In The Consequences of Social Movements, ed. Lorenzo Bosi, Mario Giugni, and Katrina Uba, 263–284. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poguntke, Thomas. 1993. Alternative Politics: The German Green Party. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rhodes, Abi. 2019a. Movement-Led Electoral Campaigning: Momentum in the 2017 General Election. In Political Communication in Britain, ed. Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, 187–205. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­00822-­2_12. ———. 2019b. Movement-led Electoral Communication: Extinction Rebellion and Party Policy in the Media. In UK Election Analysis 2019: Media, Voters and the Campaign, ed. Einar Thorsen, Dan Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 89. The Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University. Shefner, Jon, George Pasdirtz, and Cory Blad. 2006. Austerity Protests and Immiserating Growth in Mexico and Argentina. In Latin American Social

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Movements: Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks, ed. Hank Johnston and Paul D.  Almeida, 19–42. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sobieraj, Sarah. 2011. Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism. New York: New York University Press. Tarrow, Sidney. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles. 2008. Contentious Performances. New  York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Social Movements 1768–2012. Oxford: Routledge. Tilly, Charles, and Sidney Tarrow. 2007. Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Trejo, Guillermo. 2014. The Ballot and the Street: An Electoral Theory of Social Protest in Autocracies. Perspectives on Politics 12 (2): 332–352. https://doi. org/10.1017/S1537592714000863. Uba, Katrin. 2016. Protest against School Closures in Sweden: Accepted by Politicians? In The Consequences of Social Movements, ed. Lorenzo Bosi, Marco Giugni, and Katrin Uba, 159–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walgrave, Stefaan, and Rens Vliegenthart. 2012. The Complex Agenda-Setting Power of Protest. Demonstrations, Media, Parliament, Government, and Legislation in Belgium, 1993–2000. Mobilization 17 (2): 129–156. https:// doi.org/10.17813/maiq.17.2.pw053m281356572h. Wring, Dominic, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson. 2011. Political Communication in Britain: The Leader Debates, the Campaign and Media and in the 2010 General Election. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Political Communication in Britain: Polling, Campaigning and Media and in the 2015 General Election. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Political Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Social Movements as Electoral Actors

Drawing on the history of social movement mobilisation and its intimate links with movement communication, this chapter explores the overlap between movement messaging and traditional election campaigning. It starts with an overview of approaches to the study of social movements that are relevant to communicative practices, which situates the following empirical chapters in this tradition. The chapter then explores the role of internet-based technologies in social movement communication and the rise of online political participation and activism in recent years, including online participation in election campaigns. It goes on to introduce electoral communication strategies and explores the linguistic instruments used in elections by traditional political actors to communicate their messages to the electorate, such as the use of frames and strategies of persuasion and negative evaluation, and illustrates connections with The People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) tactics. Finally, the research questions and methods used in this study are outlined.

Framing Social Movement Research During the 1970s and 1980s, the Resource Mobilisation Theory (RMT), Political Process and Political Opportunity Structure (POS) approaches all dominated the US social movement research field either as distinct models (McAdam 1999) or as variants of RMT, and collectively became known as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6_2

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the classical social movement agenda (Staggenborg 2015; see also McAdam et al. 2001; Tarrow 2011). In an attempt to move social movement research towards macro-social and macro-structural approaches, RMT situated movements within their political and structural context. In contrast to Collective Behaviour, which focused on social movements as psychological phenomena, these theories treated social movements as political phenomena (Staggenborg 2015): ones that had access to resources for mobilisation and communication. Within this tradition, movements accumulate and allocate resources (or assets) and then mobilise (or control and use) them (Connolly and Hourigan 2006). As the name suggests, RMT focuses on resources as being central to successful collective action. According to many proponents of this approach, social movements must have access to resources, organisation and opportunities for collective action (Staggenborg 2015; see also Gamson 1990 [1975]; McAdam 1999; McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977; Oberschall 1973; Tilly 1978). RMT focused on the organisational qualities of social movements, highlighting the need for resources to sustain them, and identified that if there were enough resources (including money as well as participants) to nourish a collective will to protest, then a movement could grow. Through the analysis of roles and facilities that are available to people in a society, RMT emphasised how social movement organisations (SMOs) combine finances, resources, people and technology into strategic and tactical action (Chesters and Welsh 2011). The main conclusions drawn were that social movements grew and died with the amount of financing available to them and that mobilisation was key to such financial support. Alongside Anthony Oberschall (1973), John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1973; 1977) and Charles Tilly (1978) advanced RMT by developing an entrepreneurial-­ organisational version of it, which argued that movement entrepreneurs were important in defining, communicating and gaining public support for a movement’s issues (Staggenborg 2015). By focusing on organisational structures, mobilisation and resources and the rational orientation of political actors, the approach set out to explain how social movements formed at particular moments (Chesters and Welsh 2011; Tarrow 1998). It considered how movements were successful at mobilising rather than why they mobilised in the first place, and in so doing shifted research focus from societal structure to organisational questions. By asking how a movement was to be successful in conveying its message, RMT reallocated social movement research energy towards business and corporate models of organising, for which it received

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criticism. As an approach, it treated social movements as marketised entities by categorising them as the same as other businesses who need to compete for economic, material and social resources in order to succeed in the neoliberal world (Staggenborg 2015; Tarrow 1998). The approach side-lined ideology and societal grievances and left unanalysed mechanisms that can bring to the fore specific collective demands. Such a deficit rendered the application of the approach to a wide variety of movements rather mechanistic because it overlooked the ideological content and context of a movement or its participants (Chesters and Welsh 2011). A variant of RMT was the Political Process approach, which sought to limit its predecessor’s over-emphasis on the micro-economic motivation of participants and the macro-economic view of social movements that rendered them little more than fundraisers (McAdam 1999). Instead, it emphasised the macro-political factors when accounting for the rise in social movement participation and concerned itself mainly with the request to change policies and laws and, therefore, the political system. It focused on interactions between social movement actors and the state, and the role of political opportunities in the mobilisation and outcomes of social movements (McAdam 1999; Staggenborg 2015). Political Opportunity Structure sought to examine what effects an open or closed institutionalised political system has on mobilisation. As a concept, political opportunity refers broadly to features of any political environment that will influence and shape a movement’s emergence and success, however, clear definitions of what constitutes a political opportunity differ considerably (Meyer 2004; Staggenborg 2015). In general, the approach posits that if a political system is open to a group or they have elite allies then social movement action is more likely to occur because the group perceives change to be possible. A key recognition of POS is that the choices activists, participants or organisers make—their agency—can be properly understood when the political context (or the structure) within which they make their decisions is considered. The context within which a social movement develops can determine the immediate outcomes of strategies employed by the movement and their potential longer-term impact (Meyer 2004). The Political Process and POS approaches also augment RMT by arguing that organising locally and organically is essential for sustained movement mobilisation and that activists must understand the changeable nature of power relations and frame public debates and protests accordingly. However, they retain an emphasis on the politico-institutional

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sphere and to some degree neglect the cultural-, social- and ideological-­ based factors of social movements and their participants. The emphasis on culture and ideology within the framing paradigm of social movement research was reinforced by the collective identity politics that had developed out of the 1960s and which came to be labelled New Social Movements (NSM) (Chesters and Welsh 2011; Tarrow 1998). The research conducted by NSM theorists in Europe emphasised symbolic activities in the cultural sphere as well as actions directed at the state (Touraine 1981; Offe 1985; Melucci 1989). As noted, the development of NSM and RMT approaches challenged and displaced psychological theories during the 1970s, but it has been argued that a synthesis of the two generated some of the key framing concepts about social movements, such as frame alignment (Connolly and Hourigan 2006). The more structural theories (RMT and POS) suggest that institutional constraints force movement action down certain paths regardless of how protestors think about the world. NSM theorists, however, considered the influence of culture on movement participants and (more importantly) the impact of social movement communication on framing and reframing culture. The concept of framing understood social movement communication as having an impact on the political sphere and possessing the potential to challenge the way the world is seen and understood. The framing perspective, then, emphasises the role that movements play, alongside the media, the state and other institutions, as signifying or framing agents in the construction of new cultural meanings (Snow and Benford 1988). These traditional approaches in the social movement paradigm emphasised organisational capabilities (RMT, POS, Political Process) and ideological function (NSM) of movements, but have paid relatively little attention to the content of communication. This book considers movement communication to have the potential to create the ideational elements of persuasive communication essential to a functioning democracy and sees movement-voter interaction as consciously operating in the political process in order to advance claims for actions and goals that seek to identify injustices or inequalities, assign blame and propose solutions. Social movements have long used various tactics to communicate these claims and goals to intended audiences, and the availability of networked technologies today has only served to improve message broadcasting and mobilisation.

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Social Movement Communication in the Digital Age Social movements communicate with a range of other political actors and organisations, such as the mass media and political parties, other social movements with similar aims, or other third-party organisations that may be sympathetic to the issues being communicated, as well as broader publics which may include existing supporters of the movement (Staggenborg 2015). They use a wide variety of collective action strategies and tactics to communicate, which have traditionally included street demonstrations or rallies, public statements, press releases, petitions, strikes, occupations, leaflets and posters, and all manner of other creative tactics (Tilly 2008). These tactics are part of a catalogue of actions that society understands as aspects of contentious politics, which Tilly and Tarrow (2007) describe as a repertoire of contention and Kriesi et  al. (2009) and Teune (2011) describe as a communication repertoire. Each communicative tactic can be part of a conventional toolkit that already exists or can be created by inventive organisers or participants of social movements (Tarrow 1998). With the emergence of digital technologies, social movements have expanded their repertoire to include online forms of communication that are now integral to social movements’ communication tactics (Atkinson 2017; Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Cammaerts 2015; Cammaerts et al. 2013; Kidd and McIntosh 2016; Flesher Fominaya 2014). For example, Twitter as a communication organisation tool has the capacity to direct traffic with symbols such as #, @ and URLs, to allocate resources to participants of collective action, and to increase transnational advocacy around globally resonant issues (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). These digital platforms can provide space for possible novel tactics, such as culture jamming, hacktivism and podcasts, to be transmitted with ease across ever wider networks, and play an important role in facilitating the mobilisation and coordination of offline action (Cammaerts 2015; Flesher Fominaya 2014; Jordan and Taylor 2004; van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Many scholars identify the 1999 Battle of Seattle demonstrations as the first example of offline mobilisation using the internet (Eagleton-Pierce 2001; Jordan and Taylor 2004; Norris 2002; Smith 2001; van Aelst and Walgrave 2004; van Laer and Van Aelst 2010), with the Don’t Attack Iraq protests in 2003 being the most widespread gatherings to be facilitated using online modes of communication (Tilly and Tarrow 2007). Web-­ enabled communication performed a similar function for United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) when the group organised a protest march against the

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war in Iraq in Washington, DC, in 2007 (Earl and Kimport 2011). Besides hosting a ride and housing board for activists to organise transportation and accommodation to and in Washington, DC, and the traditional ‘call for action’, the website offered instructions on how to post a button on Facebook or Myspace that showed support for the event (Earl and Kimport 2011). The function of this for UFPJ was a kind of web activism that is described by Earl and Kimport (2011) as ‘e-mobilisation’, understood as the use of web-based tools to organise an offline event. The orchestration of this march via the UFPJ website is a salient example of integrated mobilisation that utilised a webspace. Prior to this, in the early 1990s, the dissemination of the Zapatista movement’s message was facilitated by web-based distribution. Handwritten communiqués for distribution to the mass media were given to reporters who typed up and scanned them and then circulated them on the internet (Carty 2018). Thanks to this circulation, these first-hand accounts of developments in the region reached a wide-ranging population and led to the formation of strong international alliances (Carty 2018; Garrido and Halavais 2003; Martinez-­ Torres 2001; Wray 1999). But, as social movement scholars identify, the use of technology to communicate with wide audiences is not a new phenomenon (Carty 2018; Dalton 2012; Tarrow 2005). In the 1930s, Gandhi invited journalists and newsreel teams to record the 248-mile salt marches, and the images of peaceful participants being beaten by British soldiers exposed the brutality of the Raj and swayed public opinion in the UK towards Indian independence (Carty 2018; Dalton 2012). It was TV images of police violence against civil rights demonstrators that galvanised support for the movement, in the same way that footage of the Vietnam War motivated viewers to agitate for peace (Carty 2018). In each of these historically important events, the images that reorientated public opinion were captured by professional camera operators and news journalists. In the digital media age, it is often participants or bystanders of protests and demonstrations that capture footage, which can then be immediately uploaded and shared across multiple platforms. This fast dissemination of information and imagery captured by individuals who can produce and control content has powerful implications for political and social change. Without the need to seek permission from elites or adhere to newsroom agendas, real-time reporting of movement activity and messages across digital technologies has the potential to reach broader publics in quick and easy ways. One result of this horizontal peer-to-peer connectivity is the swift, mass mobilisation of concerned

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citizens to a cause. A salient example of this electronic grassrooting of civil society (Castells 2001) was seen in the world-wide and immediate response to the killing of George Floyd that sparked the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. As these examples demonstrate, movements have long utilised technology to draw attention to their struggles and communicative tactics are often premised on an analysis of the affordances of prevailing media environments (see Karpf 2016 for an extended discussion of media affordances and their role in ‘analytic activism’). The advent of the web and networked technologies has brought with it an increased and accelerated circulation of grievances, collective demands and imagery that is capable of reaching a wider audience than before (Cammaerts 2015; Gerbaudo 2012; Theocharis and Lowe 2016). Social movements have adopted and even emerged from technological innovations that facilitate mobilisation and information sharing, with some of the most widely used sites such as 38 Degrees, GetUp!, MoveOn and Change.org operating as campaign tools that foster a sense of political efficacy in those who use them (for discussions of these sites, see Chadwick 2013; Chadwick and Dennis 2017; Karpf 2012, 2016; Vromen 2017; Vromen and Coleman 2011). One of the main benefits to social movements of digital media and social technologies is a sharp reduction in organisational and resource costs (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Carty 2018; Earl and Kimport 2011). For example, it is free to start a Facebook group or a Twitter handle and relatively cheap to create and host a website through which to share information and coordinate events. This low cost is passed on to movement participants who are able to participate in political activity and show support for a cause without having to find time or money to attend an offline event. Low-cost participation is facilitated by movements’ e-tactics that are hosted online, such as petitions and email and online letter-writing campaigns (often through sites such as 38 Degrees, etc.). As discussed below, such online activity and participation often also has an offline component, emphasising that today’s movement repertoire includes digital media tools that sit alongside traditional tactics. In recent years, contentious offline action has been underpinned by digital media that has resulted in a shift away from established institutional affiliations such as trade unions and political parties in favour of networked on- and offline activism. The role of social media in networked collective action has produced a plethora of studies, particularly in the wake of the

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2010 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the 2011 Occupy movement (Castells 2012; Christensen 2012; Kidd and McIntosh 2016; Kreiss and Tufekci 2013; Flesher Fominaya 2014). This book does not focus on the value of digital or social media for social movements or the role that it plays in facilitating mobilisation and recruitment. Rather, the focus is on the technology as a means to a long-standing social movement end, that of communicating information and distributing movement agendas to a broad range of audiences. It is argued here that communication is essential to a healthy democracy and, as important political actors, social movement communication is important within a democracy because it aims to persuade audiences, challenge the status quo and provide alternative perspectives. It can be argued that movements offer a voice to those without institutional power, a space for concerned citizens to communicate with elites, and a sense of empowered participation in the political system.

Online Participation and Elections By discussing the small, but positive rise in online participation, this section grounds the discussion of electoral communication and movement-­ voter interaction in the current political landscape and establishes the importance of movement involvement in this sphere. Political participation is understood as essential in representative democracies, as it enables citizens to express their individual and collective interests and attempt to influence political decision-making (Grasso 2018; Pattie et al. 2004). The actions that constitute political participation traditionally include membership of a political party, volunteering for a party and voting in  local and national elections. However, these institutional modes of engagement are thought to be in decline and, as a result, there is a perceived crisis of democracy (Bessant 2014; Savigny 2017; Vromen and Coleman 2011). By broadening out what is considered to be political participation to include interactive, digital and creative collective action, we see that any collapse in engagement is not as pronounced as first thought. The steady rise of online activism and engagement in contentious political activity reveals that citizens are still involved in politics. Modes of participation that were once thought of as unconventional, including protests and demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins, signing petitions and online activism, now form part of the repertoire of political

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action, particularly among the young (defined in the literature as under 35s) (Grasso 2018; Pickard 2018; van Aelst and Walgrave 2001). Social movements are responding to this change and engaging with people differently: developing ways to connect with publics in a personalisable way and utilising internet-enabled digital and social technologies to communicate with varied audiences (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). With the rise of Web 2.0, the participatory potential of the internet has flourished, with political engagement or forms of ‘e-participation’ increasingly taking place through digital media, including activities such as ‘clicktivism’ and ‘hacktivism’, social media use for political purposes, and online petitioning and polls (Bimber et al. 2015; Dennis 2019; Gerbaudo 2012). As the use of digital media in general has become more widespread and mainstream, there has been an expected rise in the relationship between the use of online political information and participation in political process that extended beyond those that are already politically engaged and active (Bimber et al. 2015; Xenos and Moy 2007). Indeed, multiple studies conducted on the relationship between digital media and political participation have revealed a mostly positive relationship between the two (see Boulianne 2020). As noted above, the costs to individuals of participation in political activity is lower when conducted via digital and social media as it is less resource intensive to show support for a cause by clicking ‘like’ or retweeting content than it is to attend a demonstration or rally. Such ‘clicktivism’ has been understood in the literature on digital media and political participation as an effortless, superficial or inauthentic form of political participation, often derided as ‘slacktivism’ (Dennis 2019; Grasso 2018). However, there is an awareness among digital activists of the reputational risks of sharing political content (Dennis 2019), an acknowledgement that online participation models that of offline political activity (Vissers and Stolle 2014), and an emphasis on face-to-face participation for sustaining political activity (Boulianne and Theocharis 2018; Pickard 2018), particularly when it comes to building trust and strong ties (Cammaerts 2015). One major impact of the rise of online participation in elections and digitally enabled communication by movements is the exponential increase in the supply of information for voters. There are thousands of online sources that the electorate can access, ranging from the political parties and candidates themselves to the mainstream media and individual commentators. However, with examples of mis- and disinformation being spread online before and during election campaigns (Woolley and Howard

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2018), it must be noted that there are positive and negative consequences of the rise in online political participation (Bimber et al. 2015). In addition, there are existing inequalities to political participation, whether onor offline, that must not be overlooked (see Grasso 2018 for a discussion of socio-economic predictors). As the electorate’s use of the internet to find political information increased, so too did the likelihood of voters casting their ballot, particularly in the UK (see Bimber et al. 2015). To complement this, the use of targeted online advertising and viral campaign videos by political parties has also increased (Fowler et al. 2020; Howard 2006). By adopting social media technologies, political campaigners and parties expect to connect with citizens and voters (Howard 2006) and from the early 2000s, electioneering using digital media tools was given serious attention. Political parties in the UK enabled voters to customise official websites to make them relevant to their policy interests (Bimber et al. 2015) and the digital media–based 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was heralded as a remedy to declining electoral engagement (Earl and Kimport 2011; Theocharis and Lowe 2016). The use of newsletters and email distribution lists rose to prominence during this early phase of digital media use and has grown over the last decade. However, as expanded on below, with the over-managed style of institutional electoral communication comes voter distrust of the established political actor (i.e. the politician/media reporter), which has translated into a turn towards non-institutional actors, particularly in younger citizens (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). As such, the analysis of the communicative tactics of social movements is an important dimension in understanding democratic participation today. A number of scholars have called for the field of social movement studies to draw on the work conducted in political communication in order to analyse further the ways in which movements create and distribute political information and understand how movement messages are received (Earl and Garrett 2017; Karpf 2019; Sobieraj 2019). The central aim of this book is to enrich and deepen this cross-pollination by focusing on the electoral communication of movement groups, and it is in Chap. 3 that this work begins. For now, the following section turns to the linguistic instruments employed in traditional electoral campaigning techniques used by institutional actors and demonstrates that there is an overlap with movement-voter interaction, particularly that of PAAA and XR.

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Linguistic Instruments and Electoral Campaigning Techniques Although written about the US political landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dan Nimmo’s analysis of election campaigning techniques in his book The Political Persuaders still offers an insight into long-standing political communication strategies and tactics. For example, it is still a widely held view that election campaigns are essential features of democratic politics and that a “candidate’s conduct in an election campaign determines [her/]his success or failure” (Nimmo 2001: 33). Although a number of other key factors, such as the socio-economic conditions at the time of balloting, will determine the result of elections, campaigns are thought to form an essential element of the outcome (Arbour 2014; Norris 2004). Communication is a key aspect of political campaigning and campaigns are ultimately directed towards winning an election (Lilleker 2006; Nimmo 2001). Electoral campaigns seek to frame their message in a way that will persuade undecided and supportive voters and may aim to highlight the weakness of their opponent or promote recognition of a candidate (Arbour 2014; Lilleker 2006). Campaigners use strategies to communicate with the electorate in order to persuade them to vote for one candidate or party over another. Such strategies can be positive, elucidating one’s own policies and credibility, or negative, attacking the opponent through the use of ad hominem attacks (an attack aimed at a person rather than the argument or position that they are maintaining) or a process of delegitimisation, but both are utilised to communicate information to voters. The information is communicated not for its own sake but as a way to produce a shift in voting behaviour by persuading others to act. Simply conceptualised, persuasion is a process of attempts to change attitudes (Westwood 2015). The linguistic strategies involved in this process can draw on tactics aimed at legitimating one’s own argument or delegitimising those of other actors (Chilton and Schäffner 2002; Foster 2010; Partington and Taylor 2018). The task of political persuasion is to convince others to see things in the same light as the initial proposer has defined them (Finlayson 2007; see also Burnyeat 1994). This proposer could be, and in a democracy often is, the government, who seek to convince the populace that a specific action or policy direction is the best one. As this book argues, however, the communicative tactics of social movements also use techniques of persuasion to present practical arguments, the structure of which can be intimately linked with their capacity to

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persuade and ground decision-making. Yet, as a linguistic instrument in the arena of politics, the use of persuasive argumentation is often associated with politicians and political institutions where it is considered to be manipulative use of language by those in power (Chilton and Schäffner 2002), the most salient example being the use of ‘spin’ in political communication. The term ‘spin’ has become shorthand for the communicative practices used by governments and politicians. A spin-doctor is considered to be a professional persuader who tailors a (political) message in order to control what information, personal image or version of events reaches an audience (Partington and Taylor 2018; Savigny 2017). It originated in American politics and refers to methods of manipulation when communicating favourable images to the public. Spin has become synonymous with governmental message management and, for Paul Chilton, now reflects a public belief in the existence and significance of “discourse management by hired rhetoricians” (Chilton 2004: 8). It was this type of managed messaging that the PAAA wanted to expose in their communicative tactics when, in both 2015 and 2017, they appealed to the public’s general distrust of politicians and their alleged preference for rhetorical devices over substantive statements (see Chap. 3 and Rhodes 2020). However, to persuade someone or some group involves more than simple manipulation of what is presented or not. It includes advancing reasons, through argumentation, for action and the framing of the issue, and the explication of a claim for action through the medium of practical argumentation (Burnell and Reeve 1984). This latter characteristic of persuasion allows for the application of argumentation analysis (specifically Faircloughian political discourse analysis in this book) to non-institutional actors who are usually thought of as powerless. As detailed below, persuasion is a process of convincing someone or some group that X is good or the right action to take (Burnyeat 1994; Finlayson 2007; Westwood 2015). Whether that process is completed (i.e. the person or group is convinced) is not the only measure by which to assess the persuasive nature of the argument. An unsuccessful attempt at persuading someone to do something is still an attempt at persuasion and the argument can be analysed for its composition rather than its result (Burnell and Reeve 1984). Other linguistic choices of a speaker or writer can have a political function (Fairclough 2003, 2010; Machin and Mayr 2015; Wodak and Forchtner 2018) and some strategic functions of political discourse include (but are not limited to) the framing of an issue, issue ownership, positive or

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negative evaluations (which can include ad hominem attacks), and the use of delegitimisation and binary oppositions (‘us’ vs ‘them’). How a campaign frames its message to voters is important when seeking to understand the linguistic and discursive strategies used by different political actors. Campaigns are most effective when they employ persuasion techniques to construct and reinforce a brand image (Savigny 2004), recall “an accepted set of values that are easily accessible for voters and that can be activated by the rhetoric of other political actors” (Arbour 2014: 607), or raise the salience of an issue that is central to a political actor’s programme (Lilleker 2006). Political parties have reputations and credibility that have been built up over the years, which produces that party’s ownership advantage on specific issue (Bélanger and Meguid 2008; Petrocik et al. 2003). For example, in the UK the Labour Party are historically associated with the issue of the National Health Service (NHS) (Beckett 2016; Cowley and Kavanagh 2016, 2018) and have often based their core campaigning messages around healthcare. The Conservative Party have historically owned the issue of the economy (Beckett 2016; Cowley and Kavanagh 2016, 2018) and as such, built their most recent electoral campaigns around this. Applying issue ownership to the movement groups analysed in this book, PAAA’s campaigning has consistently centred around the issue of austerity policy and its impacts on the population of the UK, and XR’s actions have focused on the climate crisis, aligning their messaging with the long-standing environmental movement. Negative evaluations of your opponent is another feature of political campaigning. During election time, the incumbent party usually warns of the dangers of the opposing side and attempts to reveal and attack the presumed failings of their opponent (Partington and Taylor 2018). Conversely, positive campaigning is when a party heralds its own virtues by promoting them. In first-past-the-post-style electoral systems, such as those of the UK and US, the two main parties usually engage in negative campaigning (Nai and Walter 2015; Partington and Taylor 2018). The 2017 and 2019 elections proved outliers in this respect. In these elections, the opposition Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, offered a more positive message of itself to the electorate (Beckett 2017; Flinders 2017) despite negative campaigning by the incumbent Conservative Party (Beckett 2017; Shephard 2017). It was PAAA that employed negative campaigning and delegitimisation in their 2017 tactics (see Chap. 3). During the 2017 election, the movement group commissioned a political party-style billboard that described Theresa May as a threat to voter’s lives

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and promoted the protest song Liar Liar GE2017 that portrayed her as a liar in all her political decision-making. Through the use of an ad hominem attack, each tactic sought to negatively evaluate Theresa May and, by extension, the Conservative Party and persuade the electorate into not voting for them. This type of negative presentation forms part of the strategy of delegitimisation used in political communication. This is evident in the presentation of Theresa May as a ‘threat’, which is a common rhetorical tactic and arguably one used as a tool of propaganda and as a way to reinforce the pervasive binary opposition of ‘us and them’ (Partington and Taylor 2018; Wood and Finlay 2010). Analysis conducted after the July 2005 bombings in London revealed these to be a frequent technique employed in the portrayal of Islam, Muslims and multi-culturalism more generally as posing a threat to the white-British population by right-wing groups such as the British National Party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL) (Kassimeris and Jackson 2015; Wood and Finlay 2010). More contemporaneously to the 2017 and 2019 elections was the narrative surrounding the European Union and the issue of Brexit. In the lead up to the Referendum vote, the EU was represented (mostly by Eurosceptics) in the debate over membership as anti-democratic and a threat to national sovereignty (Todd 2015). John Todd’s analysis of discourse on Europe from 2013 reveals that in political speeches and newspaper articles, the EU was denoted as an authoritarian system of legislation, taxation and government that was threatening the sovereignty of the UK (2015: 82–87). A vote to leave the EU was conveyed as a way to ‘protect’ the UK from such a threat. The use of the term ‘threat’ in PAAA’a billboard was used in a similar way, to stir up a strong emotional response to a person and a (political) group and to delegitimise them. Although negative evaluations and delegitimisation might be key components of political campaigning, research has shown that negative campaigning not only lowers voters’ evaluations of the attacker’s target, but also increases cynicism and decreases trust in politicians and the political system in general (Fridkin and Kenney 2011; Lau and Rovner 2007; Nai and Walter 2015). In addition to this, exposing voters to such campaigning tactics results in them being less likely to participate in the electoral process because voters dislike trait attacks and, in general, consider them to be unfair (Fridkin and Kenney 2011; Lau and Rovner 2007). Throughout the 2019 election campaign, XR’s official campaigning avoided negative evaluations and trait attacks on the political establishment in favour of foregrounding arguments about the immediacy of the

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climate emergency. As the analysis in Chap. 3 shows, XR’s various tactics had the goal of ensuring the climate emergency was prioritised in public debate and policy-making. The group did so by drawing attention to and generating support for their Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, dubbed the Three Demands Bill, which included organising local climate hustings advertised to the public. These events sought to galvanise voters to ask questions directly of their local parliamentary candidate and place pressure upon them to adopt the Bill. In doing so, XR were addressing how party priorities related to the issue of the environment (already an issue of concern for the electorate in 2019), and inviting voters to participate in the political process by encouraging them to actively consider and engage with the position held by each political party and parliamentary candidate. XR did not seek to shape the electoral outcome by persuading voters which party to vote for; instead, the group invited voters to cast their ballots for a specific electoral (and societal) issue—the environment.

Research Questions and Method The argument in this book advances social movements as political actors that engage in communicative practices and electoral communication. If, following the framing tradition and New Social Movement theorists, the goal of movements is to effect change in society (whether institutional or cultural) then the ways in which they engage in political and electoral communication forms an important dimension of analysis in political communication and social movement studies. As a field of academic study, however, political communication is conventionally associated with the persuasive messages of institutional actors (politicians, parties and the press) and accompanying processes (election campaigns and advertising). But if electoral campaigns are designed to communicate with an audience to garner support from that audience (Lilleker 2006), then the analysis of these campaigns needs to consider the plethora of voices that seek to craft tactics and messages designed to appeal to voters. As noted, with more of the population, particularly in Western democracies, turning towards political information disseminated online and by social movements, analyses of the strategies and arguments employed in movement-voter interaction enhance the field of political communication and broaden social movement research. Such an extension draws in important political discourse that attempts to inform voters and present counter-arguments to

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the dominant positions. As such, understanding how social movements communicate during elections is an important aspect of understanding how democracy functions. This understanding situates the function of social movements as holding elites to account, in the same way that liberal theory considers this to be the media’s key function in democracy. To explore the ways in which social movements function as disseminators of persuasive messages and counter-arguments in elections, this study asks two questions: Research Question 1: During elections, what tactics do social movements use to enter the political debate and what arguments do they present to the electorate? Research Question 2: In what ways do movement arguments resonate with or challenge the broader political landscape in elections? To address Research Question 1, this study analyses the communicative tactics of the UK anti-austerity movement and environment movement, represented here by PAAA and XR, respectively. Each of the 21 unique tactics analysed is shown in Table 3.1 in Chap. 3. This book takes as its field of study the UK general election campaigns of 2015, 2017 and 2019. In order to accommodate the unexpected nature of the 2017 and 2019 general elections, and to ensure comparability across the three years, this study collected data from within the short campaign periods only. As such, the data collection is as follows: 2015 general election covered March 30 to May 7, 2015; 2017 covered May 3 to June 8, 2017; and the 2019 election covered November 6 to December 12, 2019. The substance of the analysis is the tactics and messaging therein from each movement group during the elections on the impact of austerity on healthcare (PAAA) and the environment (XR). These issues were chosen for their importance as electoral issues within the media and by voters: as analysis by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture has revealed, coverage of healthcare and the environment has remained in the top five themes across the media sector in each of these elections.1 This is complemented by data from Ipsos (2019) showing that voters considered both to be an important issue facing Britain in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 election years. To answer RQ2, 1  Loughborough University Centre for Research in Communication and Culture. General Elections. https://blog.lboro.ac.uk/crcc/general-election/. Accessed 10 January 2020.

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Table 2.1  The number of words analysed per section of the Conservative and Labour Party manifestos from the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections Manifestos

2015 (healthcare)

2017 (healthcare)

2019 (environment)

Labour Conservative

1780 words 1781 words

1809 words 1888 words

828 words 810 words

Table 2.2  The number of newspaper articles per title gathered in each election Newspapers

2015

2017

2019

Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and MailOnline The Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and mirror.co.uk The Sun The Guardian

43 21 15 19

26 13 6 27

10 7 20 26

General election 2015 and 2017 articles gathered using keywords ‘NHS spending’, ‘NHS funding’, ‘cuts’, ‘People’s Assembly’ with the date ranges of March 30–May 7, 2015, and May 3–June 8, 2017 General election 2019 articles gathered using keywords ‘environment’, ‘environment policy’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ with the date range of November 6–December 12, 2019

the broader political landscape is constructed from the healthcare (2015 and 2017) and environment (2019) sections of the Labour and Conservative Party manifestos in each election year and concomitant press reporting on each issue. Publications chosen were limited to: the Daily Mail including online content from MailOnline and its sister paper The Mail on Sunday; the Daily Mirror including online content from mirror. co.uk and its sister paper the Sunday Mirror; The Sun; and The Guardian. The basis for the choice of newspapers was distribution and partisanship figures, and this cross-section is representative of what is both numerically and ideologically dominant in the UK today. The press and manifestos in this study provide the political backdrop to the movement arguments and offer a broader context of action with which to critically evaluate the reconstructed practical arguments. The final number of newspaper articles and words per manifesto section analysed are displayed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 respectively. Political Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Content Analysis All items were analysed using tools from Faircloughian political discourse analysis (PDA) (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012) and Qualitative Content

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Analysis (QCA). The four premises that form a succinct practical argument in PDA afforded a framework through which to analyse the messaging of the movement groups and assess what the groups were asking people to do, which is fundamentally what politics is about, according to Norman Fairclough and Isabela Fairclough (2012). The structure of a practical argument consists of an agent’s circumstances (C) or context of action, a set of values (V) that an agent is or ought to be concerned with, a goal (G) or future state of affairs in which the agent’s values are realised or resolved, and a claim for action (A). A certain action (A) might connect an agent’s present circumstances (C) to a future state of affairs or goal (G) that s/he may wish to bring about. Within the goals premise there may be goals that, once attained, become the means to further goals (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012: 143). Underlying (G) is the agent’s values (V) that they are concerned with (or ought to be concerned with) realising, which are described as internally motivating the agent. An agent can be internally motivated to action by a concern (or value, e.g. fairness or justice) in which case they will perform an action because they are internally driven by a certain set of values. Even if the agent is not concerned to act (they are not motivated by values), there are external reasons that the agent has to act, such as obligations and duties. They provide agents with reasons for action independent of, or external to, the agent’s individual concerns. A certain action might connect an agent’s present circumstances to a future state of affairs (or goal) that they may wish to bring about, or they can perform the action because of a recognised external reason, such as duties or norms, even if they choose not to be concerned with the realisation of the value. These concerns belong to the circumstances premise (C). In this study, distinguishing the various premises of the overall argument presented by each group aided analysis of the communicative tactics and facilitated the identification of social movement-voter interaction over movement-party interaction. In each election, the group’s claims for action (in this study, asking the electorate to vote/not vote and exert political pressure) aimed at attaining a political goal that was underpinned by certain values (moral and ethical) and located within claims about the context of action or present circumstances (including natural facts about the physical world and institutional facts such as duties, promises, and other socially recognised values and norms). The analysis in Chap. 3 draws on this framework to present the arguments made by each movement group.

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QCA of the manifesto and media data facilitated identification of amplification or challenges to the arguments made by the movement groups. Press articles were gathered using the Nexis database of global newspapers. To create a corpus for each of the key election dates (outlined above), the following keywords were used to delimit the data set: ‘NHS spending’, ‘NHS funding’, ‘cuts’, ‘People’s Assembly’ (2015 and 2017) and ‘environment’, ‘environment policy’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ (2019). Each news item and manifesto section was coded in relation to the themes emerging from the movement arguments. For example, in 2015 and 2017 items were coded by ‘privatisation’, ‘austerity’ and ‘staff numbers’ and in 2019 by ‘flooding’ and ‘air quality’ in relation to the context of action identified by the movement groups. Certain values such as ‘trust’ appeared in all three elections, with ‘fairness’ coded as ‘protection of the most vulnerable’ in 2015 and 2017 and ‘intergenerational’ in 2019. A full coding manual for all nodes can be found at: https://www.abirhodes.co.uk/ c o d i n g -­m a n u a l -­u k -­a n t i -­a u s t e r i t y -­a n d -­e n v i r o n m e n t a l -­ campaigning-­2015-­2019. Chapter 4 reconstructs the manifesto and media landscape in each election and examines the extent to which the messages rooted in movement-­ voter interaction were amplified, endorsed or challenged in these traditional electoral communicative practices.

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———. 2004. Young People and Political Activism: From the Politics of Loyalties to the Politics of Choice? Civic Engagement in the 21st Century: Toward a Scholarly and Practical Agenda. University of Southern California, Conference Paper. Oberschall, Anthony. 1973. Social Conflict and Social Movements. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Offe, Claus. 1985. New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics. Social Research 52 (4): 817–868. Partington, Alan, and Charlotte Taylor. 2018. The Language of Persuasion in Politics: An Introduction. Oxon: Routledge. Pattie, Charles, Patrick Seyd, and Paul Whiteley. 2004. Citizenship in Britain: Values, Participation and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petrocik, John R., William L. Benoit, and Glenn J. Hansen. 2003. Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning, 1952–2000. Political Science Quarterly 118 (4): 599–626. Pickard, Sarah. 2018. Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in Britain in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rhodes, Abi. 2020. Social Movement-Voter Interaction: A Case Study of Electoral Communication by The People’s Assembly Against Austerity. Social Movement Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2020.1837103 Savigny, Heather. 2004. Political Marketing: A Rational Choice? Journal of Political Marketing 3 (1): 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1300/J199v03n01_02. ———. 2017. Political Communication: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shephard, Mark. 2017. Social Media and the Corbyn Breakthrough. In UK Election Analysis 2017: Media, Voters and the Campaign Early Reflections from Leading Academics, ed. Einar Thorsen, Daniel Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 98. The Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University. Smith, Jackie. 2001. Globalizing Resistance: The Battle of Seattle and the Future of Social Movements. Mobilization: An International Journal 6 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.6.1.y63133434t8vq608. Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1988. Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participation Mobilization. In From Structure to Action, ed. Burt Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow, 197–218. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Sobieraj, Sarah. 2019. Audiences in Social Context: Bridging the Divides Between Political Communications and Social Movements Scholarship. Information, Communication & Society 22 (5): 739–746. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369118X.2019.1568517. Staggenborg, Suzanne. 2015. Social Movements. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tarrow, Sidney. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. New  York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Teune, Simon. 2011. Communicating Dissent: Diversity of Expression in the Protest Against the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm. In Protest Beyond Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe Since 1945, ed. Hara Kouki and Eduardo Romanos, 86–102. Cambridge and New York: Berghahn Books. Theocharis, Yannis, and Will Lowe. 2016. Does Facebook Increase Political Participation? Evidence from a Field Experiment. Information, Communication & Society 19 (10): 1465–1486. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X. 2015.1119871. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilisation to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ———. 2008. Contentious Performances. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Sidney Tarrow. 2007. Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Todd, John. 2015. The British Self and Continental Other: A Discourse Analysis of the United Kingdom’s Relationship with Europe. ARENA Report No 1/15. https://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/arena-­ reports/2015/arena-­report-­1-­15.pdf. Accessed 20 November 2018. Touraine, Alan. 1981. The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Aelst, Peter, and Stefaan Walgrave. 2001. Who Is That (Wo)man in the Street? From the Normalisation of Protest to the Normalisation of the Protester. European Journal of Political Research 39 (4): 461–486. https://doi. org/10.1111/1475-­6765.00582. ———. 2004. New Media, New Movements? The Role of the Internet in Shaping the “anti-globalization” Movement. In Cyberprotest. New Media, Citizens and Social Movements, ed. Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, 97–122. London: Routledge. van Laer, Jeroen, and Peter Van Aelst. 2010. Internet and Social Movement Action Repertoires. Information, Communication & Society 13 (8): 1146–1171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691181003628307. Vissers, Sara, and Dietlind Stolle. 2014. The Internet and New Modes of Political Participation: Online Versus Offline Participation. Information, Communication & Society 17 (8): 937–955. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.867356. Vromen, Ariadne. 2017. Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement: The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Vromen, Ariadne, and William Coleman. 2011. Online Movement Mobilisation and Electoral Politics: The Case of Getup! Communication, Politics & Culture 44 (2): 76–94. Westwood, Sean J. 2015. The Role of Persuasion in Deliberative Opinion Change. Political Communication 32: 509–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/1058460 9.2015.1017628. Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Wood, C., and W.M.L.  Finlay. 2010. British National Party Representations of Muslims in the Month After the London Bombings: Homogeneity, Threat, and the Conspiracy Tradition. British Journal of Social Psychology 47: 707–726. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466607X264103. Woolley, Samuel C. and Philip N.  Howard. 2018. Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media. Oxford Scholarship Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190931407.001.0001. Wray, Stefan. 1999. On Electronic Civil Disobedience. Peace Review 11: 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659908426237. Xenos, Michael, and Patricia Moy. 2007. Direct and Differential Effects of the Internet on Political and Civic Engagement. Journal of Communication 57 (4): 704–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-­2466.2007.00364.x.

CHAPTER 3

Movement-Voter Interaction 2015–19 General Elections

Having established the overlap between movement messaging and traditional election campaigning in the previous chapter, I here focus on case studies of two UK movement groups—The People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) and Extinction Rebellion (XR)—in three general elections—2015, 2017 and 2019—to examine the communicative tactics employed. The case studies in this chapter serve as illustrative (rather than exhaustive) examples of how movement groups communicate during elections and demonstrate the theoretical dimension of movement-voter interaction developed in Chap. 1. The analysis draws on Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) political discourse analysis (PDA) framework outlined in Chap. 2 to deconstruct the tactics used by each group and to determine their articulated goals, claims for action, values and context for action on the key electoral issues of the National Health Service (NHS) (PAAA, 2015 and 2017) and the environment (XR 2019). Following the structure of practical arguments in this way offers a framework within which to assess the prevalence of movement-voter interaction in each election and the degree to which it features in an overall argument. It is revealed that the PAAA argument engaged solely in movement-voter interaction to persuade voters, while XR also included elements of movement-party interaction and indirect communication with voters. PDA also allows for each group’s claims to be examined in relation to any counter-arguments or claims that were found in concomitant mainstream press reporting and manifesto pledges, as explored in Chap. 4. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6_3

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Overview: Election Tactics and Data During the short election campaigning periods (March 30–May 7, 2015; May 3–June 8, 2017; and November 6–December 12, 2019), the movement groups produced a myriad of different communicative tactics. Across the 2015 and 2017 elections, the national PAAA launched a hashtag campaign #ManifestoOfMisery on Twitter that coincided with a mini-protest outside the Conservative Party manifesto launch in Halifax, published three podcasts, with one Election Special, and 28 articles via their website (http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/), crowdfunded an anti-­ Conservative billboard and promoted the protest song Liar Liar GE2017, which reached number one in the iTunes chart and number four in the UK’s official Top 40. In 2019, XR employed similar communicative tactics including a non-partisan billboard, a protest song (that did not form part of the group’s official campaign), an election special podcast and 24 articles on their website (https://extinctionrebellion.uk/). The group also released hashtags including one for the group’s overall campaign, #ElectionRebellion, and others aimed at parliamentarians that publicly asked them what emergency plan they had for the environment (#WhereisYourPlan), to #TellTheTruth, and called on them to sign XR’s Three Demands Bill (#SignTheBill and #ThreeDemandsBill). Most of the hashtags used aimed at voters, and these included #ElectionRebellion, #ActNow, #votefortheclimate, #VoteClimate and #DemandDemocracy. Both #ElectionRebellion and the Three Demands Bill, which had its own Twitter handle @XRdemandsbill, formed the basis of the group’s campaigning strategy and, as such, are considered in the analysis. Beyond these similarities, XR’s repertoire was broader and more expansive. A tactic early in the election saw XR activists sail a classic suburban house down the River Thames in the early hours of Sunday November 10, 2019. This tactic sought to highlight the threat that rising sea levels caused by climate change poses and was performed as extensive flooding was occurring in Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Both of these were followed by the prolonged direct action of the ‘UK ElectionRebellion Hunger Strike for People and Planet’ that began on November 18 and lasted one week. During this strike, letters were written to the leaders of the seven main parties in the UK to request a personal meeting to discuss support for the movement’s Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, dubbed the ‘Three Demands Bill’. Towards the end of the hunger strike, another letter was delivered to the Department of Education by 100s of scientists who

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marched through London to demand the curriculum be changed to include more information on the climate emergency. Towards the end of the month posters claiming, ‘Countdown to Election Day Zero’; ‘Demand Good Clean Debate Energy’; and ‘This Race Can’t Get Any Hotter’ formed part of the larger Paint the Streets (#PaintTheStreets) campaign that XR launched on November 30, the first day of their ‘12 Days of Crisis’ campaign. This campaign was central to XR’s communicative tactics and took the form of a series of non-violent direct actions (NVDA) aimed at “building up pressure during the 12 days leading up to the Vote” (XR 2019). There were nine distinct tactics carried out from November 30 until December 11, with activists sounding air raid sirens across the rocks of Hay Tor at dawn (Sound the Alarm), parading a six-metre-high ostrich with its head in the sand between political party headquarters in London (Ostrich), and staging a mock weather forecast read by the actor Emma Thompson outside BBC’s broadcasting house (Severe Weather Warning). Further tactics included mothers and babies holding roving feed-ins between party headquarters to deliver letters asking each party to consider the effects of the climate and ecological crisis on children (XR Mothers and Babies Feed-in). Another letter was sent to invite the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, to honour his promise to the then Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, to lie down in front of bulldozers and stop the construction of a third runway at Heathrow by attending a ‘Bulldozer lie-in’ and rally at the airport on December 8 (Bikes Against Bulldozers). Roads were blocked in London, Manchester, Weymouth, Yeovil and York in the Air We Grieve tactic to highlight air pollution, and to demonstrate other issues associated with the climate emergency (loss of the bee population, food vulnerability, extreme weather). XR activists also dressed in yellow-and-black bee outfits and glued themselves to each of the main parties’ campaign ‘battle buses’ (Bee-yond Politics). The 12 Days campaign ended with a ‘fossil fuel finale’ outside the Conservative Party HQ with Santas delivering coal to highlight the party’s perceived environmental failings (Stocking Filler). Running alongside these tactics were 12 performances (December 1–12, 2019) by Extinction Theatre and the Crisis Carol Choir and a myriad of videos published on XR’s YouTube channel that related to the election. Central to all these tactics and XR’s overall Election Rebellion strategy was getting the climate and ecological emergency to the top of the political agenda, to stress the importance of this election in demanding action, and to ask politicians to sign up to the Three Demands Bill. The Bill

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sought to legislate for action by the Prime Minister on the environment, such as a reduction in emissions and carbon footprint, protection of nature, and the creation of a citizens’ assembly to ensure that ordinary citizens were consulted on environmental policy. Throughout the entire campaign (November 20–December 4, 2019), local XR groups held climate hustings in their constituencies aimed at securing support for the Three Demands Bill from prospective parliamentary candidates. An estimated 300+ events took place, many across London, including Hammersmith, Battersea, Vauxhall and Streatham, but also in Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester. This chapter employs techniques from Faircloughian PDA to analyse the 21 unique tactics, 1787 tweets and 52 website articles gathered from both movement groups across the three election campaigns. These are displayed in Table 3.1, where the number given for each tactic refers to the instances that it appeared during the short election campaigning period. An * indicates the number of instances estimated by the movement group.

Movement-Voter Interaction: Case Studies The analysis follows the framework of practical argumentation in PDA to identify what PAAA and XR were calling for during the elections analysed here. It reveals the ways in which each premise of the groups’ argument was indicative of movement-voter interaction and/or aimed at movement-­ party interaction. Context of Action: Crises and Duties The context of action for all groups contained an element of crises that were identified as rooted in political decisions and concomitant duties that were expressed as alleviating these strains. For PAAA the crisis identified was the political decision to implement austerity that led to cuts to the NHS and its services, which had knock-on effects on patient care. For XR, it was political indecision that was preventing action being taken on the climate emergency despite the clear (natural) facts for an environmental crisis, emphasised by localised flooding in Derbyshire and Yorkshire during the election, and voter concern around the environment. For both groups, the duty to respond to these pressures and, in so doing, protect its citizens, lay with the government. For PAAA the State held the socially recognised and normatively binding duty to provide equal access to good,

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3  MOVEMENT-VOTER INTERACTION 2015–19 GENERAL ELECTIONS 

Table 3.1  Movement group tactics: The People’s Assembly Against Austerity in the General Elections of 2015 and 2017 and Extinction Rebellion in the General Election of 2019 The People’s Assembly Tactics

2015

2017

Extinction Rebellion

Total

2019

All years

Unknown amount

Unknown

12 Days of Crisis (in order) 1.

Posters – Paint The Streets

2.

Sound the Alarm

1

1

3.

Mothers and Babies Feed-in

1

1

4.

Bee-yond Politics

3

3

5.

Severe Weather Warning

1

1

6.

Ostrich

1

1

7.

Bikes Against Bulldozers

1

1

8.

Air We Grieve

1

1

9.

Stocking Filler

1

1

1 (in multiple places)

2

300+*

300+*

Carols

1

1

Floating 'Sinking' House

1

1

Unknown amount

Unknown

Hunger strikes

1

1

Letters

4

4

1

1

3

1

4

1

1 (unofficial)

2

12

12

1

1 1787

Billboard

1 (in 40 marginal seats)

Hustings

Flyers: ‘Tell Voters The Truth’

Marches/ demonstrations Podcasts

1 (post-election) 3

Protest song Theatre Three Demands Bill Twitter

(not collected)

670 (#ManifestoOfMisery)

683 (#ElectionRebellion) 247 (@XRdemandsbill) 187 (@XRebellionUK 49

49

19

9

24

52

YouTube videos Website

Each number given refers to the number of instances of the tactic. An * indicates the number of instances estimated by the movement group

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free healthcare for all its citizens, and for XR the government had a duty to protect people and the planet from an ecological emergency. In addition to the government’s duty, XR expressed the duty of the electorate to vote with certain facts in mind.  qual Access and Environmental Crises E In both the 2015 and 2017 elections the context of action, according to PAAA, was that of a crisis in the NHS after years of cuts and underfunding, which was putting financial pressure on the service and patients (PAAA Tactics: Website, 19/04/2017). The reason for this crisis, as expressed most often by the movement group in 2015, was the ‘programme of austerity’, which is referred to in a podcast as an “ideological assault that goes beyond cutting some spending. It is an ideological assault that is going to the root of the idea of public service or [the] Welfare State” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 3, 6/04/2015). This view aimed at informing the voting public and was summed up more plainly on the movement’s website: “Cuts are not only unnecessary but are a deliberate strategy to undermine state involvement in any form of public provision …” (PAAA Tactics: Website, 23/04/2015a). Such a strategy or assault was, for the movement in 2015, a political choice rather than an economic necessity. This is articulated by Matt Willgress of the North London People’s Assembly in Podcast 3 when he refers to the ideological choice of making “the population pay” for a crisis it did not create, which, PAAA claims, was implemented through the austerity imperative of cuts to public services. Here Willgress rearticulates Mark Blyth’s (2013) notion of ‘bait and switch’ that lays bare the ideological twist that saw an economic problem turned into a political problem of where to allocate blame. For PAAA in both elections, austerity was a way of normalising the underfunding of public services across broader society (austerity-as-­ covert-privatisation) and could be utilised by a government to encourage public acceptance of the (further) privatisation of public services (privatisation-­by-consent). The repetition that cuts to public spending was essential and the only way to handle public debt was, for the group, a necessary step in the process of obtaining privatisation-by-consent. One reason for this was that, at the time, the British public held the belief that healthcare should be funded by the taxpayer and implemented by the

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government.1 But, if it became an established ‘fact’ that austerity was a necessary condition for a recovering economy, then it could be possible for any future government to claim that, due to the restrictions of austerity, it would be unable to increase spending on the NHS.  One consequence of this is that the service would need to be delivered by an alternative, non-­ State, non-NHS provider, which forms the basis of PAAA’s argument against privatisation. The PAAA’s concern with privatisation was that it would lead to unequal access to treatment and limit the quality and quantity of care that patients can expect to receive (PAAA Tactics: Website, 31/05/2017). The standard of the material life of the population—the quality of care and everyday access to public services—was diminishing due to privatisation and underfunding of services and this was evident, they claimed, in “scandals from across Britain where basic levels of support and care were not available or not delivered within NHS establishments” (PAAA Tactics: Website, 23/04/2015b). In this web article, the group made specific reference to the issues at “Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust (half privatised at the time) and Hinchingbrooke Hospital (the first privately run hospital in Britain)”, where staff cuts, increasing workloads and reports of “critical life-saving equipment being brought out of retirement in place of buying newer models” led to “increasing numbers of patients being treated in corridors or car parks”. The group presented these ‘scandals’ to the electorate as a result of increased levels of privatisation instituted by the political decision to cut funding to the NHS. In addition to this, there were references to staffing shortages, described as “staff cuts” (PAAA Tactics: Website, 23/04/2015b), and lengthy GP waiting times, which were emphasised by PAAA’s Election Special Podcast (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 5, 24/04/2015), when a guest, Dr Walker, claimed that, from the GP’s point of view, the lengthening of GP waiting times was down to a reduction in funding (“cuts”) for social care. As will be discussed in Chap. 4, this issue was amplified by the mainstream media during the 2015 election campaign. For the movement group, people waiting longer to access services, staff shortages and privatisation were features of the programme of austerity that was causing a crisis within the NHS and impacting people’s material lives. This assessment of the circumstances underpinned all of PAAA’s movement-voter interaction. 1   2016 British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA 34): http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/ media/39145/bsa34_role-of-govt_final.pdf (last accessed 15/09/2018).

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In the 2019 election, XR also referred to “increased pressure on the NHS and emergency services” but assessed it to be “a direct result of climate and environmental breakdown” (XR Tactics: Podcast, 08/12/2019), stating that the “climate emergency is a health emergency” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019a). However, the group’s context of action focused on pressures faced in society caused by the climate emergency that was presented through natural facts (or facts about the physical world), and political indecision despite the presence of these facts. These natural facts were manifest for XR in: poor air quality that “sees 25 Londoners lose their lives each day due to air pollution” (XR Tactics (Air We Grieve): Website, 09/12/2019; Twitter, 09/12/2019b); food and water shortages (XR Tactics (Hunger Strikes): Website 23/11/2019, 25/11/2019, 26/11/2019, 27/11/2019, 29/11/2019, 02/12/2019, and 10/12/2019; Podcast, 08/12/2019; Twitter 01/12/2019a and 05/12/2019a); and flooding, heavy rainfall and storms (XR Tactics: (Floating ‘Sinking’ House and Severe Weather Warning): Website 10/11/2019, 26/11/2019, 27/11/2019, 05/12/2019 and 10/12/2019; Podcast 08/12/2019; Twitter 05/12/2019b). It was the latter of these facts that was the most salient for voters during the 2019 election campaign. During the first two weeks of the election campaign, widespread flooding in Derbyshire and Yorkshire hit the headlines in broadcast media (see Chap. 4, for more). The flooding, described as a “political issue”, provided the context of action within which XR’s voter focused discussion of the “very real risk” that climate change posed to “homes, businesses and families” was conducted (XR Tactics: Website, 10/11/2019). Tweets focused on highlighting to the electorate the effects that the floods were having on “people’s lives across the country”, including flooding fields leaving “Millions of tonnes of crops […] rotting in drowned fields” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019b). The impact of this natural catastrophe was highlighted by articles on the group’s website and, innovatively, by a ‘sinking’ house that was floated down the River Thames in early November 2019. The tactic was staged to draw public attention to the threat that rising sea levels, caused by climate change, posed to the UK and the rest of the world unless action is taken. This echoed the message expressed to voters in the Election Special Podcast and the Severe Weather Warning tactic that questioned the adequacy of politicians’ responses to the crisis. For XR, the flooding was a tangible event that rendered the climate emergency an undeniable fact in 2019. However, the group’s message to

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voters was that politicians and the government (at the time the Conservative Party) were unwilling to engage with the issue or call the flooding a national emergency. This was expressed as a line in the Crisis Carols tactic (“5 oceans rise”) and most saliently during the Severe Weather Warning tactic. Along with 20 other activists, actor Emma Thompson stood in front of maps that showed which London Tube lines and coastal areas around the UK were most at risk of flooding. Flanked by XR activists in goggles and swimming caps, Thompson delivered a mock weather forecast warning: General consensus does suggest that there’s an imminent crisis forecast. But not for politicians, who seem to think that this moist and fertile rain is ideal for a growing economy. … All the signs are telling us to act now, but as our chief adviser, King Canute, once said ‘never let a rising tide get in the way of a good election’. (XR Tactics: Podcast, 08/12/2019)

The sarcasm here lampooned governmental inaction on what XR considered to be “the biggest threat humanity has ever faced” (XR Tactics: Website, 27/11/2019), and was an issue that was emphasised to the public in communication on the group’s concern with trust (outlined below). In a similar way to PAAA, it was the impact on the standard of material life that was a fundamental feature of the crisis—people were losing their homes and livelihoods due to floods—but for XR, it was political inaction that was creating the pressures that affect people in society, rather than a decision to implement policy as it was for PAAA. Each element of these perceived crises was articulated through tactics that aimed directly at communicating with the electorate and sought to define a set of circumstances that was not being recognised by institutional actors. The communication of these crises is indicative of movement-voter interaction in that the tactics aimed at entering public debate and discourse to inform voters of specific issues (the programme of austerity and the environmental crisis) and to heighten awareness of the material impacts caused by them.  overnmental and Voter Duties G Both groups engaged in movement-voter interaction when they outlined governmental duties to relieve the pressures generated by each issue in tactics aimed at the voting public. The cornerstone of PAAA’s context of action was that it is the government who had a duty to protect patients and

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provide accessible, good quality and well-resourced healthcare, which the group claimed in 2015 and 2017 was being eroded by private providers. On their website and in each podcast, the concept of equitable access to healthcare as a normatively binding duty held by the State was communicated to voters (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 6/04/2015, 04, 12/04/2015, 05, 24/04/2015; Website, 23/04/2015a, 30/05/2017). For PAAA, this duty was being eroded by austerity because, as the underfunding of public services was becoming normalised across society, it was becoming easier to advance the idea of an increase in the private provision of public services (austerity-as-covert-privatisation). This aspect of the group’s context of action fits with the wider anti-austerity movement, of which PAAA is a part, that understands cuts to the funding of public provision as part of the broader neoliberal agenda of reducing the role of the State in welfare provision (Brown 2005; Cammaerts 2018; Crouch 2011; Seymour 2016). In a similar way, although not explicitly expressed by XR tactics during the 2019 election, the broader environmental movement sees neoliberal globalisation and ever-increasing consumerism as responsible for environment degradation and delivering poverty and injustice across the globe, with particularly deleterious effects in the global south (Asara 2017; Brulle and Rootes 2015; Doherty and Doyle 2013; Doyle and MacGregor 2014; Wall 2005). Such perspectives are the preserve of anti-systemic movements that, according to Arrighi et al. (2011 [1989]), are those that seek to change the system within which they operate. Both groups, while not aiming to overturn the overarching neoliberal system during these election campaigns, were seeking to make changes to the political debate and to reorientate policy-making in order to maximise well-being and minimise harm. For XR in 2019, this took the form of calling “on all political parties’ duty of care for the current and future wellbeing of everyone in the United Kingdom and globally” (XR Tactics: Website, 14/11/2019). Like PAAA, XR’s context of action in 2019 considered the social fact that the government had a duty to protect its own citizens, and that duty rested in taking action to prevent “incalculable human suffering” (XR Tactics (March): Website, 21/11/2019). The duty was communicated to voters with the claim that institutional actors were choosing to do nothing, which the group asserted was a “dereliction of [their] duty” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 06/12/2019b; Website, 27/11/2019). Resting upon this inaction is the second duty for XR: the public’s duty to vote with the relevant facts in mind. The electorate were being asked not to ignore the

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natural facts (outlined above) and #VoteClimate. Included in almost every web article was the sentence: “Extinction Rebellion believes it is a citizen’s duty to rebel, using peaceful civil disobedience, when faced with criminal inactivity by their Government”. Voting was viewed as direct action and one underpinned by another voter duty: exerting pressure “to ensure the Climate and Ecological Emergency is the number one issue” in the 2019 election (XR Tactics: Website, 26/11/2019). This pressure, it was hoped, would lead politicians to sign up to the Three Demands Bill, and such political pressure formed part of both groups’ claims for action discussed below and demonstrates their engagement in movement-voter interaction. A Concern with Values: Fairness and Trust The two most prominent values both movement groups were concerned with are fairness and trust. Fairness was communicated to voters as a form of protection both in the present (protecting the vulnerable now—PAAA) and future (protecting future citizens—XR). A lack of trust in politicians to tell the truth to voters was expressed either as simply lying to citizens about an issue (PAAA) or as downplaying the size of an issue and taking a head-in-the-sand approach to decision-making (XR).  resent and Future Fairness P The value of fairness communicated to the electorate by both movement groups was concerned with protection: protecting the vulnerable (PAAA) and protecting future generations (XR). In 2015, PAAA’s focus was on fairness as protection of the worst off that emphasised the need to shield the most vulnerable in society from the effects of austerity and the resulting cuts to the funding of services. These cuts to public provision were viewed as unnecessary and unfairly disadvantaging the poorest in society. To lend weight to their concerns, the communicative tactics from PAAA across both elections contained elements of the normative argument against austerity. In several tactics aimed at the voter, austerity was assessed by the movement group as unfair in two ways. Firstly, the impact of the cuts had been shouldered by the people least able to bear them, with cuts disproportionately impacting upon the poorest people and communities in society (PAAA Tactics: Website, 31/05/2017) and those “who are already experiencing shortages of income, jobs, education and housing” (PAAA Tactics: website, 23/04/2015a). Secondly, the cuts implemented by austerity had not caused the positive change to the financial circumstances of

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the UK by 2015 that was predicted in 2010, and so it failed on its own terms: austerity was “far from effectual in resuscitating the UK economy” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 06/12/2015). Overall, the message to voters was that, as an economic policy, austerity was not the fairest way to share the burden of debt repayment because cuts unfairly disadvantage and adversely affected the poorest and most vulnerable in society as they are hit the most by cuts to public provision. A similar message was conveyed by XR in 2019  in that the climate emergency was “disproportionately impacting our poorest and most vulnerable communities” (XR Tactics: Website, 10/11/2019). For XR, the concern for fairness centred around protecting the environment now, so that the lives of future generations would be more secure. This view relates to the concept of intergenerational fairness that forms the basis of the system of intergenerational reciprocity, which is maintained in society at the familial level (parents provide for children, children provide for elderly parents) and societal level (working adults providing, via taxes, for both older and younger dependents) (Harper 2010). XR’s concern for intergenerational fairness was rooted in the familial level, with calls for parents and grandparents to look after future generations by making decisions about the environment now. On Twitter, demands for “intergenerational policies to protect us and future generations on planet Earth” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 02/12/2019) were communicated to voters and these were echoed by the voices of activists in the street (see XR Tactics: Website, 02/12/2019b). The XR Mothers and Babies Feed-in was the communicative tactic that expressed the urgency most saliently. Sitting alongside banners asserting “Climate Change Kills Children” and wearing sashes with the simple words “Their Future” written on them, the mothers occupied the pavement outside party HQs. The tactic placed the responsibility to make decisions to ensure a fairer future for the younger generation firmly with the government, which complemented the institutional fact that the government had a duty to act, as mentioned above. It represented a form of movement-party interaction by XR in that it sought to communicate directly to leaders of the main political parties. In a letter from the mothers, the politicians were asked to recognise the impact of the climate and ecological crisis on children across the world when making policy decisions. However, the performative nature of the tactic meant that the concern for intergenerational fairness was communicated indirectly to passing members of the public and directly to voters through XR’s website (XR Tactics: Website,

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02/12/2019b) and Twitter handle (XR Tactics: Twitter, 03/12/2019a). XR’s concern with intergenerational fairness was also communicated directly to voters via messages from the hunger strikers: a tactic that physically embodied intergenerational fairness with the nine XR activists ranging in age from 18 to 83. The message on intergenerational fairness from the hunger strikers was baldly stated by Peter Cole, a 76-year-old emeritus professor and grandfather: “This climate emergency is going to wreak havoc on our children’s and grandchildren’s lives so it behoves the generation who have been partly responsible for generating climate change to take drastic measures to make authorities act” (XR Tactics: Website, 27/11/2019). This messaging further illustrates movement-voter interaction in the emphasis it places on the current voting-age cohort’s duty to cast their ballot with the climate in mind and take responsibility for the current crisis. Further demonstrating movement-voter interaction and intergenerational fairness were tweets that cited the electorate’s duty to cast their ballots, with some simply exclaiming, “Vote for your kids! #ClimateElection” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019c), and others claiming, “How we vote this Thursday will affect the lives of generations to come #GE2019. [Th]ere are some of the brilliant youths that unfortunately will not be able to have any input in the upcoming election. Let’s vote for their futures on Thursday. #ElectionRebellion” (XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019c). Both conceptions of fairness were communicated by the groups in order to spark debate over the ways in which we should interact with and act towards particular issues. The majority of the tactics communicating this value were voter-facing and were thus examples of movement-voter interaction.  olitical Trust: Trusted to Tell the Truth P The value expressed most consistently by both movement groups across all the elections was that of trust. It was expressed via movement-voter interaction as a negative, as a lack of trust in politicians to tell the truth in general and about either austerity (PAAA) or the climate crisis (XR) specifically. For PAAA, tactics conveyed to the electorate a broad mistrust in the ‘Tories’ (calling them liars in 2017) and the party’s economic competence (2015). In the case of XR, politicians were painted as not being trusted to communicate effectively with voters or make the decisions needed to protect the planet or future generations.

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In their 2015 movement-voter interaction, PAAA drew on the dimension of ‘truth telling’ by attempting to reveal to the electorate that politicians were not to be trusted to be honest about austerity and its impact on people. In Podcast 3, the host, Jordan Reyne, analysed the budget speech that George Osborne gave two weeks before the start of the 2015 election on March 18. She informed listeners that the budget was “an exercise in secrecy and unsound statistics” that contained “openly misleading information” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 6/04/2015). The implication of her claims is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2015 was employing statistics out of context in order to deliberately misinform the voting public that the austerity measures implemented in 2010 had reduced the deficit. In doing so, the PAAA were communicating to the electorate that austerity was not working and that the Conservatives were prepared to massage the figures to convince the public that it was. The movement-­ voter interaction in this election did not go as far as calling the Chancellor a liar, but in 2017, the PAAA were not so subtle. To convey mistrust in politicians to voters in 2017, the movement group openly called the incumbent Prime Minister, Theresa May, a liar. The PAAA promoted the protest song Liar Liar GE2017, which was performed by the band Captain SKA and available for download during week four of the general election campaign (PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017). It called into question the legitimacy of the sitting government by steering those that heard it towards a negative moral evaluation of Theresa May as an inherent liar. The lyrics focused on the then Prime Minister, featuring three clips taken from speeches and news interviews with her as examples of when she is alleged to have lied in the past, and these were interspersed with other lyrics and the chorus: “She’s a liar, liar… you can’t trust her, no no no no”. One example focused on the calling of the snap general election, through a clip of Theresa May on The Andrew Marr Show from the September 4, 2016, episode stating: “I will be very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability, to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing. I’m not going to be calling a snap election”. This is presented as standing in contrast with the fact that seven months later, she called the snap general election for which the song was released. The song builds on a long-standing tradition of mistrusting the Conservatives, particularly with public services (“Nurses going hungry, schools in decline”) and branding the party liars (Cowley and Kavanagh 2016). It also connected with the weakness of May’s character that was circulating in broader political discourse and, through their

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movement-voter interaction, strategically appealed to the electorate to use a heuristic of trust (Rhodes 2020). The personal attack on May would have resonated with voters due to U-turns over the dementia tax and abandoned budget changes to national insurance for the self-employed. This was coupled with trust in May’s premiership being questioned by other electoral commentators over her unwillingness to take part in televised debates, which served to dent her credibility (Ridge-Newman 2019, 138). There is, however, a danger that this form of negative campaigning could further alienate the politically disengaged, but in 2017, Sam Fairbairn, then PAAA’s National Secretary, saw the group’s communicative tactics as a necessary corrective: “we want to expose the lies behind Theresa May’s soundbite rhetoric” he told the Daily Mail (Birks and Rhodes 2017). Such a statement is in keeping with the goal of exposing (Conservative) government spin expanded on below. References to lying were scarce in XR’s tactics and any direct mention of this trait was from members of the public engaging with the group on Twitter. There was an implication that politicians were being dishonest because they were “taking money from the biggest polluters” (the gas and oil industry) (XR Tactics: Twitter, 12/12/2019a), but this featured in only two tweets. One point of correlation between the movement groups was in the highlighting of participation in televised debates. As noted above, May’s appearance on The Andrew Marr Show was lambasted by PAAA in 2017, and in 2019, the absence of Boris Johnson from a televised leaders’ debate, focusing on the environment, and from a series of interviews by Andrew Neil was exploited by XR. The Climate Debate was held on Channel 4 and featured all party leaders with the exception of the Conservatives. The nonappearance of Boris Johnson led to several tweets asking why he was missing, and some of the ‘bees’ in the Bee-yond Politics tactic attempted to ask him why he and his Party had not been engaging in the televised climate debates or local election hustings (see later, for more on the Hustings as a tactic). In addition to these, a six-foot ostrich with its head in the sand made its way to the Tory Party HQ on December 6. It was wheeled there by activists alongside a video screen on a van showing Andrew Neil’s challenge to Boris Johnson to submit to a face-to-face interview that the presenter made at the end of his programme on Thursday December 5, 2019. The innovative and striking action sought to highlight the Prime Minister’s head-in-the-sand approach to climate policy, and XR’s concern with not trusting politicians to make the decisions needed to protect the planet or future generations. Such tactics are

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more consistent with movement-party interaction and the direct communication by movements with institutional actors than with movement-­ voter interaction. However, like the XR Mothers & Babies Feed-in tactic mentioned earlier, the ostrich would have been seen by passers-by and so represented a form of indirect communication with voters. There was one element central to XR’s overall Election Rebellion strategy that was found in all communications, whether movement-voter or movement-party interactions, and that was the first demand of the Three Demands Bill. The demand to “Tell the truth by declaring a Climate and Ecological Emergency and do all in their power to communicate the urgency for change, including working with government and other institutions” went straight to the heart of the group’s concern with trust. The impetus behind this demand was the view that politicians and governments across the world were failing to communicate the severity of the climate emergency, which built on the unwillingness of political elites to act on the natural facts given in the context for action. Across Twitter, the hashtag #TellTheTruth accompanied a sixth of all XR tweets collected and the majority (85%) were examples of movement-voter interaction (the figure includes messages that targeted only voters and those targeting both voters and candidates in one tweet). These ranged from calls to “Vote for the Planet” and “Educate yourself before voting this week”, to requests to send messages to local candidates on the issue of air pollution (XR Tactics: Twitter 08/12/2019, 09/12/2019d, 10/12/2019a, 12/12/2019b). Voting was described as “direct action” in several tweets from the @ XRebellionUK handle linking to a short video on YouTube informing the electorate that they have a “voice”, a “choice” and a “vote” (XR Tactics: Twitter 10/12/2019b). The 27-second video is indicative of movement-­ voter interaction in that its message focused on drawing voter attention to a specific issue, namely extreme weather events, flash floods and other natural facts referred to in XR’s context of action. The tactic drove home the movement group’s concern with trust with a spoof breaking news headline stating that the “Government declares everything is fine”, followed by images of climate destruction—floods and fires—and fake footage of the House of Commons on fire while MPs debate climate policy. The imagery invoked the head-in-the-sand approach to decision-making exemplified by the ostrich and called upon voters to #ACTNOW to change this behaviour. Another salient example of direct communication with the electorate was a short YouTube video, uploaded in the early part of the campaign and disseminated on Twitter, that sought to engage voters in

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the creation and distribution of XR’s ‘Tell Voters The Truth’ flyers (XR Tactics: Twitter 03/12/2019b). The design of the flyer aimed at informing voters of their local party candidates’ records on climate change ahead of polling day and is indicative of consciousness raising in movement-voter interaction. By producing the flyer template, XR actively engaged in highlighting a specific concern related to the environment (candidate’s climate voting records) that could affect the way in which voters cast ballots, ultimately placing pressure on institutional actors (i.e. voting them out of office). (Not) Voting and Political Pressure: Claims for Action There were two types of claims for action from both movement groups in each of the three elections. The action of voting or not voting was directed at voters and called for by XR in 2019 and PAAA in 2017, respectively. In 2015, PAAA’s claim for action was to put post-election pressure on the newly elected government to put an end to the programme of austerity. This tactic aimed at mobilising voters to challenge the issue of austerity and formed the final element of PAAA’s movement-voter interaction. A similar claim to exert political pressure was called for by XR in 2019, but the action came during the election campaign in the form of asking prospective parliamentary candidates to support the Three Demands Bill. Hustings were arranged by local XR groups and voters were called upon to contact their local parliamentary candidate and ask that they attend. This tactic is representative of a hybrid of movement-party and movement-­ voter interaction in that it was targeting political parties and their candidates, but also called directly upon the electorate to participate and communicated the importance of such participation. Voting/Not Voting Building on the duty to vote outlined in the context of action, XR’s claim for action was voting. Casting your ballot with the climate in mind (XR Tactics: Website, 26/11/2019) was what the group thought people ought to do in light of the natural facts they had identified, and doing so would achieve the goal of having a political and policy landscape that prioritises the climate emergency (as discussed below). Examples of movement-­voter interaction proliferated across Twitter, with calls to “vote wisely” increasing as polling day got closer (XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019d, 11/12/2019, 12/12/2019c), and on the eve of election

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day, political-style billboards started to appear across London stating, ‘The Polls Are Now Open Melting #ActNow’ (see XR Tactics: Twitter 12/12/2019d). All of the calls to vote concerned the issue of the environment rather than political parties, maintaining the group’s non-partisan status. In contrast, the PAAA’s 2017 claim for action was to call on the electorate to not vote for the incumbent Conservative government. The movement’s claim to action focused closely on the crisis in the NHS and the resulting pressures faced by people as a consequence of a dereliction of duty, specifically by the Tories, identified in the context of action above. The communicative tactic that most saliently expressed this to voters during the 2017 election was the crowdfunded billboard. There were 40 billboards in key marginal seats, each aping traditional political party advertising and presenting Theresa May, and by extension her Conservative government, as a “threat” (PAAA Tactics: Billboard). They addressed viewers in the second person to emphasise the impact austerity policies had on “your local hospital, your child’s education, your standard of living, your job security, your pension, your peace and security”. Each one ended with the strapline “Don’t vote Conservative on June 8th #ToriesOut”: an action that would attain the goal of removing the Conservative government. Political Pressure In addition to (not) voting were the movement groups’ claims to put pressure on politicians to meet their demands. The overarching claim for action that formed part of XR’s Election Rebellion was getting politicians to sign up to the Three Demands Bill, which was indicative of the group’s hybrid of movement-party and movement-voter interaction. As noted above, the Bill sought to legislate for action by the Prime Minister on the environment and “calls for the Government to declare an emergency, commit to zero emissions by 2025 and create a Citizens’ Assembly to set out how we achieve this” (XR Tactics: Website, 25/11/2019). During the 2019 election campaign, XR groups held climate hustings in their constituencies that aimed to secure support for the Bill from prospective parliamentary candidates. Each of the 300+ hustings invited local candidates to attend a hustings specifically to answer questions from the electorate about the environment and what their party planned to do about it if they were elected. With voters citing the environment as one of the top four issues facing the country (YouGov 2019), the pressure on those standing to turn up to discuss an electorally salient issue was high and

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would have chimed with XR’s movement-voter interaction on the issue of the climate. The tactic resonated with politicians, with a high number of tweets from candidates stating that they were supporting the Three Demands Bill, and several from voters thanking them for agreeing to sign up. The Bill and the hustings were a way for the group to leverage voter concerns with the environment and place pressure, through indirect voter communication, on the political elite ahead of the election and in order to attain their goal. By contrast, PAAA’s claim for action in 2015 was to mobilise for a demonstration on June 20, 2015, over a month after the election, in an attempt to place pressure on the newly elected government to end austerity. The impetus behind the demonstration was that, at the time, “every major party remain[ed] committed to austerity” and a mass mobilisation would send a “clear message to the new government that we demand an alternative to austerity” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 04, 12/04/2015). The message was communicated to the public in each of the tactics PAAA employed in 2015. In a website article on May 11, six weeks before the demonstration, the group told supporters, “Now is the time to mobilise, to spread the word and to put everything we have into showing the full force of anti-­ austerity opinion in Britain” (PAAA Tactics: Website, 11/05/2015). In each of the podcasts, the host told listeners that a “major national demonstration” would be held to have “our voices heard” and to “ask whoever the new government turns out to be to End Austerity Now”. The demonstration, although held after the election and therefore holding little power over the new Conservative government, aimed at achieving their goal to set the agenda and change the debate on austerity. Goals: Setting the Agenda In keeping with the theoretical dimension of movement-voter interaction outlined in Chap. 1, the main goal of each movement group in all of the elections analysed here was to set the electoral agenda through public debate. Each group had a different strategy in each election and concomitant tactics to achieve this. In both election campaigns, the aim for PAAA was to challenge the foundations of austerity and protect the NHS from the threat of privatisation. To achieve these goals in 2015, the group disseminated information via websites and podcasts with the aim of changing the public and political debate around the issue of austerity. In 2017, the aim was to expose the Conservative government’s spin and rhetoric and

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the tactics centred around 40 large billboards claiming that Theresa May was a “threat” to the public, and a protest song, both discussed above. Like PAAA in 2015, XR’s approach was to ensure that the climate emergency was prioritised in public debate and institutional politics and all of the tactics (shown in Table 3.1) were instrumental in getting this message across. Taking each election year in turn, the following outlines the ways in which the groups entered the discursive landscape. The overarching goal of PAAA in 2015 was that of ending the programme of austerity that was leading to privatisation, and this was to be achieved through raising awareness of the issue and changing the debate. Changing the debate included the use of ‘wordy’ tactics, such as podcasts and written web articles that signposted to voters the galvanising character of collective action. One example of this was in Podcast 3, where an interviewee and PAAA organiser, Matt Willgress, tells listeners about the movement in Greece and the pressure that the strikes and community campaigns had on the situation of the Greek people.2 He claimed that without these “massive movements against austerity”, the country “wouldn’t have got to the stage where there was a possibility of austerity and the cuts being reversed” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 6/04/2015). Willgress goes on to offer some UK examples of people getting together in “really prominent national and local campaigns” to say “‘we’re not taking this anymore’ and [they] fought back against it” (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 6/04/2015). He mentions non-specific campaigns about the Bedroom Tax and the Living Wage, on which, he states, Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party in 2015 adopted a strong stance during the election campaign. This feature of the group’s movement-voter interaction follows the logic of mobilisation and information dissemination, but had a limited reach in the political landscape at the time. By 2017, PAAA moved away from the aim of information dissemination on austerity and turned towards a more interactive offering with their billboard, hashtags, mini-protest and protest song. The goal in 2017 was to replace the Conservative government by attempting to reveal its ‘true 2  For such research see: Kanellopoulos, K., Kostopoulos, K., Papanikolopoulos, D., and Rongas, V., ‘Competing modes of coordination in the Greek anti-austerity campaign, 2010–2012’, Social Movement Studies, 16:1 (2017), 101–118; Sergi, V., and Vogiatzoglou, M., ‘Think globally, act locally? Symbolic memory and global repertoires in the Tunisian uprising and the Greek anti-austerity mobilizations’, in Understanding European Movements: New social movements, global justice struggles, anti-austerity protest, ed. by Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox (Oxford: Routledge, 2013).

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intentions’, which, for PAAA, were to use austerity as a way of implementing privatisation (austerity-as-covert-privatisation) and being derelict in their duty to provide functioning healthcare services to all. This was manifest in several tweets linked to #ManifestoOfMisery that targeted voters and used a sarcastic register to emphasise private healthcare, and another, more cryptic, referring to the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente and hinting at the Conservative government funding them rather than “#OurNHS” (PAAA Tactics: Twitter, 19/05/2017). The implication here is that if NHS patients were to require health insurance from a private company to obtain medical treatment then the Conservative’s 2017 pledge that care “should be based on clinical need, not the ability to pay” (Conservative 2015: 37) would be exposed as mere political rhetoric to gain votes. This message chimes with PAAA’s claims elsewhere that the Conservative Party were a threat to hospitals and misleading in its claims about the effectiveness of austerity. Across its communicative tactics, XR were a lot more explicit in their intention to enter public debate and set the political agenda. Prior to the start of the 2019 election campaign, XR announced their Election Rebellion campaign and the purpose of it, which was to get the climate and ecological emergency to the top of the political agenda. From October 31, 2019, the date of XR’s first anniversary, the group revealed an intention to do “everything they can” to ensure that the climate emergency was “the defining issue” of the election (XR Website, 31/10/2019). By putting the environment at the top of the list of priorities, XR would attain their future state of affairs: a political and policy landscape that prioritises the climate emergency. This was at the heart of the Election Rebellion strategy and clearly articulated on XR’s website in mid-November: “Our objective is to put the Climate and Ecological Emergency at the top of the agenda for this election” (XR Tactics: Website, 14/11/2019). All nine of the 12 Days of Crisis tactics were designed to achieve this goal, beginning with Sound the Alarm which saw local XR groups across the UK heading out with air raid sirens, pots and pans, sound systems, and more, to usher in the 12  Days actions. On the same day, activists also raised the Flag of Extinction on public buildings, schools, offices, town halls and landmarks—with or without permission—in order to garner attention from the voting public. But it was the tactic on the fourth day, dubbed Bee-yond Politics, that explicitly encapsulated the group’s goal and exemplified indirect voter communication and the group’s movement-­ party interaction. On XR’s website, the description of this tactic stated:

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This election, the Climate and Ecological Emergency needs to be at the top of the agenda. We know this. But some of our esteemed politicians seem to have forgotten. A swarm of creative die-ins along the campaign trail should remind them. (XR Tactics: Website, 26/11/2019)

To garner engagement from political parties, XR activists dressed in yellow-and-black bee outfits and glued themselves to each of the main party’s campaign ‘battle buses’. The main aim of this movement-party interaction was to physically stop the election campaign trail and directly discuss the crisis of climate change (as described in the context of action above) with the leaders of the main political parties. Bees surrounded the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative Party buses and set about confronting the politicians with the claim that they were irresponsible in their policy-making and questions around how they would tackle the climate emergency in government. The tactic was reported on in the press with articles often including the voices of the ‘bees’ (see Chap. 4), which amplified the movement’s message and indirectly communicated it to the voting public. As with the hunger strikes and feed-ins described above, this tactic is representative of movement-voter interaction; while targeting the party politicians directly, it elicited mediated interaction with voters that may in turn have led to pressure from the electorate in the form of voting with the climate in mind.

Summary and Conclusions The case studies above reveal that both movement groups engaged in movement-voter interaction to differing degrees. In the 2015 and 2017 general election campaigns, PAAA engaged solely in movement-voter interaction in adopting novel strategies to try to enter the political debate and reach the wider electorate. During the short campaigning periods, the movement published podcasts, crowdfunded anti-Conservative billboards and brought back the protest song with the number one hit Liar Liar GE2017, as well as maintaining an active presence online and launching successful hashtag campaigns such as #ManifestoOfMisery on Twitter. The target of each of these tactics was the electorate, and the content sought to negatively evaluate the incumbent government and austerity policy in general. In 2019, XR employed similar communicative tactics such as launching an election-focused hashtag, producing non-partisan billboards and releasing an election special podcast. But unlike PAAA, whose movement-voter

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interaction focused closely on asking people to not vote for politicians who could not be trusted, XR’s direct voter communication focused on making politicians electable by asking people to target them and demand that they sign up to the group’s Three Demands Bill. As such, the goal of XR tactics was championing direct democracy by putting pressure on parliamentary candidates to ‘listen’ to the people. The goal of PAAA’s tactics was to get voters to use their vote in a certain way and, in doing so, change the government that the UK had in 2015 and 2017. Both groups were engaging in the practice of electoral campaigning, with PAAA’s communicative tactics focusing solely on the electorate and XR combining voter messaging with movement-party interaction in some instances. XR’s communication was broadly representative of movement-voter interaction, particularly when communicating governmental and voter duties and a concern with trust, but the group also focused on securing support from the candidates and leaders from across all parties. The group sought to implement new environmental policy and/or influence decision-­ making around the issue and that requires direct communication with institutional actors to achieve. Tactics such as XR Mothers and Babies Feed-in, the hunger strike, the ostrich, climate hustings and Bee-yond Politics aimed at communicating directly with political leaders by occupying spaces that institutional actors access during elections, such as party headquarters and battle buses. Each featured direct calls to change policy by demanding that prospective parliamentary candidates sign up to the Three Demands Bill and, as such, were representative of movement-party interaction. What this reveals is that XR’s movement-party interaction aimed at promoting their pro-policy campaigning (advancing environmental policy changes), which stands in contrast to PAAA’s voter-focused anti-policy (reversing austerity policy) communication. Overall, the force of movement-voter interaction in this study lay in communicating moral evaluations to the electorate (trust, fairness, duties) and highlighting natural/social facts within the political landscape to lend weight to them. This emphasises the defined function of movement-voter interaction, given in Chap. 1, as discursive, in that it aims to set the public-­ political agenda by conveying ideas, values and beliefs about the world with a view to changing social or cultural norms on a particular issue. By contrast, the function of movement-party interaction in this study was policy formation or setting the agenda in the institutional arena. Chapter 4 explores this arena by examining the way in which the institutional actors of the party and the press endorsed, amplified or challenged the movement group’s arguments outlined above.

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Tactics PAAA Tactics: Billboard, https://www.reportdigital.co.uk/stock-­photo-­ theresa-­may-­i-­am-­a-­threat-­billboard-­by-­the-­peoples-­assembly-­against-­ photojournalism-­image00109122.html PAAA Tactics: Podcast 03, 6/04/2015, ‘The People’s Assembly Podcast – Episode #03’ https://soundcloud.com/the-­peoples-­assembly/the-­ peoples-­assembly-­podcast-­episode-­03?in=the-­peoples-­assembly/sets/ the-­peoples-­assembly-­podcasts PAAA Tactics: Podcast 04, 12/04/2015, ‘The People’s Assembly Podcast  – Episode #04’ https://soundcloud.com/the-­peoples-­ assembly/the-­peoples-­assembly-­podcast-­episode-­4?in=the-­peoples-­ assembly/sets/the-­peoples-­assembly-­podcasts PAAA Tactics: Podcast, 05, 24/04/2015, ‘The People’s Assembly Podcast – Episode #05 (Elections Special)’ https://soundcloud.com/ the-­p eoples-­a ssembly/the-­p eoples-­a ssembly-­p odcast-­e pisode-­0 5-­ e l e c t i o n s -­s p e c i a l ? i n = t h e -­p e o p l e s -­a s s e m b l y / s e t s / the-­peoples-­assembly-­podcasts PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017, ‘Captain SKA  – Liar Liar GE2017’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxN1STgQXW8 PAAA Tactics: Website, 22/04/2015, Can the Welfare State Afford to Be Cut by a Further £12 Billion? http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/ can_the_welfare_state_afford_to_be_cut_by_a_further_12_billion PAAA Tactics: Website, 23/04/2015a, ‘Education Cuts: Evident at All Levels’ http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/education_cuts_evident_ at_all_levels PAAA Tactics: Website, 23/04/2015b, ‘Challenging the Austerity Approach to Healthcare’ http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/ challenging_the_austerity_approach_to_healthcare PAAA Tactics: Website, 11/05/2015, ‘Six Weeks to the Biggest Demonstration in Years’ http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/six_ weeks_to_demo PAAA Tactics: Website, 19/04/2017, ‘#ToriesOut!’ http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/toriesout PAAA Tactics: Website, 30/05/2017, ‘Austerity Fight  – Feature Film’ http://www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/austerity_film XR Tactics: Podcast, 08/12/2019, ‘Election Special – Extinction Rebellion Podcast’ https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/election-­special-­ extinction-­rebellion-­podcast/id1456115700?i=1000459073610

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XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019a, Extinction Rebellion Newham XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019b, Extinction Rebellion Leicester XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019c, XR Hastings & St Leonards XR Tactics: Twitter, 01/12/2019d, Extinction Rebellion Leicester XR Tactics: Twitter, 02/12/2019, XR Islington XR Tactics: Twitter, 03/12/2019a, Extinction Rebellion UK XR Tactics: Twitter, 03/12/2019b, Tell Voters The Truth XR Tactics: Twitter, 05/12/2019a, XRNorwich XR Tactics: Twitter, 05/12/2019b, Extinction Rebellion Newham XR Tactics: Twitter, 06/12/2019b, XR Rebel Every Day XR Tactics: Twitter, 08/12/2019, Extinction Rebellion Aberdeen XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019a, XR Richmond-upon-Thames XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019b, XR Writers Rebel XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019c, Extinction Rebellion UK XR Tactics: Twitter, 09/12/2019d, Extinction Rebellion Chester XR Tactics: Twitter, 10/12/2019a, XR Ipswich XR Tactics: Twitter, 10/12/2019b, Extinction Rebellion UK XR Tactics: Twitter, 11/12/2019, XR Writers Rebel XR Tactics: Twitter, 12/12/2019a, XRHaringey XR Tactics: Twitter, 12/12/2019b, Extinction Rebellion Manchester XR Tactics: Twitter, 12/12/2019c Extinction Rebellion Newham XR Tactics: Twitter, 12/12/2019d, Extinction Rebellion Leicester XR Website, https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-­truth/demands/ XR Website, 31/10/2019, https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/10/ 31/9356/ XR Tactics: Website, 10/11/2019, ‘Act Now – Our House Is Flooding’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/11/10/act-­now-­our-­house­is-­flooding/ XR Tactics: Website, 14/11/2019, ‘Monday 18 November: Extinction Rebellion to Begin Global Climate Hunger Strikes in 22 Countries’ https://extinctionr ebellion.uk/2019/11/14/monday-­1 8-­ november-­extinction-­rebellion-­to-­begin-­global-­climate-­hunger-­strikes-­ in-­22-­countries/ XR Tactics: Website, 21/11/2019, ‘Scientists March on Westminster Urging Election Hopefuls to Listen To The Science’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/11/21/scientists-­m arch-­o n-­w estminster­urging-­election-­hopefuls-­to-­listen-­to-­the-­science/

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XR Tactics: Website, 23/11/2019, ‘Global Hunger Strike Day 6: Meetings with Three UK Political Parties Confirmed’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/11/23/global-­h unger-­s trike-­d ay-­6 -­ meetings-­with-­three-­uk-­political-­parties-­confirmed/ XR Tactics: Website, 25/11/2019, ‘Global Hunger Strike Day 8: Extinction Rebellion Hunger Strikers Continue into Second Week, Demanding Leaders to Act Now’ https://extinctionrebellion. u k / 2 0 1 9 / 1 1 / 2 5 / g l o b a l -­h u n g e r-­s t r i k e -­d a y -­8 -­e x t i n c t i o n -­ rebellion-­h unger-­s trikers-­c ontinue-­i nto-­s econd-­w eek-­d emanding-­ leaders-­to-­act-­now/ XR Tactics: Website, 26/11/2019, ‘Election Rebellion: Twelve Days of Crisis’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/11/26/election-­rebellion-­ twelve-­days-­of-­crisis XR Tactics: Website, 27/11/2019, ‘Global Hunger Strike Day 10: Plaid Leader Pledges to Push for Citizens’ Assemblies. Seven Activists on Tenth Day of Hunger Strike in London’ https://extinctionrebellion. uk/2019/11/27/global-­hunger-­strike-­day-­10/ XR Tactics: Website, 29/11/2019, ‘Hunger Strike Day 12: UK-Wide Occupations of Political Party Offices Announced’ https://extinctionr ebellion.uk/2019/11/29/hunger-­s trike-­d ay-­1 2-­u k-­w ide-­ occupations-­of-­political-­party-­offices-­announced/ XR Tactics: Website, 02/12/2019a, ‘Day 15: Hunger Strikers Begin Third Week with Further Meetings with Political Leaders’ https:// extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/02/day-­15-­hunger-­strikers-­begin-­third­week-­with-­further-­meetings-­with-­political-­leaders/ XR Tactics: Website, 02/12/2019b, ‘Climate Change Kills Children: Extinction Rebellion Mothers and Babies stage Mass “Feed-In” at Party HQs’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/02/climate-­change-­ kills-­c hildren-­e xtinction-­r ebellion-­m others-­a nd-­b abies-­s tage-­m ass-­ feed-­in-­at-­party-­hqs/ XR Tactics: Website, 05/12/2019, ‘Severe Weather Warning | Emma Thompson’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/05/severe­weather-­warning-­emma-­thompson/ XR Tactics: Website, 09/12/2019, ‘The Air We Grieve: Extinction Rebellion Block Central London Road to Demand Action on Deadly Air Pollution as Hunger Strikers Continue into Fourth Week’ https:// e x t i n c t i o n r e b e l l i o n . u k / 2 0 1 9 / 1 2 / 0 9 / t h e -­a i r-­w e -­g r i e v e -­ extinction-­rebellion-­block-­central-­london-­road-­to-­demand-­action-­on-­ deadly-­air-­pollution-­as-­hunger-­strikers-­continue-­into-­fourth-­week/

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XR Tactics: Website, 10/12/2019, ‘BREAKING: Extinction Rebellion UK Glue Themselves to Tory Battle Bus and Ask the Conservative Government “Where Have You Been?” This #ClimateElection’ https:// extinctionr ebellion.uk/2019/12/10/br eaking-­e xtinction-­ rebellion-­u k-­g lue-­t hemselves-­t o-­t or y-­b attle-­b us-­a nd-­a sk-­t he-­ conservative-­government-­where-­have-­you-­been-­this-­climateelection/

References Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 2011 [1989]. Anti-Systemic Movements. London: Verso. Asara, Viviana. 2017. Social Movements and Resistance. In The Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society, ed. Clive L.  Spash, 173–182. Abingdon: Routledge. Birks, Jennifer, and Abi Rhodes. 2017. Civil Society and Grassroots Voices in the Election Coverage. In Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Newsletter Three-D, 28. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brulle, Robert J., and Christopher Rootes. 2015. Environmental Movements. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, vol. 7, 2nd ed., 763–768. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B9780-­08-­097086-­8.91016-­X. Cammaerts, Bart. 2018. The Circulation of Anti-Austerity Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Conservative Party. 2015. Strong Leadership, a Clear Economic Plan, a Brighter, More Secure Future. The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015. https://www. conservatives.com/manifesto2015. Accessed 15 September 2017. Cowley, Philip, and Dennis Kavanagh. 2016. The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave Macmillan. Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Doherty, Brian J., and Timothy Doyle. 2013. Environmentalism, Resistance and Solidarity: The Politics of Friends of the Earth International. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Doyle, Timothy, and Sherilyn MacGregor. 2014. Environmental Movements Around the World. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford: ABC Clio/Praeger.

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Fairclough, Norman, and Isabela Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Harper, Sarah. 2010. The Capacity of Social Security and Health Care Institutions to Adapt to an Ageing World. International Social Security Review 63. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­246X.2010.01374.x. Rhodes, Abi. 2020. Social Movement-Voter Interaction: A Case Study of Electoral Communication by The People’s Assembly Against Austerity. Social Movement Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2020.1837103. Ridge-Newman, Anthony. 2019. “Strong and Stable” to “Weak and Wobbly”: The Conservative Election Campaign. In Political Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election, ed. Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, 131–148. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­00822-­2_9. Seymour, Richard. 2016. Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. London: Verso. Wall, Derek. 2005. Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-­ Globalist and Radical Green Movements. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. XR. 2019. XR UK Election Rebellion Kitlist. https://docs.google.com/ document/d/1xrCg3TrvfxbYkO1Oho5o5e0qiGGD8C1f0T1-­p tXuNsw/ edit#heading=h.qcmgo3eysxdy. Accessed 4 December 2019. YouGov. 2019. Political Trackers (25–26 Nov update). https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/politics/articles-­reports/2019/11/26/political-­trackers-­25-­26-­nov-­ update. Accessed 10 January 2020.

CHAPTER 4

Movements, Manifestos and the Media

This chapter considers the mainstream media reporting and manifesto chapters on the issues of healthcare and the environment. It draws out where the media and manifestos amplified or challenged the messages contained in the movement-voter interaction of The People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) as outlined in Chap. 3. The prevailing political landscape in each election is briefly described before turning to the comparative analysis. In 2015, the language of austerity was being employed by both of the main political parties and in the media (Cowley and Kavanagh 2016). The PAAA tried to challenge that language, but their communicative tactics did not engage the broader electorate. By 2017, the public’s appetite for the ‘make-do-and-mend’ spirit of austerity was waning (Clery et al. 2017), and there were institutional actors who were more inclined to talk about the negative consequences of austerity policies and to suggest alternatives that PAAA and other anti-austerity movements had long been campaigning for (Blumler 2019). In 2019, not only were voters citing the environment as a top priority (YouGov 2019), but throughout that year, XR made UK headlines with their protests and numerous deliberately disruptive non-violent direct actions, with the intention of drawing attention to the climate and ecological emergency. As the general election approached, XR embarked on a series of tactics in an effort to ensure that the environment continued to be at the forefront of the political agenda. Despite this, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6_4

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analysis from Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC) revealed that media coverage of the environment remained low throughout the campaign and the issue did not appear in the top five election themes (Loughborough CRCC 2019). The purpose of this chapter is not to demonstrate whether the electoral campaigning of XR or PAAA achieved a shift in media discourse or political actors’ actions or manifesto pledges; rather, it focuses on the ways in which movement-voter interaction was congruent with the broader political landscape during each election. To do so, it follows the structure of Chap. 3 and the framework of Faircloughian political discourse analysis (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012) and employs qualitative content analysis to explore the points of agreement or contention between each movement group’s arguments and the electoral messaging of institutional actors, such as the political parties and the press.

Movements in the Media and Manifestos To get a clear picture of the electoral landscape in 2015, 2017 and 2019, this section draws on the manifestos of the two biggest parties in the UK—Conservative and Labour—and an ideologically balanced selection of newspapers: the Daily Mail, including online content from MailOnline and its sister paper The Mail on Sunday; the Daily Mirror, including online content from mirror.co.uk and its sister paper The Sunday Mirror; The Sun; and The Guardian. For practicalities of scale, a threshold of 3000 words per newspaper article was set and the key topics of healthcare (National Health Service, or NHS) and the environment delimited the breadth of reporting. Similarly, only the chapters on healthcare and the environment were chosen from the manifestos. The final number of newspaper articles and manifesto pages analysed are displayed in Chap. 2 in Tables 2.1 and 2.2. In this section, the media and manifestos are analysed in relation to the movement arguments in Chap. 3 and situated in the broader political context. Austerity and the Environmental Crisis: What the Papers and Parties Say The healthcare crisis, caused by the ‘programme of austerity’, that was communicated to voters by PAAA in both elections also featured mid-­ election in 2015 across both manifestos and all the newspapers in the

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study with the exception of The Sun. The main focus of these actors was on the issues of staffing levels and GP waiting times discussed by PAAA, although the left-leaning Daily Mirror did draw a connection between underfunding and privatisation. These issues featured less in 2017, and it can be argued that this was the result of the election of the left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn to Labour leader in September 2015, which shifted the weight of anti-austerity discourse by 2017 (see Cammaerts 2018 for a discussion of the political mainstreaming of the anti-austerity argument in this year). In their 2015 manifesto, the Conservative Party stated that they had increased NHS staff numbers and “slashed” waiting times (Conservative 2015: 37–38). This was disputed by Labour who claimed that the NHS was “struggling with staffing shortages”, which they accompanied with a pledge to invest in more doctors and nurses (Labour 2015: 33). For Labour, the crisis lay in Accident and Emergency (A&E) and GP waiting times and a lack of patient access to tests and treatment (Labour 2015: 33), whereas the Conservatives claimed that the NHS was coping well with increasing demand and patient satisfaction was at its highest for years (Conservative 2015: 37). These competing claims respectively amplified PAAA’s assertion that the NHS was in crisis and challenged them. It was in reports in the press that PAAA’s voter communication found more agreement. The crisis in the NHS referred to in PAAA’s movement-voter interaction was amplified in mirror.co.uk (Gregory April 1, 2015a) and MailOnline (Stevens April 20, 2015) articles when the papers reported Labour’s manifesto claims that the service was in “crisis” as patients were starting to turn to overstretched A&E departments because of long waits for GP appointments (Labour 2015: 34). A reason given for increased GP waiting times is proffered as an element of the context for action by PAAA, when, as noted in Chap. 3, Dr Walker claimed that it was due to massive cuts in social care (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 5, 24/04/2015). These cuts to social care were also referenced by Labour who used them to attempt to undermine the Conservatives in 2015. According to Labour, the Conservative’s manifesto claim that they had protected the NHS budget was undermined by the cuts of “billions of pounds” to funding for adult social care (Labour 2015: 32): a view that was referred to in articles in The Guardian commenting on the Local Government Association (LGA) and National Audit Office (NAO) reports on the issue (LGA 2013; NAO 2014). The media reports highlighted the contents of the two documents that revealed local

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councils were experiencing a real-terms reduction in government funding of 40%, which had a significant negative impact on spending on services, including a 9% reduction to adult social care (Rutter March 30, 2015; Smith April 13, 2015). The result of reductions to spending on adult social care was that people were attending A&E for treatment and remaining in hospitals despite being ready to be discharged (for more details, see The King’s Fund 2015). Pressure was then placed on hospital capacity and the NHS budget. This issue is noted by Dr Walker in the podcast (PAAA Tactics: Podcast 5, 24/04/2015) and echoed in a letter from leading doctors that appeared in The Guardian. The letter baldly stated, “Queues in A&E, delays in discharge, the lack of community services and joined-up care [we]re due to the savage cuts in social care” (Campbell May 6, 2015b). In mirror.co.uk, there were descriptions of “A&Es in meltdown” (Blanchard May 5, 2015), with waiting time targets reported in The Guardian as having not been met for a year, “making it the service’s worst performance in a decade” (Ramesh April 7, 2015). According to NHS England figures reported in MailOnline and mirror.co.uk, over 400,000 people waited longer than four hours in hospital emergency wards before being either admitted, transferred or discharged in the first three months of 2015 (McTague April 7, 2015; Gregory April 27, 2015c). The number of patients who waited longer than four hours in A&E had increased in 2015 by 302% since 2009/10 from 353,617 to 1,421,191 (Gregory April 27, 2015c). It was articles, mainly from the left-leaning press, that drew the link between rising waiting times and privatisation, which was central to PAAA’s argument. It is useful to note here that as part of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the Private Patient Income (PPI) cap had increased the amount of private work that NHS Trusts were permitted to take on from 2% to 49% (Clause 162, HSCA 2012). By 2015, mirror.co.uk reported that some underfunded NHS Trusts were taking on more of this private work to maximise their income, even though “their own waiting lists soar[ed]” (Beattie April 25, 2015a) and, in The Guardian, patients were reported as having “to endure longer waits for treatment” as hospitals maximised income from private patients (Campbell April 25, 2015a). The result, according to Andy Burnham, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary in 2015, was the potential for the NHS to “end up as ‘a two-tier service’, with those paying privately being prioritised over other patients” (Campbell April 25, 2015a). This is a view that finds agreement with PAAA’s concerns around the threat of privatisation leading to unequal

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access and austerity as a way of enabling more private companies to deliver healthcare (austerity-as-covert-privatisation). For example, the use of PPI by NHS Trusts enabled them to accept payment from private individuals, rather than solely from collected tax revenue. As such, increasing the PPI cap advantaged those citizens who could afford to pay for treatment and, conversely, disadvantaged those who could not by making them wait longer for treatment. The media reporting also acknowledged the movement’s argument for austerity-as-covert-privatisation when they revealed that private patients were becoming a source of income for NHS Trusts. As the article in mirror.co.uk (Beattie April 25, 2015a) claimed, “… stats show the average income which NHS Trusts are bringing in from private patients has soared by a staggering 58% since 2010”. This income was providing much-needed money to fill the growing budget deficits that NHS Trusts were reporting, which is an element that is missing from the PAAA’s movement-voter interaction. The movement group’s claims around the programme of austerity (a programme that, for the movement, led to understaffed and privatised services that could not provide excellent standards of healthcare) were found in the manifestos and amplified in the left-leaning mainstream media. However, reporting by the latter centred around claims made by the main parties and other civil society actors (i.e. Trade Unions) rather than PAAA’s communicative tactics. In both the 2017 and 2019 elections, there was a spike in news stories and media reporting directly on both movement groups’ tactics. The appearance of PAAA’s 2017 tactics in the print press and beyond is discussed below. For now, we turn to media reporting around the climate crisis, specifically focused on the natural facts as presented by XR, and the environmental sections of the 2019 Labour and Conservative manifestos. Turning first to the manifestos, there was an acknowledgement from both parties that there is a climate and environmental emergency, with Labour echoing XR’s direct voter messaging by declaring that the 2019 election was about “the crisis of … the climate and environmental emergency” and the Conservative’s recognition of the “climate emergency” (Labour 2019: 11; Conservative 2019: 55). For both parties, the priority for dealing with the climate emergency was delivering economic growth and job opportunities, and the substantive policy pledges in both manifestos were centred around ‘green’ investment. There were promises to fund infrastructure projects such as the development of clean or low carbon transport networks (Conservatives 2019: 43 & 55; Labour 2019: 13 &

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19–21) and green, low-carbon energy technologies, including off- and onshore wind farms (Conservatives 2019: 55; Labour 2019: 14–15). The pledges on energy concentrated on reducing energy bills for consumers and creating jobs (unionised ones for Labour (2019: 15)). All of these sat next to assurances to plant more trees and tackle plastic pollution (Conservatives 2019: 55; Labour 2019: 23–24). Each manifesto also mirrored the natural facts found in XR’s movement-­ voter interaction, with Labour reiterating the Air We Grieve tactic by claiming that “polluted air contributes to over 40,000 premature deaths a year” and making a pledge to “introduce a new Clean Air Act” and “clean air zones” (Labour 2019: 22–23), and the Conservatives stating that they would “support clean transport to ensure clean air, as well as setting strict new laws on air quality” (Conservative 2019: 55). Unlike XR’s argument, there was no mention of the food and water shortages due to the climate emergency in either manifesto, however in a subsection on ‘Food’, Labour does acknowledge that “[a] quarter of all food purchased is wasted every year, equivalent to over 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, costing over £20  billion” (Labour 2019: 23). Despite this being in the ‘Environment’ chapter of the manifesto, this subsection focuses closely on the social justice impact of food wastage over food insecurity caused by changes to the climate. The chapter refers to “ending ‘food bank Britain’”, ensuring that “everyone has access to healthy, nutritious, sustainably produced food”, and pledges to “establish a National Food Commission” (Labour 2019: 24). Overall, the focus was on sustainable farming and food production practices over and above the issue of food vulnerability that XR’s direct voter communication aimed at highlighting. The issue of flooding did receive attention from both parties, with the focus of manifesto pledges on prioritising funding for flood defences (£4 billion from the Conservatives and £5.6 billion for Labour). There was no reference to XR’s messaging around climate-based causes of flooding, nor a direct undertaking to address them. However, these causes were both amplified and endorsed in several newspaper reports on incidents of flooding across Derbyshire and Yorkshire in November 2019. Across the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and The Guardian there were references to the flooding and its impacts on people’s homes and livelihoods, in conjunction with the climate crisis. It is reporting from The Guardian that focuses most closely on manifesto pledges and quotes responses from all of the parties on the issue of flooding (Carrington December 8, 2019). The Conservatives referenced the “impacts of climate

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change” in relation to investing in flood defences, while Labour used their platform to call for the re-democratisation of water companies. The newspaper also reported on proceedings from various institutions in relation to the floods and the climate. One example, in a piece by Murray and Carrington on November 12, 2019, made use of Met Office records to highlight the percentage increase in rain and referred to the UK government’s own Committee on Climate Change (CCC). The article reiterated the same message from XR to voters that politicians weren’t acting on the information that they had by reporting the CCC’s warning that there “were no areas where the government was preparing properly for climate impacts” (although the Committee was also reported as saying that “flood planning was making progress”, a view of inaction that is expanded on below). In the Daily Mirror, reporting focused on “heart-breaking scenes” as people were being “forced to flee” their homes and businesses from “raging flood waters” (Byrne November 11, 2019). Interviews with residents of Yorkshire who lived near the River Don related to Daily Mirror readers experiences of water coming up through the floor, cattle being “up to their bellies in water”, “submerged gardens and scattered belongings” and “evacuations” by the fire brigade (Byrne November 11, 2019). The following day, November 12, in a short piece in the same paper, a link was made with the anti-austerity argument stating that firefighters “warn years of cuts means they will struggle to cope with the growing climate crisis” that will lead to more flood incidents (Anon November 12, 2019). Where there was mention of both flooding and the climate in the Daily Mirror, it is through the voices of Jeremy Corbyn (Byrne November 11, 2019) and Dr Emily Grossman, co-founder of Scientists for Extinction Rebellion (Lubin et al. November 14, 2019). Dr Grossman was reported alongside other climate scientists warning readers of the “extreme weather events” that are expected due to increasing global temperatures, which leads to “ice caps […] melting and sea levels […] rising”. Further reporting on the voices of XR organisers appeared in the media. The Daily Mirror amplified movement-voter interaction around the climate crisis in its focus on pressures facing the flood victims, as noted above. But, perhaps surprisingly, it was the MailOnline that gave the most space to activist voices and tactics. A piece by Joe Middleton (December 5, 2019a) for the paper was devoted solely to the Severe Weather Warning tactic that was delivered by Emma Thompson on December 5 (XR Tactics: Website, 05/12/2019). The article reported, almost verbatim, the script that the actor read from but made no further commentary on the content

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other than to briefly highlight “accusations of hypocrisy” over her flying from the US to join XR’s demonstration in October 2019. Another piece by the same author gave several column inches to the Air We Grieve tactic (Middleton December 9, 2019b), drawing links between the manifesto pledges, movement-voter interaction on the issue of air quality, and the press. In this news item, Middleton describes the actions that took place on Cranbourne Street in London, and in Manchester. The reporting from London described the scene and XR’s messaging with references to protest signs “saying ‘all I want for X-Mas is clean air’ and “air pollution kills 25 Londoners a day” and, unusually during election coverage, a direct quotation from one of the protestors. Rosamund Frost is described as a teacher and her message, quoted at length, was simply introduced using the neutral quoting verb “said”: We are here demanding action on illegal levels of toxic air in our communities, our schools and our streets. In February 2017, the European Commission issued a ‘final warning’ to the UK over illegal levels of air pollution. In May that year, after the Government failed to take decisive action, they were taken to Europe’s highest court, the European Court of Justice. The Government have neglected to tackle fatal levels of air pollution. How can we put our trust in them to address the broader climate and ecological emergency?

This message quoted in the MailOnline is also featured in The Guardian (Thomas December 9, 2019) and was the one found on XR’s website on December 9 (XR Tactics: Website, 09/12/2019), which demonstrates that even the right-leaning press amplified elements of XR’s movementvoter interaction in 2019. This quotation referenced the natural facts around air pollution that XR were communicating as part of the crisis and emphasised the unwillingness of politicians to act upon these natural facts, which amplified the movement group’s concern over the electorate’s ability to trust politicians on this issue. Duties to Vote and Protect Citizens: Pledges and the Press Aspects of movement-voter interaction that focused on the duty to vote and protect citizens also featured in the media and manifestos in all three election campaigns to differing degrees. The duty to vote was highlighted

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by politicians, celebrity chef Delia Smith (Beattie May 3, 2015b), and the general public calling for people to vote for particular parties. These calls fell along party-affiliation lines, with the Daily Mirror asking people to vote Labour and the Daily Mail calling for people to vote Conservative. The duty of the government to protect its citizens in relation to healthcare and the environment also appeared in reports and manifesto pledges in all three general elections, with the exception of the 2017 Conservative manifesto which did not mention protection at all in its subsection on the NHS. In 2015, the title of the Conservative’s manifesto chapter on healthcare (2015: 34) was “Protecting and improving our National Health Service”, but with the ‘protecting’ focusing solely on the institution’s budget, the party’s message did not chime with the movement-voter interaction of the PAAA. Instead, the party was invoking the economic argument for austerity that a responsible government must ensure a growing, debt-free economy that can provide for all. In 2015, the Conservatives presented themselves as the party responsible for protecting the NHS budget whilst also securing a strong economy. It was Labour’s 2017 manifesto that amplified PAAA’s voter communication on governmental duty to protect patients by also stating that the party would “protect patients and legislate to ensure safe staffing levels in the NHS” (Labour 2017: 68). In addition, the party pledged to “introduce a new legal duty on the Secretary of State and on NHS England to ensure that excess private profits are not made out of the NHS at the expense of patient care” (Labour 2017: 69). What this claim did was subtly invoke PAAA’s view that private providers were eroding the quality of care that patients received, and recentred the State’s duty to provide healthcare for all. In addition to this, both of Labour’s 2015 and 2017 manifestos promised to “repeal” (2015) or “reverse” (2017) privatisation in the NHS, which implicitly endorses PAAA’s negative messaging around privatisation. In the media, the duty to protect in relation to healthcare centred either on NHS budgets (The Guardian, MailOnline and Daily Mirror) or around patient well-being (Daily Mirror and Daily Mail). Discussions in the media over NHS budgets revolved around competing austerity and anti-austerity arguments. The normative argument for austerity of a responsible government that will keep the deficit low was articulated by George Osborne in his piece that appeared in The Guardian. He claimed, “Harm the economy with higher taxes and higher debts, and not only do you put millions of jobs at risk: you undermine the NHS and all the vital public services that a strong economy pays for” (Osborne April 10, 2015).

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This argument around tax rises was picked up again in 2017, this time in the MailOnline, when rises were positioned as “economically damaging” due to the impact that they are proposed to have on private investment (Martin May 26, 2017c). To raise taxes, as suggested by Labour in 2017, was, therefore, to damage the economy and such an economic landscape would be detrimental to the NHS. As one anonymous Tory spokesman was reported in another piece in the Daily Mail as summing up: “Jeremy Corbyn can’t deliver any of this because his nonsensical economic policies would damage our economy and mean less money for the NHS, not more” (Martin May 15, 2017a). PAAA’s direct voter communication challenged this evaluation by claiming that reduced public spending (or cuts) on the NHS had been detrimental to the functioning of the service and its staff—a view that was also elaborated on by Labour in their 2017 manifesto when the party referred to staffing levels (Labour 2017: 68), and implied in the song Liar Liar GE2017, which claimed that nurses needed to use food banks (PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017). In the Daily Mirror, the view from PAAA that budget cuts lead to eroded levels of patient care was also articulated and the duty to protect the NHS reported as residing in increased funding (Gregory June 6, 2017). It was often the voices of Labour MPs, particularly Jon Ashworth, then Shadow Health Secretary, that reported this view, rather than those of PAAA activists. Away from party politicians, policy and budgets, the voices of voters were also being heard on the issue of the NHS, including doctors, nurses, and a mum with an impassioned plea to consider how much it would cost to have a baby if people had to pay for healthcare (Mulroy June 7, 2017). Amplifying PAAA’s messaging around cuts and poor patient care (PAAA Tactics: Podcast, 05, 24/04/2015), doctors were described in the Daily Mirror as being concerned for patients because “unacceptably long delays” compromise the “safety and quality of care” due to “chronic underfunding of health and social care” (Gregory June 6, 2017). The only reference to protecting patients in the Daily Mail was in relation to an alleged proposal by health officials to make “language tests for foreign nurses easier because too many candidates are being rejected” (Spencer May 23, 2017). The duty to protect patients, seen here, was distinct from that of PAAA’s voter-focused communication only by way of who was considered ultimately responsible for patient care: nursing staff (Daily Mail) or the government (PAAA).

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The duty to protect espoused in XR’s movement-voter interaction was endorsed in both 2019 manifestos. However, the focus of these were mainly on protecting the planet not people, although protection of one is implicit in protecting the other. The duty to protect citizens from climate catastrophe did also appear in The Sun and The Guardian. Echoing the same message from XR’s voter communication in their manifestos, each party promised to “[f]ight climate change and protect the environment” (Conservative 2019: 55) or commit to “ecosystem repair and environmental protections” (Labour 2019: 22). The Conservative manifesto’s duty to protect also extended to protecting and restoring “our natural environment after leaving the EU”, which injected an element of Brexit into the party’s pledges on the environment (Conservative 2019: 43). Both parties declared that, when in government, they would introduce a Bill to protect the environment, which mirrored similar calls from XR for such legislation (embodied in the group’s Three Demands Bill). The Conservative’s Environment Bill promised to protect and restore our natural environment after leaving the EU (Conservative 2019: 43). Labour’s “Climate and Environment Emergency Bill” pledged to set legal and binding standards “for decarbonisation, nature recovery, environmental quality and habitats and species protection” (Labour 2019: 22). This legally binding standard was, for Labour, rooted in “environmental and nature-recovery obligations” (Labour 2019: 23), which hints at the notion of duty (as an obligation) as an institutional fact or something that, in Faircloughian political discourse analysis, is a morally recognised commitment for the agent (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012: 48). This moral evaluation of the climate emergency echoes XR’s movement-voter interaction when the group articulated in their tactics the duty to protect citizens and the planet as an external reason for voters and the government to be motivated to make change (XR Tactics: Twitter, 06/12/2019; Website, 27/11/2019). The government’s duty of care for citizens also featured only in one article from The Guardian via the reprinting of sections of the letter from the hunger strikers to party leaders. The reprints include XR’s claim that “Your party has an absolute duty of care, for the current and future wellbeing of everyone in the United Kingdom” and, in doing so, emphasises to readers the social fact, presented by the group, that the government has a duty to protect its own citizens. This moralising register was not repeated in any other newspaper in the sample and, with the exception of the ‘obligation’ mentioned above by Labour, it is not amplified in the broader

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electoral landscape. There were references to protecting the environment in other articles in The Guardian and one in The Sun, but these were reserved for ideologised party political posturing and reported quarrels between Labour and Conservative MPs on whose party is the most “environmental” (Mason November 7, 2019; Carrington December 8, 2019; Utley November 26, 2019). Fairness and Trust in the Broader Political Landscape The PAAA’s concern with fairness as protection of the worst off and most vulnerable from the effects of austerity also features as a message only in Labour’s 2015 and 2017 manifestos. The media focus in these election years was on challenging the fairness of the adult social care system on carers and the elderly, and the unfairness of dementia suffers paying for their own care. Almost foreshadowing XR’s 2019 messaging, the Conservative’s 2017 manifesto focused on the concept of intergenerational fairness but concentrated mostly on restoring the schism between the generations that was brought into sharp focus by the financial crisis of 2008 (Harper 2014) and heightened during and after the 2016 Referendum on the EU (Becker et al. 2017; Clarke et al. 2017; Liberini et al. 2017). Both groups drew on the heuristic of trust when communicating with voters in the 2017 and 2019 elections. Trust did not feature at all in any of the manifesto sections in this study, but it was amplified by mainstream media reporting of trust in Theresa May’s premiership in 2017 and in relation to political leaders’ head-in-the-sand approach to environmental policy. Fairness A concern for fairness as protection of the most vulnerable featured in both 2015 and 2017 Labour manifestos, but was a value shared in PAAA’s movement-voter interaction in 2015 only. The emphasis on fairness from Labour was expressed through the lens of the plight of the elderly and those who looked after them in the 2015 care system. Using emotive terms like “fear”, “insecurity”, “loneliness” and “exclusion”, Labour conjured up an image of a frightened older person sitting alone at home with no one to talk to or access for any help (Labour 2015: 32). This image preceded references to funding for adult social care that, according to the party, had been cut by “billions of pounds” (Labour 2015: 32). In 2017, Labour’s conception of fairness continued to find agreement with PAAA’s direct voter communication by also focusing on protecting vulnerable and

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poor communities and advocating that these groups were being unfairly disadvantaged by austerity and car parking charges. There was a focus on fighting “health inequalities”, ending “the scandalous link between child ill-health and poverty” (Labour 2017: 67) and protecting patients from “unfair” hospital parking charges (Labour 2017: 67). Labour deemed it unfair to financially penalise people experiencing illnesses and the staff who drove to work to help them. Offering free car parking was seen as fair because it would protect the vulnerable and, as a political issue, also highlighted ‘fairness as wealth redistribution’ through taxation, which is linked to the lowering of inequalities in society (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). It was only the mirror.co.uk that amplified aspects of PAAA’s messaging around the impact of cuts to public provision on the poorest and most vulnerable in society, in its reporting of the unfairness of the adult social care system in 2015. The article was, however, written by former Labour MP Tom Watson, and he repeated the manifesto message of underfunded adult care and older people who “struggle to get in and out of the bath on their own” (Watson April 9, 2017). Throughout the 2015 election, the Daily Mirror’s focus on fairness centred around pay and conditions for nurses (Blanchard May 5, 2015; Catchpole April 25, 2015; Gregory April 13, 2015b; Selby May 3, 2015), but by the 2017 campaign, fairness in the press concentrated on the so-called Dementia Tax. The link between the dementia tax and fairness as protection of the vulnerable appeared in letters to The Guardian, with one reader saying that we should “all contribute to care for the sick and vulnerable, whatever their family wealth” (Letters June 2, 2017). Unfairness in the sense communicated to the electorate by PAAA was amplified in the MailOnline when Jeremy Corbyn was quoted as saying that “it was unfair that cancer sufferers got free care on the NHS while those with long-term conditions such as dementia face huge bills” (Martin May 19, 2017b). Overall, however, the view on the dementia tax from both papers was that it was only fair that those who could afford to pay for care should do so. Prior to her U-turn on the policy, Theresa May was described in the MailOnline as forging a “fairer” Britain by asking for “sacrifices from wealthy pensioners” (those with wealth over £100,000) who would pay for their own social care (Tapsfield May 18, 2019). The decision, it was claimed in another MailOnline piece, was founded on the view that “the elderly should not expect current and future taxpayers to pay for their care” (Martin May 19, 2017b), a view most stridently endorsed by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian when she gave “full marks to Theresa May and Hammond for not burdening the

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working young yet again” with the bills for beneficiaries of the “mad house-price booms since the 1980s” (Toynbee May 18, 2017). There is an element here of intergenerational fairness that foreshadows XR’s concerns in 2019. Unlike 2015 and 2017, the 2019 manifestos paid scant attention to fairness or intergenerational fairness when it came to the issue of the environment. The Labour manifesto made only one allusion to intergenerational fairness when it stated, “The climate crisis ties us all into a common fate. This election is our best hope to protect future generations from an uninhabitable planet” (Labour 2019: 11). References to a “common fate” and “future generations” anchored Labour’s view of the climate crisis as something that will affect us all in a future that has yet to be decided, while alluding to the particular predicament of generations yet to come. This echoed the movement-party interaction in XR’s Mothers and Babies Feed-­ ins and their message that: “We are now at a tipping point, where if we don’t act now, ours and our children’s future will not be secure” (XR Tactics: Website, 02/12/2019). Allusions to intergenerational fairness appeared in relation to XR’s Hunger Strike tactic, which garnered some media attention. Despite the action also lending itself to the genre of human-interest stories, the Mirror group did not report on the event and reporting in the Daily Mail was limited to two sentences referring to Peter Cole, the 76-year-old grandfather, and the letter the strikers sent to Boris Johnson (Middleton December 9, 2019b). It was only The Guardian that reported on the rationale behind the actions, describing them as a way to “push for more robust policies on tackling the climate emergency in the general election” (Walker and Proctor November 18, 2019). This article referred to the Three Demands Bill and its call “to ‘tell the truth’ about the extent of the climate emergency”, and linked the action to the Labour Party headquarters but not to manifesto pledges. In a similar piece of reporting, also in The Guardian, Jessica Murray emphasised the Bill and referred to the Conservative headquarters, but also included the voices of the strikers (Murray November 27, 2019). The choice of quotations in this piece focused largely on the impact of hunger striking on the activists’ bodies, with Peter Cole quoted, rather plainly, as saying that “[t]he first three days are quite hard because of the hunger pangs” (Murray November 27, 2019). Neither of The Guardian articles substantively linked the actions with party policy and there was no debate in the press or the manifestos around the concern for intergenerational fairness in regard to the environment, perhaps indicating that this value lacked resonance with voters.

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Trust Both groups drew on the heuristic of trust when communicating with voters in the 2017 and 2019 elections. In 2017, PAAA’s movement-voter interaction focused on presenting the Conservatives as untrustworthy by questioning the personal conduct and character of Theresa May. One aspect of the personal attack centred around her U-turn on the calling of a snap general election, which may have subsequently resonated with voters as the Prime Minister flip-flopped on the dementia tax (PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017). Four days after the launch of the manifesto, Theresa May made an unprecedented U-turn on this policy, which coincided with negative coverage of the Conservatives in the press in week three (Deacon et  al. 2019: 38; Phillips 2019: 91). The U-turn chimed with the protest song and also functioned as way of challenging her campaign slogan, which was the main focus of press commentary. During the 2017 election, the Conservative’s central campaigning message was ‘strong and stable’ leadership with Theresa May, which appeared on billboards and other materials throughout the election. It was repeated incessantly as part of the Conservative’s campaign strategy, a move that proved to be significantly miscalculated as its overuse was hijacked by political opponents and lampooned by commentators (Ridge-Newman 2019). With every U-turn, the strength and stability of May’s leadership was called into question, leading the Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner, to refer to her in a tweet as “weak and wobbly” (Rayner 2017). This challenge to May’s credibility was amplified across the media in several outlets. For example, The Guardian editorial claimed that “deep and lasting damage” to the “strong and stable” message had occurred because May had “added another U-turn to [the party’s] already remarkable list of U-turns, which include abandoned budget changes to national insurance for the self-employed, and the repeated denials of election plans” (Editorial May 22, 2017). It was mirror.co.uk that referred to her ‘weak and wobbly’ status the most, with many headlines incorporating the phrase and relating it to her “election” or “social care” climbdowns that featured in articles throughout the campaign (Bartlett June 1, 2017; Bloom May 22, 2017; Blanchard June 7, 2017). Even the Conservative-leaning Daily Mail commented on Theresa May’s lacklustre performance, stating that “she appeared uncomfortable when repeatedly questioned by journalists on the apparent U-turn and whether it showed her to be weak and wobbly, rather than her election slogan strong and stable” (Groves and Stevens May 23, 2017). All of this served to endorse the description of Theresa

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May as weak and untrustworthy, presented to voters by PAAA’s support of the protest song (PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017). Unconventionally, the movement group’s tactic was picked up in the press and described by mirror.co.uk as an anti-austerity anthem. In a statement to the paper, Jake from Captain Ska said that it was re-mixed because the group wanted to do all they could “to expose the horrific effects Tory policy has had on ordinary people” (Mills and Milne May 31, 2017). This statement links to PAAA’s concern with trusting the Conservatives and exposing their rhetoric when it comes to protecting the NHS. Such a view was also echoed in a piece for mirror.co.uk when Andrew Gregory wrote “cash-strapped bosses were secretly ordered to draw up yet more cuts” which, for him, made “a mockery of Theresa May’s pledge to protect the NHS with a cash injection of £8billion if re-elected” (Gregory June 6, 2017). The concern with trust in XR’s movement-voter interaction was that of politicians being perceived as untrustworthy when making the decisions needed to protect the planet for future generations. As noted in Chap. 3, this was communicated to voters as a head-in-the-sand approach to policy-­ making by political elites, which was made visible by the six-metre ostrich outside Conservative Party headquarters. This claim of inaction by XR was also laid bare in several pieces for The Guardian. Throughout the early part of the campaign, the government’s approach to climate policy was defined as seeking to dodge the “difficult decisions” (Garnett November 6, 2019), and targets had been made but “never filled in” (Buranyi November 21, 2019). The journalist Stephen Buranyi took it one step further, accusing the government of not taking even legislated action, such as that found in the “UK’s own Climate Change Act of 2008”, describing commitments as having “hardly been addressed” since its inception. Martin Kettle (November 13, 2019) accused Johnson of “completely forg[etting] about floods” and stated that such inaction erodes trust. This head-in-the-sand approach to the climate crisis—that XR claims evidenced untrustworthiness—was hinted at in the MailOnline (Martin December 4, 2019) and the Daily Mirror (Boyd December 4, 2019) through the reported voice of Bethany Mogie, an XR activist involved in Bee-yond Politics. She was quoted in both papers as saying, “No one can hide from the Climate and Ecological Emergency forever”, and admonished the Conservatives for not being “willing to engage”. It was the Bee-­ yond Politics tactic (an example of XR’s movement-party interaction) that garnered the most media attention.

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On the fifth ‘Day of Crisis’, several activists dressed in yellow-and-black bee outfits started to find and glue themselves to party battle buses. They started with the Liberal Democrats, made their way to the Labour bus and, finally, ended with the Conservative one, all with the intention of focusing the parties on supporting the Three Demands Bill. There was no media reporting at all of activists gluing themselves to Labour’s bus, but rather the focus was on the Liberal Democrat and Conservative buses and concomitant policy. The tabloid newspapers analysed in this study reported on the events in markedly different ways, with The Sun (Kindred December 4, 2019) codifying the activists negatively, branding them as “leftie clowns”, while the Daily Mirror (Boyd December 4, 2019) stuck with puns about bees to describe them in slightly more positive terms (“a swarm” of activists “buzzed around”). Both papers reported on XR’s Three Demands Bill, but only the Daily Mirror reported the voices of the activists and alluded to environmental proposals (the Liberal Democrat’s 2045 emissions reduction target and the Conservative’s elusive plans). In a similar vein, the mid-market MailOnline (Martin December 4, 2019) described activists as “bumbling” and gave the rationale behind XR’s action, but, perhaps surprisingly, foregrounded activist voices most prominently in its reporting on the Conservative battle bus (Wood and Middleton December 10, 2019). XR’s warning about the Conservative Party 2050 decarbonisation policy as a “death sentence” was given in the first line, and around two-thirds of the article expanded on this view. The Guardian also reported extensively on the reasons for activists gluing themselves to the Liberal Democrat battle bus and linked the action with the party’s policy to reduce carbon emissions (Walker and Gayle December 4, 2019), but when reporting on the Conservative battle bus, mentioned only its delayed departure (Stewart et al. December 10, 2019) and made no reference to the party’s environmental commitments. Overall, however, XR’s view of inaction by the incumbent is somewhat challenged in a response by the Conservative Party to a question posed by The Guardian published on December 8. The article, aimed at all the political parties, asked what policies would be put in place to mitigate increases in flooding and water shortages, to which the Conservative Party repeated their manifesto pledge of investing in flood defences (Carrington December 8, 2019). In addition, both the Conservative and Labour manifestos pledged to take action to tackle various environmental issues, such as plastic and food waste, and promised to meet the target of ‘net-zero’ emissions by specific dates (2050 for the Conservatives and 2030 for

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Labour). Of course, all party manifestos aimed to show what action each would take on certain issues, and accusations of inaction would be defended, particularly at election time.

Conclusions: Agenda Setting and Political Pressure The movement groups’ goals and claims for action centred around putting pressure on politicians to engage with the issues (austerity: PAAA, and environment: XR) and on voters to cast ballots with these issues in mind. The aim of these actions was to achieve the overall goal of setting the political agenda. In both election campaigns, the aim of PAAA’s movement-­voter interaction was to challenge the foundations of austerity and protect the NHS from the threat of privatisation by changing the debate (2015) and exposing government spin (2017). XR’s approach in 2019 was to set the political agenda by keeping the climate emergency as a top priority in public debate and institutional politics. To understand whether the overall arguments and these claims for actions achieved each group’s goals, an overview of the overlap between press, manifesto and movement group tactics outlined in this chapter is summarised here. Such a summary facilitates the mapping of movement-voter interaction within the institutional political landscape. As demonstrated in the analysis above, the perceived societal crises in healthcare and the environment were also found in the press, with the exception of The Sun, and appeared frequently in the manifestos. Amplification in the press in 2015 and 2017 on the issue of austerity and healthcare most often centred around certain facts such as nursing staff figures, patient waiting times, and the NHS budget. The facts were presented as responses to debates between political elites—taking a tit-for-tat ‘Labour-said/the Conservatives-said’ approach—rather than engaging with the movement-voter interaction of PAAA. The duty to protect citizens in relation to healthcare did not feature in the media, and it was only found in Labour’s 2017 manifesto that pledged to protect patients. The duty to protect citizens from climate catastrophe, however, did also appear in 2019 in the press and in both manifestos alongside the impact of natural facts on the population, such as flooding and air pollution, that formed the context of action for XR. Both movement group’s concern for fairness (whether intergenerational or as protection of the most vulnerable) found scant amplification or endorsement in either the press or the manifestos. Equally, the value of trust was lacking in any of the manifestos but did find

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some endorsement from the press in the form of critiques from commentators about the head-in-the-sand approach of politicians to environmental policy and the ‘flip-flopping’ of Theresa May’s leadership style. As revealed in the analysis, the frequency of activist voices in newspaper election reporting in 2019 in comparison to either 2015 or 2017 demonstrates that the environment in that year resonated far more with voters than austerity did in the earlier elections. Indeed, the argument for austerity was so entrenched in the political landscape of 2015 that both main parties constructed their manifestos around it to a greater (Conservatives) or lesser (Labour) degree. This meant that the broader political discourse that mediated people’s understanding of the world around them stood in opposition to PAAA’s employment of the anti-austerity argument. It is possible, therefore, that by holding a different perception of the circumstances to the one held by the public, PAAA in 2015 were unable to bridge the gap between themselves and the pre-existing cognitive structures of the electorate. By 2017, the argument for austerity had started to wane, although NHS staff shortages and lengthy waiting times had not, and instead of focusing on these specific facts, PAAA plugged into voters’ heuristic of trust. This switch in register, from anti-austerity argument to a more evaluative one, saw their communicative tactics acknowledged by the mainstream press. Both the protest song and the billboard were reported on and utilised by the papers as a way of highlighting Theresa May’s incompetency in 2017. For XR, the environment—particularly the climate emergency—was a salient problem to be solved in the minds of the electorate at the time of voting. The circumstances and values presented by the tactics would have resonated with the public and the group’s large-­ scale actions (similar to those reported on throughout late 2019) may have exerted some of the political pressure that they sought to elicit. Despite the hoped-for impact of the climate hustings and the Three Demands Bill on politicians, the environment was not widely reported in the press. However, a broad range of parliamentary candidates tweeted about attendance at these events and several hundred signed up to the Bill (XR Website, 12/12/2019). What this summary shows is that elements of movement-voter interaction did find resonance in the broader mediated and political landscape during each election. Of course, the electoral salience of certain issues assists with movements gaining ground in the political debate and, as noted here and in Chap. 3, the public’s consent for austerity was waning in 2017 and polls were showing that voters were very concerned with the

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environment in 2019. But the role of social movements in contributing to the electoral agenda should also be acknowledged. As YouGov’s June survey revealed, the “sudden surge” in interest in the climate crisis is “undoubtedly boosted” by the mass protests held by Extinction Rebellion in London and activism by people like Greta Thunberg (Smith 2019). As defined in Chap. 1, direct communication with the public to gain support for issues is a key element of movement-voter interaction and a significant factor in both PAAA and XR’s communicative tactics. So, while it is important that movement messaging is amplified and finds some consistency with that of institutional political actors, the main aim of this type of communication is to bypass mediated messages in favour of direct contact with voters. Tactics PAAA Tactics: Podcast, 05, 24/04/2015, ‘The People’s Assembly Podcast – Episode #05 (Elections Special)’ https://soundcloud.com/the-­peoples-­ assembly/the-­p eoples-­a ssembly-­p odcast-­e pisode-­0 5-­e lections-­ special?in=the-­peoples-­assembly/sets/the-­peoples-­assembly-­podcasts PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017, ‘Captain SKA  – Liar Liar GE2017’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxN1STgQXW8 XR Tactics: Twitter, 06/12/2019, XR Rebel Every Day XR Tactics: Website, 27/11/2019, ‘Global Hunger Strike Day 10: Plaid Leader Pledges to Push for Citizens’ Assemblies. Seven Activists on Tenth Day of Hunger Strike in London’ https://extinctionrebellion. uk/2019/11/27/global-­hunger-­strike-­day-­10/ XR Tactics: Website, 02/12/2019, ‘Climate Change Kills Children: Extinction Rebellion Mothers and Babies Stage Mass “Feed-In” At Party HQs’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/02/climate-­ change-­kills-­children-­extinction-­rebellion-­mothers-­and-­babies-­stage-­ mass-­feed-­in-­at-­party-­hqs/ XR Tactics: Website, 05/12/2019, ‘Severe Weather Warning | Emma Thompson’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/05/severe-­ weather-­warning-­emma-­thompson/ XR Tactics: Website, 09/12/2019, ‘The Air We Grieve: Extinction Rebellion Block Central London Road to Demand Action on Deadly Air Pollution as Hunger Strikers Continue into Fourth Week’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/09/the-­air-­we-­grieve-­extinction-­rebellion-­block-­ central-­london-­r oad-­to-­d emand-­action-­on-­deadly-­air-­p ollution-­as-­ hunger-­strikers-­continue-­into-­fourth-­week/

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XR Website, 12/12/2019, Celebrities Backing Extinction Rebellion Say “Party Leaders  – Please Meet the Brave Hunger Strikers!” https:// extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/12/celebrities-­backing-­extinction­rebellion-­say-­party-­leaders-­please-­meet-­the-­brave-­hunger-­strikers/

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Harper, Sarah. 2014. Economic and Social Implications of Aging Societies. Science 346: 587–591. Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA 2012). https://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/2012/7/contents. Accessed 12 January 2018. Kettle, Martin. 2019. The Floods Have Exposed Johnson  – He Is Equal Parts Reckless, Careless and Useless. The Guardian, November 13. Kindred, Alahna. 2019. Totally Glueless Bungling Extinction Rebellion Mob Glue Themselves to Lib Dem Election Bus…Even Though It’s Eco-Friendly Electric. The Sun, December 4. Labour Party. 2015. Britain Can Be Better. The Labour Party Manifesto 2015. https://action.labour.org.uk/page/-­/ A4%20BIG%20_PRINT_ENG_ LABOUR%20MANIFESTO_TEXT%20LAYOUT.pdf. Accessed 5 September 2017. ———. 2017. For the Many, Not the Few. The Labour Party Manifesto 2017. h t t p s : / / l a b o u r. o r g . u k / w p -­c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 7 / 1 0 / l a b o u r-­ manifesto-­2017.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2018. ———. 2019. It’s Time for Real Change: For the Many Not the Few. The Labour Party Manifesto 2019. https://labour.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2019/ 11/Real-­Change-­Labour-­Manifesto-­2019.pdf. Accessed 16 December 2019. Letters. 2017. Age Shall Not Weary Them nor Must We Let Cares Condemn Them. The Guardian, June 2. Liberini, Federica, Andrew J.  Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Michela Redoano. 2017. Was Brexit Caused by the Unhappy and the Old? IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Discussion Paper Series, IZA DP No. 11059 342. https://www.iza. org/publications/dp/11059/was-­brexit-­caused-­by-­the-­unhappy-­and-­the-­ old. Accessed 12 December 2018. Local Government Association (LGA). 2013. Overview of the LGA’s Spending Round Submission. https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/overview-­pdf-­10-­pages286k-­0aa.pdf. Accessed 29 January 2019. Loughborough CRCC. 2019. What About the Environment? https://www. lboro.ac.uk/news-­e vents/news/2019/november/what-­a bout-­t he-­ environment/. Accessed 29 December 2019. Lubin, Rhian, Adam Aspinall, and Louie Smith. 2019. Britain’s Climate Disaster Hotspots. Daily Mirror, November 14. Martin, Daniel. 2017a. Labour Says Tax Raid Will Net NHS an Extra £37bn. Daily Mail, May 15. ———. 2017b. Tories Face Backlash as Social Care Shake-Up Is Branded a ‘Dementia Tax’ Which Will Leave Pensioners with Sky High Costs. MailOnline, May 19. ———. 2017c. Exposed, Labour’s Lies Over Tax: Think Tank Warns of ‘Dishonest’ Plans for the Highest Burden Since World War Two. MailOnline, May 26.

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Martin, Henry. 2019. Jo Swinson Is Caught in Extinction Rebellion Sting! Bungling Climate Change Activists Dressed as Bees Glue Themselves to Lib Dems’ Electric Battle Bus Before Swarming Brexit Party’s Campaign Office. MailOnline, December 4. Mason, Rowena. 2019. Tory Election Hopeful Called Climate Crisis ‘Socialist Trojan Horse’. The Guardian, November 7. McTague, Tom. 2015. A&E Waiting Times Soar to Worst Level in More Than 10 Years with 5,000 Patients Every Day Left Unseen for More Than Four Hours. MailOnline, April 7. Middleton, Joe. 2019a. Emma Thompson Delivers Bizarre Climate Crisis ‘Forecast’, Warning We May Have to EAT Our Pets to Survive Imminent ‘Crop Failures, Water Contamination and Ruined Lives’  – At Extinction Rebellion Protest Outside BBC. MailOnline, December 5. ———. 2019b. Extinction Rebellion Protesters in Hi-Vis Jackets Glue Themselves to Concrete Blocks Outside Leicester Square Tube Station as They Campaign Against Air Pollution in the Latest of Their ‘12 Days of Crisis’ Stunts. MailOnline, December 9. Mills, Kelly-Ann, and Oliver Milne. 2017. ‘Theresa May’s a Liar’ Song Hits Number 1 – but Here’s Why You Won’t Be Hearing It on the Radio Anytime Soon. mirror.co.uk, May 31. Mulroy, Zahra. 2017. This Is How Much It Could Cost You to Give Birth Without Our NHS. mirror.co.uk, June 7. Murray, Jessica. 2019. The Power of Vulnerability’: Meet Extinction Rebellion’s Hunger Strikers. The Guardian, November 27. Murray, Jessica, and Damian Carrington. 2019. Flooding Caused by Poor Management and Floodplain Building, Say Experts. The Guardian, November 12. National Audit Office (NAO). 2014. The Impact of Funding Reductions on Local Authorities. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2014/11/ Impact-­of-­funding-­reductions-­on-­local-­authorities.pdf. Accessed 29 January 2019. Osborne, George. 2015. The Conservatives Will Plug the NHS Funding Gap. The Guardian, April 13. Phillips, Angela. 2019. The Agenda-Setting Role of Newspapers in the UK 2017 Elections. In Political Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election, ed. Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, 83–97. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­00822-­2_6. Ramesh, Randeep. 2015. GPs Are Exhausted, A&E Is Overrun and Hospitals Are Broke. What Went Wrong? The Guardian, April 30. Rayner, Angela. 2017. https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/ 859785437463949313.

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Ridge-Newman, Anthony. 2019. “Strong and Stable” to “Weak and Wobbly”: The Conservative Election Campaign. In Political Communication in Britain: Campaigning, Media and Polling in the 2017 General Election, ed. Dominic Wring, Roger Mortimore, and Simon Atkinson, 131–148. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­00822-­2_9. Rutter, Tamsin. 2015. Frances O’Grady: “Britain Has Been Very Good at Creating Bad Jobs”. The Guardian, March 30. Selby, Alan. 2015. 1,000 Real Reasons not to Trust Tories with Health Service. Daily Mirror, May 3. Smith, Dominic. 2015. Ed Miliband Accuses Tories of Trying to “Fund NHS on an IOU”. The Guardian, April 13. Smith, Matthew. 2019. Concern for the Environment at Record Highs. https:// yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-­r eports/2019/06/05/concern-­ environment-­record-­highs. Accessed 14 December 2019. Spencer, Ben. 2017. Health Chiefs’ Plan to Water Down English Tests for Foreign Nurses. Daily Mail, May 23. Stevens, John. 2015. Labour Gets Its Poster Ideas from Maggie: Party Recycles Tories’ Dole Queue Image from 1979 to Attack the Conservatives over GP Appointments. MailOnline, April 7. Stewart, Heather, Rowena Mason, and Dan Sabbagh. 2019. Final Scramble for Votes in ‘Most Important Election in a Generation’. The Guardian, December 10. Tapsfield, James. 2019. PM Vows to Make ‘Hard Choices’ to Forge a ‘Fairer’ Post-Brexit Britain as Tory Manifesto Raids Wealthy Pensioners to Help ‘Ordinary Working Families. MailOnline, May 18. The King’s Fund. 2015. How Serious Are the Pressures in Social Care? The King’s Fund Verdict. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/verdict/how-­serious-­ are-­pressures-­social-­care. Accessed 29 January 2019. Thomas, Tobi. 2019. Extinction Rebellion Stages Air Pollution Protests in London and Manchester. The Guardian, December 9. Toynbee, Polly. 2017. Theresa May’s Social Care System Is a Lottery. Just Hope You’re Not Unlucky. The Guardian, May 18. Utley, Olivia. 2019. This Green and Pleasant Land Runs in True Blue Veins. The Sun, November 26. Walker, Peter, and Damien Gayle. 2019. Extinction Rebellion Bee Protester Glues Himself to Lib Dem Bus. The Guardian, December 4. Walker, Peter, and Kate Proctor. 2019. Extinction Rebellion Hunger Strikers Target UK Political Parties; Activists Stage Protests at Party HQs to Push Climate Emergency on to General Election Agenda. The Guardian, November 18.

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Watson, Tom. 2017. Tom Watson: I Am Proud to Fight in ‘Harry’s Last Stand’. mirror.co.uk, April 9. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. 2009. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Wood, James, and Joe Middleton. 2019. Stuck in Staffordshire: Extinction Rebellion Protesters Glue Themselves to Boris Johnson’s Campaign Bus. MailOnline, December 10. YouGov. 2019. Political Trackers (25–26 Nov Update). https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/politics/articles-­reports/2019/11/26/political-­trackers-­25-­26-­nov-­ update. Accessed 14 December 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

This concluding chapter draws together the key findings from the previous analysis chapters and answers the research questions posed in Chap. 2. It makes a case for the value of movement-voter interaction in the fields of social movement studies and political communication and explores the role of this interaction in democracy.

Movement-Voter Interaction: General Elections 2015–19 The case studies in this book reveal that in recent years, movement groups in the UK have engaged in conventional electoral politics and the highlighting of specific issue to voters. Through the use of various communicative tactics, both The People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) attempted to set the political agenda and impact public decision-making on who or what to vote for during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections. Each attempted to raise awareness of specific issues (anti-austerity and the environment) among the general public in order to effect the political change that they sought and, in doing so, engaged in movement-voter interaction. As outlined in Chap. 1, movement-voter interaction aims for societal and/or cultural change and, as shown in Chap. 3, the goal of both movement groups in this study was to enter public debate and change discourse around austerity and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6_5

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climate, respectively. In this section, I summarise the tactics and arguments of each group in each election campaign and review their scope in the broader electoral landscape of the manifestos and mainstream media. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates what tactics and arguments the movement groups used in the elections (answering Research Question 1) and in what ways these dovetailed or challenged the prevailing political landscape (answering Research Question 2). The analysis in this book reveals that PAAA engaged solely in movement-­ voter interaction and tailored their communicative practices during both elections to focus on delivering a message to the electorate. In both the 2015 and 2017 elections, their messaging revolved around a crisis in the National Health Service (NHS) that was caused by the programme of austerity, the impact of which was felt most by vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society as access to healthcare and other welfare services were cut for these groups. To communicate this to voters in 2015, PAAA’s argument focused on challenging the notion of austerity by highlighting that it was a political choice, not an economic necessity. They claimed that this political choice was undermining the idea of public services, as cuts to services caused a decrease in staff numbers, increased waiting times, and could lead to privatisation-by-consent. Privatisation was leading to unequal access to treatment, and austerity policy not only disadvantaged those most in need (a concern for fairness as protection of the worst off), but also had not resuscitated the UK economy as predicted. In spite of this, the Conservative Party at that time was still pursuing austerity and, according to PAAA, spinning statistics when in government to present the policy as working at reducing the deficit. For the anti-austerity movement group, the combination of choosing to engage in a policy that was not working on its own terms and damaging to a country’s citizens revealed that the government could not be trusted (a concern with trust). As such, the claim for action (what they ought to do) from PAAA in 2015 was to mobilise for a demonstration that called for an end to austerity. This action would achieve the goal of putting pressure on the newly elected 2015 government to abandon their programme of austerity, which would be achieved by changing the public debate on the issue. This argument was conveyed through the movement’s website and podcasts, which, despite the tactics’ limited reach, were designed to inform the voting public of the crisis. The communicative tactics used by the movement sought to challenge the concept of austerity and inform the electorate of that challenge, but did not seek to influence the electorate’s

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voting intention as they did in 2017. However, voters’ support, at the time, was for cuts to public spending, and the notion of austerity was so entrenched in the political landscape of 2015 (Cowley and Kavanagh 2016) that the group’s assertion that it was a political choice may not have bridged the gap between their message and the electorate. This was evident in the manifesto pledges and media reporting in 2015, which centred less around political decision-making and more on staff numbers, the length of GP waiting times, and overstretched Accident and Emergency departments. Across the media, references to facts and figures about patients turning to hospital emergency departments due to a lack of GP appointments were made, but often this was not attributed to the policy of austerity or it was assigned to partisan wranglings (McTague April 7, 2015; Gregory April 1, 2015). There were, however, reports around cuts to adult social care that attributed the crisis in the NHS to a reduction in government funding to local councils (Rutter March 30, 2015; Smith April 13, 2015), and the left-leaning Mirror group and the centre-left Guardian drew links between rising waiting times and privatisation (Beattie April 25, 2015; Campbell April 25, 2015). These latter reports amplified elements of PAAA’s movement-voter interaction when revealing that private patients were becoming a sizeable source of income for NHS Trusts, which could lead to unequal access. The duty to protect citizens from the negative impacts of cuts and privatisation was assigned to the government in 2015 by the PAAA, but was largely absent from the manifestos and the media. Protecting the NHS budget by managing the economy responsibly (i.e. not overspending on public services) was amplified by the parties and the press over and above care for patients or citizens. A similar lack of messaging was found in concern for fairness as protection of the worst off, with only the Labour Party and the PAAA communicating this value to voters. The reverse was true for both PAAA and XR’s concern with trust, which did not feature in any of the manifesto sections in this study, but it was endorsed in mainstream media reporting in 2017 (trust in Theresa May’s premiership) and 2019 (political leaders’ head-in-the-sand approach to environmental policy). The perceived weakness of Theresa May’s character and U-turns during the campaign dovetailed with PAAA’s movement-voter interaction and their appeal to trust as a heuristic. In 2017, the group’s movement-voter interaction that argued against austerity was backgrounded in favour of engaging in negative campaigning. The claim for action from PAAA in 2017 was to not vote for a Conservative government that could not be

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trusted and that was a threat to the NHS. As in 2015, their goal was to end austerity and the threat of privatisation of the NHS, but in 2017, this would be achieved by exposing (Conservative) government lies, spin and rhetoric rather than arguing against austerity. Using a political-style billboard and promoting a protest song, the movement group’s voter communication attempted to persuade the electorate that a Conservative government could not be trusted. The tactics called into question the integrity of Theresa May’s political decision-making by highlighting her flip-flopping on proposed policies during the election campaign, calling her a liar (PAAA Tactics: Protest song) and presenting her as a threat to public services and livelihoods (PAAA Tactics: Billboard). Such ad hominem attacks on May were amplified in the press, where several editorials and comment pieces lampooned the ‘strong and stable’ message and questioned her credibility as a leader (Editorial May 22, 2017; Bartlett June 1, 2017; Blanchard June 7, 2017; Bloom May 22, 2017; Groves and Stevens May 23, 2017). It can be argued that the resonance between PAAA’s movement-voter interaction and the press was due to a change in the 2017 political landscape. Not only was the public’s consent for austerity waning in 2017, but there was also a Labour Party that favoured social and political visions in keeping with PAAA’s overall argument (to end austerity) and had adopted a model of politics that was more movement-led (Blumler 2017). The election and subsequent re-election of the veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and 2016 cleaved open an opportunity for the political mainstreaming of the anti-austerity argument, and this high-profile anti-austerity political actor may have impacted on PAAA’s communicative tactics. Due to there being a viable anti-­ austerity party political alternative, the movement concentrated less on putting forward an argument against austerity and, instead, focused more on trying to convince enough of the electorate not to vote for the Conservatives. But the group’s case in 2017 may have been more robust if it had interrogated or drawn attention to the weaknesses in their opponents’ arguments (as it attempted to in 2015), instead of personalities. For example, the dimension of not trusting the Conservatives to deliver public services could have focused more closely on the use of collective provision (taxes) to pay for treatment offered by private, for-profit providers, an aspect of privatisation that the Conservatives in 2017 may have found it hard to defend against.

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In 2019, XR’s movement-voter interaction drew attention to the content and context of its own argument, rather than engaging in negative evaluations of other political actors. The communicative tactics of XR sought to place the climate high on the political agenda and invited voters to do the same when deciding who to vote for. Each tactic revolved around attracting attention to the Three Demands Bill, and whether that was voter or parliamentary candidate attention, the intention was the same: that the next government place climate issues front and centre when it came to policy-making. The overarching claims for action from XR formed around the Three Demands Bill and constituted asking the public to vote with the environment in mind and asking politicians to sign up to the Bill. The goal was to ensure that the climate emergency was prioritised in public debate and institutional politics during the 2019 election and beyond. This future state of affairs was sought because the context of action for XR consisted of interrelated facts: natural facts about the physical world, such as the climate emergency manifested by localised flooding, heavy rainfall and storms, poor air quality, food and water shortages and dying bees; and institutional facts (about value commitments), including politicians and the electorate having a duty to consider the natural facts when making policy and voting, and the government’s duty to protect its citizens from the crisis. There were concerns for climate justice for all and the protection of future generations from climate catastrophe (intergenerational fairness), plus a concern that politicians could not be trusted to make the decisions needed to protect the planet or future generations. The majority of XR’s tactics were based in movement-voter interaction; however, there were also some tactics that offered a hybrid of movement-­ party and movement-voter interaction, the most salient being the climate hustings. These events took place across the UK and invited prospective parliamentary candidates to come and debate the issue of the climate in front of their potential constituents. The tactic also called upon voters to secure support for XR’s Three Demands Bill by contacting their local candidates and requesting that they come along to answer questions they had about the environment and what their party planned to do if they were elected. By targeting both the political parties directly and the electorate simultaneously, this element of XR’s communicative tactics amalgamated direct voter and direct party interaction. The hybrid nature of this tactic illustrates the movement group’s drive to implement policy (taking a pro-­ policy stance) that was distinct from PAAA’s demands to repeal austerity policy (an anti-policy stance).

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Where XR’s tactics displayed only movement-voter interaction, they paid particular attention to the communication of natural facts, a duty to vote, and the urgency of the climate emergency and its place on the political agenda. Each of these elements of the group’s argument was disseminated across multiple digital media platforms, including their own website, Twitter handle, YouTube channel and podcast, and also offline in novel and traditional tactics. One salient example of a combination of digital and on street movement–voter interaction was in the highlighting of natural facts around flooding, heavy rainfall and storms. On XR’s website, in their podcast and via Twitter, information about the impact of climate change on global weather systems was embodied in the offline Severe Weather Warning tactic (XR Tactics: Website, 05/12/2019). Alongside the actor Emma Thompson, 20 activists in goggles and other swimming attire displayed a map of the UK that was marked with areas most likely to flood, including coastal areas and London Tube lines. The tactic aimed at demonstrating the immediacy of the climate emergency and questioned the adequacy of politicians’ responses to the crisis, which was communicated to voters as a concern with trust and telling the truth. Due to the celebrity status of Thompson and the event taking place outside BBC Headquarters, this tactic was picked up by the media but only directly reported in the Daily Mail (Middleton December 5, 2019a). The issue of flooding was amplified more broadly across the papers analysed in this study, particularly early on in the campaign when flooding affected Derbyshire and Yorkshire (Anon November 12, 2019; Byrne November 11, 2019; Carrington December 8, 2019; Murray and Carrington November 12, 2019). It was a theme also present in the Conservative and Labour manifestos, where pledges to prioritise funding for flood defences featured alongside the delivery of economic growth in the form of green infrastructure projects (wind farms and cycle lanes). Another theme from XR’s movement-voter interaction present in the manifestos was the duty to protect. However, the focus was on repairing ecosystems by planting trees and making economic policy designed to prevent future environmental damage. Similarly, a concern with intergenerational fairness was absent from the manifestos and scarce in media reporting on the issue of the environment. This is despite the presence of hunger strikers outside political party headquarters for several weeks during the campaign and the distinctive feed-ins held by XR mothers and their babies. It was the Bee-yond Politics tactic (XR Tactics: Website, 10/12/2019) that was most visible in the press, appearing in each of the

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papers analysed in this study (Boyd December 4, 2019; Kindred December 4, 2019; Martin December 4, 2019; Walker and Gayle December 4, 2019; Wood and Middleton December 9, 2019; Stewart et  al. December 10, 2019). Activists dressed as bumble bees targeted the campaign ‘battle buses’ of the main political parties by gluing themselves to the outside. The aim was to halt the campaign trail in order to discuss the environment with the leaders of each party and confront them about their climate policies. This tactic and others, including the XR Mothers and Babies Feed-ins and hunger strike were examples of the group’s movement-party interactions that were picked up by the media in its reporting of parties and policy during elections. Unusually for election time, however, activist voices were featured, not only in relation to the movement-party interactions above but also for direct voter communicative tactics. Several column inches were given to the Air we Grieve tactic. Activists occupied streets in London, Manchester, Weymouth, Yeovil and York, gluing themselves to concrete blocks to raise voter awareness for the number of people dying from air pollution each day. Links between this action and the manifesto pledges on this issue, including the introduction of a “Clean Air Act” by Labour (Labour 2019: 22–23) and support for clean transport by the Conservatives (Conservative 2019: 55), were made in the MailOnline and in The Guardian (Middleton December 9, 2019b; Thomas December 9, 2019). Each article quoted the same XR activist at length. The quotation referenced the natural facts around air pollution that XR communicated to voters and emphasised the refusal of politicians to take decisions based upon these natural facts. The reproduction of this movement-voter interaction amplified the movement group’s concern in this election over the voters’ ability to trust politicians on the issue of the environment. Overall, XR’s communicative tactics were representative of movement-voter interaction in that the goal was to direct the public debate and political discourse around their defining issue. The group attempted to place pressure on politicians and set the political agenda by informing voters about the environment and asking them to hold prospective parliamentary candidates to account for their decision-­ making. But with polls revealing high levels of voter concern for the environment in 2019 and XR’s presence throughout that year, it is not surprising that some of XR’s tactics were reported on and issue specifics (such as flooding and environmental protections) featured in manifestos. The analysis in this book reveals that the political opportunity structure of the prevailing political landscape was important for the uptake of

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movement-­ voter interaction by the media and the political parties. However, as the function of movement-voter interaction is grounded in public debate and promoting a conversation about certain issues, the impact of this interaction lies not solely in the immediate, mediated endorsement of movement messaging, but in its longer-term influence on discourse. It is difficult to say what role movement-voter interaction plays in the overall discursive landscape, but it is a point of concentrated engagement and argumentation around specific issues that can be studied. In a broader sense, it can be argued that movement-voter interaction provides a site of exploration for academics in order to conduct research on potential future shifts in the political debate.

Movements, Elections and Democracy Movements can bring about social change through the use of a wide variety of strategies and tactics that influence public opinion, popular discourse and public policy, and the mediation practices of social movements assist the dissemination of societal critiques that are essential for a functioning democracy (Cammaerts 2018; Staggenborg 2015). This book argues that social movements can challenge official or dominant meanings through the spreading of ideas between individuals and groups, which in turn informs the political landscape. As these ideas, discourses and ideologies compete in the social sphere, determining, as they do so, the growth and decline of political issues and controversies, it is clear why it is important for social movement and political communication research to analyse them. As the analysis in Chap. 3 demonstrates, both PAAA and XR circulated ideas and facts about austerity and the environment, respectively, to the voting public. Both groups attempted to highlight institutional actors’ responses to these issues and present alternative arguments and solutions. The communication of these counter-arguments by the movement groups constituted a body of knowledge (Foucault 1991 [1975]) through which to understand the political landscape and to make decisions about what to do or what (alternative) policies to choose. The claims for action of both movement groups in this study were to persuade more citizens to participate in the electoral process and put pressure on the prospective government over which policies to adopt. This forms part of della Porta’s (2014) concept of social movements as representatives of democracy from below. Within a democracy, there should be space to hold the State or

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government accountable for its actions and provide some level of participation in parliamentary decision-making and transparency on how those decisions are made. Participation by citizens in the process of what policies to adopt is fundamental to the concept of electoral democracy, which is built on the basic principle that ordinary people are worthy of political consultation (Goldstone 2003). The role of movement-voter interaction in this process is to extend political consultation to members of the public through the communication of political alternatives during elections. It must be noted that increasingly managed electoral messaging by communication consultants and PR managers has had the effect of producing higher levels of cynicism and lower levels of engagement in the democratic process (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Cappella and Jamieson 1997). With stage-managed communication there is a sense that, as Bennett and Iyengar (2008) note, the electoral process is engineered, leading to voters feeling manipulated and ‘left out’ of the institutional conversation, rather than galvanised by it. The perceived decline in institutional participation, including political party and trade union membership (Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Giugni and Grasso 2019) and electoral politics and political trust (Bailey 2014; Rhodes 2020), has been met with a rise in social movement participation (Norris 2002, 2004). As such, movement communication directed at voters could reignite electoral participation, and analysis in this area presents researchers with an opportunity to build a broader and more comprehensive picture of the impact of political communication on electoral outcomes. The inclusion of these extra-institutional actors adds value to the fields of social movement studies and political communication because it draws in counter-­arguments that broaden the political debate, especially at election times, and draws out what they are saying and how they challenge or amplify dominant political positions and ideologies. What this insight does is embed social movements in the bigger picture of large-scale power relations and situates them as one of the potential processes of social change. Tactics PAAA Tactics: Billboard, https://www.reportdigital.co.uk/stock-­photo-­ theresa-­may-­i-­am-­a-­threat-­billboard-­by-­the-­peoples-­assembly-­against-­ photojournalism-­image00109122.html PAAA Tactics: Protest Song, 26/05/2017, ‘Captain SKA  – Liar Liar GE2017’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxN1STgQXW8

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XR Tactics: Website, 05/12/2019, ‘Severe Weather Warning | Emma Thompson’ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/05/severe­weather-­warning-­emma-­thompson/ XR Tactics: Website, 10/12/2019, ‘Breaking: Extinction Rebellion UK Glue Themselves to Tory Battle Bus and Ask the Conservative Government “Where Have You Been?” This #ClimateElection’ https:// extinctionrebellion.uk/2019/12/10/breaking-­extinction-­rebellion-­uk-­ glue-­t hemselves-­t o-­t or y-­b attle-­b us-­a nd-­a sk-­t he-­c onser vative-­ government-­where-­have-­you-­been-­this-­climateelection/

References Anon. 2019. Crew Cuts Hit Climate Fight. Daily Mirror, November 12. Bailey, David J. 2014. Contending the Crisis: What Role for Extra-Parliamentary British Politics? British Politics 9 (1): 68–92. https://doi.org/10.1057/ bp.2013.26. Bartlett, Nicola. 2017. How Theresa May’s Election Campaign Has Gone from Strong and Stable to Weak and Wobbly in Just Five Weeks. mirror.co.uk, June 1. Beattie, Jason. 2015. £2bn Private Health Deals Since David Cameron Came to Power New Figures Show. mirror.co.uk, April 25. Bennett, W. Lance, and Shanto Iyengar. 2008. A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication. Journal of Communication 58 (4): 707–731. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-­2466.2008.00410.x. Blanchard, Jack. 2017. Lies, Damned Lies and Theresa May – Don’t Condemn Britain to 5 More Years of Tory Broken Promises. mirror.co.uk, June 7. Bloom, Dan. 2017. Theresa May Makes Humiliating Climbdown Over ‘Dementia Tax’ Manifesto Policy Just 4 Days After Announcing It. mirror.co.uk, May 22. Blumler, Jay G. 2017. Looking on the Bright Side for a Change. In UK Election Analysis 2017: Media, Voters and the Campaign Early Reflections from Leading Academics, ed. Einar Thorsen, Daniel Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 11. The Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research, Bournemouth University. Blumler, Jay G., and Michael Gurevitch. 1995. Comparative Research: The Extending Frontier. In The Crisis of Public Communication, ed. Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, 73–85. London: Routledge. Blumler, Jay G., and Dennis Kavanagh. 1999. The Third Age of Political Communication: Influences and Features. Political Communication 16 (3): 209–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/105846099198596. Boyd, Milo. 2019. Extinction Rebellion Protesters Dressed as Bees Ambush Jo Swinson’s Battle Bus. Daily Mirror, December 4. Byrne, Paul. 2019. Heartbreaking; Swamped Residents Start Clean-up Heavy Rain to Bring More Misery. Daily Mirror, November 11.

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Index

A Austerity, 4, 5, 9 anti-austerity argument, 73, 77, 89, 100 as-covert-privatisation, 48, 52, 63, 74 debate on, 7, 61, 97 impact of, 32, 53, 56, 60, 98 language of, 71, 99 policy, 29, 64, 65 as a political choice, 46, 48, 49, 59, 62, 72, 75, 98 pro-austerity argument, 7, 48, 79, 89 C Climate crisis, 29, 50–51, 55, 75–78, 84, 86, 90 D Democracy, 2, 20, 23–25

direct, 65 movement-voter interaction, 32, 104–105 online participation, 21–26 E Electoral campaigning, 4, 27–31, 65, 72 ad hominem attacks, 7, 27–30, 100 negative, 4, 7, 17, 27, 29, 30, 55, 57, 79, 99 F Fairness, 34, 65, 82–84, 88 intergenerational, 35, 53–55, 101, 102 protection of the most vulnerable, 35, 53–55, 98, 99

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Rhodes, Social Movements in Elections, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76205-6

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INDEX

M Movement-party interaction, 8, 9, 34, 43, 54, 58, 63, 65, 84, 86, 103 Movement-voter interaction, 89–90, 97–104 definition of, 9–11 N National Health Service (NHS), 9, 29, 43, 72, 79 crisis in, 48, 49, 60, 72, 73, 98, 99 privatisation of, 48, 61, 73, 74, 79, 88, 100 O Online activism, 24 clicktivism, 25 P Political discourse analysis, 28, 33–34, 43, 72, 81

Q Qualitative Content Analysis, 35, 72 S Social Movements digital technology, 21–24 elections, 5–9 T Tactics, 2 campaigning, 30 communicative, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 23, 26–28, 32, 34, 43, 44, 54, 57, 60, 63, 71, 75, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103 e-tactics, 23 innovative, creative, novel, 4, 21, 44–46 repertoire of, 2, 21 traditional, 23 Trust, 35, 65, 78 truth telling, 53–59, 85–88, 98, 99, 102, 103 voter distrust, 26, 28, 30, 105