Abstract
Comparative political scientists have sought to remedy their subdiscipline’s structuralist tendencies by paying greater analytical attention to transformative political events. Yet, our conceptual understanding of events remains rudimentary. The article addresses this conceptual gap in two ways. First, it foregrounds symbolic meaning-making as the constitutive attribute of events. Second, it demonstrates that events are not inherently agency-facilitating by developing the concept of prospectively framed events. These are occurrences that actors know will take place, but of whose outcome they are uncertain. Political challengers frame the upcoming event so as to discursively trap incumbents into political action they would rather not undertake. The article demonstrates this process by tracing the conflict between secessionist challengers and political incumbents within the Catalan nationalist movement between 2006 and 2010. The concluding section discusses the causal implications of the argument.
The intrinsic goal of comparative political science—theory-building through the exploration of patterns and regularities in political phenomena—has traditionally steered the discipline toward structural explanations. 1 This tendency has made it difficult to account for change as distinct from path-dependent continuity, and for the role of human agency in both. Scholars have approached this problem from two directions. Some have turned to gradual political transformations during times of “normal politics,” rooted in the novel interpretation of ambiguous and contradictory institutional rules. 2 Viewed thusly, agency is diffuse, exerting its causal impact through the sedimentation of numerous actions over extended time periods. Others have directed their attention to the more sudden transformations of political landscapes, emphasizing either relatively extended but definable critical junctures or more temporally condensed political events. 3
Events are an essential element of politics. They transform political landscapes in ways previously considered improbable, and establish new parameters for action. 4 They thus often inform explanatory accounts of politics, both explicitly and, more often, implicitly. 5 Yet political scientists have thus far failed to systematically explore the conceptual and theoretical characteristics of this phenomenon, diminishing our ability to understand fundamental political change. The customary application of the concept in political analysis reveals two major problems. The first is an insufficiently “social” understanding of events. In other words, scholars usually take the meaning of events for granted, examining their causal efficacy without accounting for the processes of political contestation through which this meaning is created. 6 This is an untenable position because the meaning of events is both socially constructed (or far from “given”), and integral to events’ political and causal impact. Second, existing studies of events foreground their agency-facilitating properties in such a way as to imply that they inherently empower the challengers to the political status quo. While this implication seems intuitive, it has not yet been put to the test.
This article develops a systematic, empirically validated reconceptualization of transformative political events. It rejects the naturalized understanding of events embedded in many political science accounts. Events, to paraphrase Mark Blyth, do not come with an instruction sheet. Their meaning is subject (and is subjected) to political contestation. The findings at the core of this article provide a decisive demonstration of this claim. Moreover, the article shows that while events may be agency-facilitating, they do not necessarily empower those actors who seek to upturn existing patterns of political activity. It does this by distinguishing between retrospectively and prospectively framed events. The former are sudden, unexpected occurrences whose meaning is created after they take place. The latter are important occurrences that we know will transpire (e.g., major elections, court decisions, referenda, demonstrations), but whose outcome is not known prior to their passage. Whereas retrospectively framed events are moments of greater than usual agency, as existing scholarship views them, prospectively framed events can be deliberately framed in order to constrain agency. The latter are designed to facilitate change by trapping change-averse decision-makers into choices they would rather not make. The effectiveness of this maneuver is of secondary importance to the article. 7 The article’s central aim is to demonstrate what the prospective framing of occurrences tells us about the link between agency and power. 8
For actors seeking fundamental political change, especially those possessing few power resources of their own, events are political resources of the first order because they can demonstrate the unsustainability of the political status quo and facilitate mobilization for change. However, examining only retrospectively framed events would result in misleading conclusions about the extent to which events enhance the power of actors advocating radically different patterns of political activity. As inherently successful cases of political transformation, retrospectively framed events imply that the scope for agency created by events necessarily favors the challengers. By contrast, the analysis of prospective framing of occurrences suggests a greater range of power implications inhering in events. The very effort that the opponents of the status quo expend to frame an occurrence before it takes place demonstrates their skepticism that the potential constituents for change—be they classes, ethnic groups, nations, or other collective actors, and, notably, their political leaders—will perceive the upcoming occurrence as a turning point at all. 9 In this sense, opponents of the political status quo view the agency-facilitating potential of events as a threat as well as an opportunity. An event may facilitate change, but it may also leave the existing patterns of politics intact. Political parties that might in principle be open to a radically different approach to politics may be deterred from it by short-term political calculus rooted in their own conservatism, and that of their constituents. The challengers may attempt to prospectively frame an occurrence precisely in order to reduce the maneuvering space for these actors at the point at which the occurrence takes place.
The article demonstrates the conceptual plausibility and methodological utility of prospectively framed events by tracing the framing of the 2010 Spanish Constitutional Court decision concerning the constitutionality of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy (SoA) between 2006 and 2010. During this period, independentist political activists in Catalan political and civil society attempted to frame what they anticipated would be a negative Court decision (reducing the scope of Catalonia’s autonomy gained in 2006) as a pivotal event in Catalan politics. Their targets were the leaders of mainstream Catalan nationalist parties, whom they viewed as unwilling to commit to the secessionist cause, and ultimately the nonindependentist members of the Catalan nation. By trying to extract public commitments to a radical framing of the anticipated decision, the challengers attempted to trap the vacillating incumbents into secessionist positions in case the Court ruling proved to be negative.
(Re)Defining Events
Occurrences constitute the raw material out of which events are made. Political occurrences are all instances of political action, from the routine (e.g., regularly scheduled elections, or normal legislative or regulatory acts) to the unusual (acts of civil disobedience, outbreaks of political violence, corruption scandals), prior to or without being interpreted as turning points. Events, on the other hand, are occurrences that are interpreted as politically transformative. Without a broadly shared understanding among the relevant constituents that a particular occurrence constitutes a significant departure from the status quo, such an occurrence does not become an event. 10 This does not require the development of a fixed or specific meaning, only an agreement that the occurrence represents a major turning point. 11 Readers may question the necessity of challenging the common-sense meaning of the term “event.” One of the main goals of this article, in line with constructivist approaches in political science, is to denaturalize its subject (Finnemore & Sikkink, 2001). The conceptual framework and the empirical findings in the subsequent sections demonstrate that we should not take the meaning of events for granted and should pay more attention to processes of political contestation through which this meaning is created.
The above conceptualization is rooted in William Sewell’s (1996a) definition of historical events as “sequences of occurrences that result in the transformation of structures” (p. 843). Yet, it amends Sewell’s sparse definition by emphasizing the interpretive element that he himself places at the centre of analysis. An event is a confluence of ruptures in social structure (institutions, networks, patterns of resource distribution) and of creative reimagining of a new social reality. The political work of “symbolic interpretation is part and parcel of the historical event” (Sewell, 1996a, p. 861). This is an aspect that merits special emphasis because it is not always apparent in other scholarly conceptualizations of events. For example, like Sewell, Griffin and Abbott see events as helping social actors transcend structural constraints (Abbott, 1990, 1992; Griffin, 1992, p. 414; 1993). But neither author discusses the symbolically salient novelty that events embody and engender. Events are either processual chains that transform social life in directions underpredicted by structural features of their context, or single occurrences within those chains. Emphasis is placed on variation in the internal temporal structure of social processes in which occurrences are indicative of events. Event is primarily a methodological concept (Griffin, 1992, p. 417), rather than an artefact of contentious political practice. 12
A different issue crops up in Beissinger’s study of nationalist mobilization in the Soviet Union. Beissinger simultaneously imports the “thin” conception of events-as-occurrences (in the sense in which occurrences are defined above) via event history analysis, while remaining sensitive to the symbolic aspect of events. Thus, he counts as events all instances of violent and nonviolent mass contention during a protest cycle (Beissinger, 2002, Chapters 2 and 4). This conceptualization clashes with an alternative view of events as symbolically extraordinary, “defining” occurrences (Beissinger, 2002, p. 86). 13 If one agrees with scholars foregrounding the symbolically “punctuated” specificity of events, the conceptual slippage identified in these works presents an analytical problem. Occurrences do not become events as a matter of course, even if and when they do transform institutions or social structures. Their meaning must be actively created in order for them to become broadly apparent political facts. 14 Conceptual looseness that sometimes conflates events with occurrences either nourishes an ontologically suspect assumption that meaning is built into occurrences, or else supports the reification of events as objective phenomena.
A comparison with critical junctures helps bring the symbolic specificity of political events into sharper focus. Similar to events, critical junctures are understood as periods during which structural factors that usually hem in political activity loosen up (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 341; Mahoney, 2001, p. 7; Mahoney & Villegas, 2007, pp. 79-80; Slater & Simmons, 2010, p. 890; Soifer, 2012, p. 2). Nevertheless, the causal efficacy of critical junctures does not necessarily rest in their cultural resonance and symbolic visibility. Some critical junctures are prompted by major series of occurrences, including economic crises, protest waves, or wars, parts of which may qualify as events (Collier, 2002, p. 31; Hall & Taylor, 1996, p. 942). However, critical junctures can also be a result of longer-term developments that need not be sudden or as noticeable as events are, or that may not be apparent at all outside of a select few insiders. 15 Events, on the other hand, are inherently symbolically resonant and appear to relevant—and broad—audiences as punctuations in the fabric of historical time.
Another difference between events and critical junctures concerns outcomes. For Capoccia and Kelemen, critical junctures do not of necessity result in durable political change. Rather, they represent the loosening of structures that leaves greater possibility for change, of the kind that might not be inferred from structural conditions. 16 Instead of facilitating political transformation, some junctures may result in “re-equilibration” and continued reproduction of the path predating the juncture (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007, p. 352). By contrast, events, at least according to Sewell’s definition, are by definition actualized in long-term change whose form is both structural and discursive.
Understood in this way, some critical junctures overlap with events, but not all do. A critical juncture need not eventuate in a new discursive reality, even if it opens the space for a major long-term transformation of social structures, institutions, or resource distribution. Events, on the other hand, are always at least indicative, if not co-constitutive, of critical junctures. In Sewell’s understanding, every event reconstitutes the symbolic-cultural features of the political landscape, and does so durably (that is, lasting structural change is accompanied by a long-term change in discursive reality). Put differently, not every critical juncture presupposes an event, whereas every event presupposes a critical juncture.
Prospective Event Framing and Political Power
Scholars adopting the constructivist conceptualization of events customarily examine the creation of meaning after the occurrence has taken place (Capoccia & Ziblatt, 2010, p. 948; Chwieroth, 2010; Ish-Shalom, 2011; Sewell, 1996a, p. 852; 1996b, p. 271; Wagner-Pacifici, 2010, p. 1352). These retrospectively framed events appear to us as moments of heightened agency. In this article, I identify an alternative class of events: occurrences that relevant political actors know will take place in the future, but of whose specific outcome they are unsure, and whose meaning is constructed prior to them taking place. I classify these occurrences as prospectively framed events. Both types of events can facilitate change, but prospectively framed events can provide us with farther-reaching insights into the character and exercise of political power.
Writing a decade apart, Terry Moe (2005) and Paul Pierson (2015) noted that political scientists have become increasingly reluctant to study power, despite its centrality to the practice of politics. Analysis of events, particularly prospectively framed events, can help advance the theoretical knowledge of the less analytically and empirically tractable forms of power. These forms are subsumed under a number of terms, including “third face” (Lukes, 2005), “fourth face” (Digeser, 1992), and “productive power” (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). While these conceptualizations differ from one another in significant ways, they share the understanding that power is exercised through actors, rather than over them. Transformative political change is made difficult less by the unequal distribution of resources or differential access to institutional power, than by the legitimacy of the political status quo among the potential constituents for change. Broadly accepted discourses among those constituents legitimize the existing patterns of political activity and nourish identities conducive to the continuation of those patterns (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, pp. 46, 56; Digeser, 1992, p. 980). The power of status quo politics is actualized and projected through the very identities of its potential opponents.
Without change to dominant political discourses and, by extension, identities that they support, major political alternatives remain exotic curiosities rather than serious contenders. 17 Yet all political projects, no matter how dominant, engender some degree of opposition (Digeser, 1992, pp. 984-985). 18 Challengers to the political status quo normally lack access to resources with which to change the prevailing identities and discourses. The role of events in challenging the political status quo is thus pivotal—they are potential power-amplifiers for the challengers, since they can be framed as demonstrating the unsustainability of existing patterns of political activity. However, while events are indeed agency facilitating, they do not necessarily favor the opponents of the political status quo. Distinguishing between retrospectively and prospectively framed events is a particularly useful way of establishing this.
As noted in the introductory section, focusing on retrospectively framed events is a potential source of selection bias, likely to result in misleading conclusions about the character of agency produced by events. 19 Since retrospectively framed events tend to represent successful examples of major change, we can expect resulting analyses to show that events normally tend to favor those seeking to overturn existing political patterns. 20 Studying prospectively framed events suggest that this is not the case. The very act of prospective framing indicates that the challengers to the political status quo are not convinced that the upcoming occurrence will be interpreted by their target audiences as a fundamental turning point, or that it will provoke a change in their attitudes and behaviors. Instead, the challengers are keenly aware of the scope for differing interpretations—including those favorable to the political status quo—that occurrences facilitate. The examination of prospectively framed events thus demonstrates that agency need not enhance the power of the challengers and might instead supply status quo actors with discursive possibilities to escape committing to change.
In this context, the prospective framing of an upcoming occurrence performs several political functions. First, it helps the challengers problematize or denormalize prevailing discourses about status quo politics. 21 The occurrence, if and once it takes a “negative” turn as framed by the challengers, can provide “proof” of the unsustainability of extant approaches to politics. This is the framers’ attempt to “reveal” what Digeser would label the fourth face of power—to point to the (unfavorable) power implications of the existing state of affairs for the potential constituents for change. By providing an alternative reading of the political landscape, instead of “raising awareness” among the potential constituents for change—as their rhetoric normally stipulates 22 —the challengers are attempting to create a new political identity for those constituents. Second, by framing an upcoming occurrence, challengers to the status quo are trying to shore up their own power relative to that of the status-quo political players. In nationalist contestation, which is the empirical subject of this article, the relevant status quo players are usually moderate political actors or organizations representing the potential constituents for change. 23 Prospective framing provides the challengers with an opportunity to reduce the agentic scope at the disposal of these actors.
While the specific approaches to this goal may vary, in this article I propose the following general pattern of prospective event framing. The framing process can be thought of as a three-move game. In the first move, the challengers reframe the political situation in light of the upcoming occurrence. They interpret an anticipated outcome as a major challenge to the existing approach to politics, requiring an equally transformative change in policy. In the second move, the challengers engage in public contestation, the goal of which is to coax the status quo decision-makers to openly commit to the “if-then” proposition articulated in the new frame. 24 This does not entail that the latter commit to immediate change of policy—only that they acknowledge the validity of the frame conditional on the specific outcome of the upcoming occurrence. If the challengers are successful in extracting such a conditional concession from the status quo players, there is a convergence around the common meaning of the impending occurrence. If status quo actors do not adopt the frame, they expose themselves to charges of indifference to a pressing political problem, which is yet another way through which the challengers may attempt to enhance their relative power position. The third move in the game is actualized if the anticipated occurrence takes the form predicted by the challengers, thus discursively trapping the actors supporting the existing state of affairs. 25 At this point, they can either alter their political strategy in line with the challengers’ expectations, or lose political credibility among their constituents by abandoning the frame or “massaging” its meaning. I emphasize again that this article does not seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of this type of framing, but rather to empirically verify its conceptual validity and draw implications for the study of agency and power in politics.
Understood in this way, prospective event framing is meant to produce substantive change by constraining, rather than facilitating, agency. The reason challengers direct their activity toward existing political organizations is due to the latter having at their disposal not only institutional resources, but also the brand recognition that may be of use in gaining support for political alternatives among broader segments of society. The ultimate goal is to reduce the ability of status quo actors to evade political change by reducing the scope for alternative interpretations of an upcoming occurrence. 26 What follows is a case study examining the framing of the Spanish Constitutional Court decision 31/2010 regarding the Catalan Statute of Autonomy between 2006 when the Statute was referred to the Court, and 2010 when the Court issued its verdict. The study demonstrates the pattern of framing efforts aimed at reducing the decision-making leeway of the leaders of Catalan nationalist parties, and responses by the latter to resist those framing attempts.
Catalonia: Framing a Transformative Event
Case Selection and Frame Analysis
The case study at the core of this article is a conceptual plausibility probe. According to Eckstein, the goal of plausibility probes is “to establish that a theoretical construct [in this case, the prospective framing of events] is worth considering at all” (Eckstein, 1975, p. 109). The Catalan case is highly suitable in the pursuit of this goal. First, during the time period under study (2006-2010), it exhibited the basic prerequisites necessary for the process of prospective framing: the presence of political challengers wishing to transform extant patterns of political activity (the secessionist members of political and civil society in Catalonia), and the possibility of prospective framing of an event provided by the court appeal against the Catalan Statute of Autonomy. Second, the case is theoretically relevant due to the political marginality (but not outright irrelevance) of secessionist politics in Catalonia for the duration of the period under examination. Openly secessionist parties were a minority phenomenon in Catalan politics until 2012 (Rico & Liñeira, 2014). 27 Had secessionism been in the political mainstream, we likely would not have been able to detect any prospective framing directed at mainstream political parties because the secessionist position would already have been entrenched. The absence of framing would not have signified its political irrelevance, but rather its lack of necessity. In case framing did nevertheless occur, it would have been epiphenomenal to the dominant political discourse. Given the political marginality of secessionism in Catalonia during this time period, the framing evident in the empirical sections below cannot be understood as a mere indicator of existing political trends, but rather a novel phenomenon seeking to transform Catalan politics.
Third, and related to the previous point, while secessionism was politically marginal during the time period in question, it was not wholly absent. Secessionist political parties and organizations have had an enduring presence in Catalonia, despite failing to achieve notable electoral success or ideological hegemony. Moreover, they operated in the context in which nonseparatist Catalan nationalism was mainstream. This is seen in the adoption of Catalan nationalist discourse not only by autonomist parties such as the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia and Democratic Union of Catalonia (members of a federated platform that governed the region between 1980 and 2003 and then again from 2010 to 2015), but also by parties not normally associated with Catalan nationalism, such as the Socialist Party of Catalonia and the Initiative for Catalonia-Greens (Lluch, 2014, Chapter 4). Thus, rather than being an irrelevant case (e.g., a region in which virtually no secessionist movement could become politically consequential), this is a negative case conforming to the possibility principle outlined by Mahoney and Goertz (2004). With an irrelevant case, we would expect to find either no framing at all, or framing with virtually no possibility of efficacy. Finally, the case offers advantages of data availability due to the combination of regime type and the level of socioeconomic development. As the politics of meaning-making took place in a prosperous, democratic region, it was relatively transparent, providing a wealth of information on the basis of which I was able to reconstruct the patterns of framing and counterframing.
Thus far, I have discussed framing in rather general terms. The article now turns to more specific framing patterns. As noted above, the meaning of specific occurrences is seldom self-evident (Snow, 2004, p. 384). The framing process “assign[s] meaning to and interpret[s] relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists” (Snow & Benford, 1988, p. 198). Framing always takes place in a context characterized by preexisting schemas of meaning. 28 Consequently, radical political change requires what scholars have called frame transformation. Rather than a mere adjustment of existing frames, frame transformation represents a “dramatic reconstitutions in the way in which the object of orientation [ . . . ] is seen” (Snow, 2004, p. 393). For Snow and Benford, the framing process combines “diagnostic” and “prognostic” features. The diagnostic frame links elements of a process into a common narrative that presents those elements as parts of a problem to be solved. The prognostic frame supplies the solution to the problem identified by the “diagnosis” (Snow & Benford, 1988, pp. 200-201). Rather than prognosis, however, I use what I believe to be a more accurate term—“prescription”—and correspondingly refer to “prescriptive frames.”
Before the adoption of the 2006 Statute of Autonomy, the dominant Catalan nationalist frame was that of gradual, if contested, advancement of Catalonia’s self-government within the Spanish constitutional framework. Between 2006 and 2010, Catalan secessionists attempted to transform this frame by inducing status-quo nationalist politicians to acknowledge that the gradualist approach to meaningful self-government was at an end. The new diagnostic frame they were proposing was that the Constitutional Court decision on the 2006 Statute, which they predicted would reduce the scope of Catalonia’s autonomy, would decisively demonstrate that Spanish political elites were no longer capable of accommodating Catalan political demands. The corresponding prescriptive frame suggested that the only appropriate response to this new reality would be a determined (and near-term) shift to a strategy of independence. The core element of their political strategy was to persuade the wavering elites in two main nationalist parties, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia [ERC]) and Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (Democratic Convergence of Catalonia [CDC]), to publicly accept the new frame.
The frame that the challengers used will henceforth be referred to as the collective exhaustion master frame, as it narrates a national community’s arrival at a psychological threshold in a situation of political inequality. Reaching such a threshold, in turn, suggests that normal or cooperative politics no longer applies. A prospectively framed event can be integral to threshold construction and qualitative change in political dynamics. Such an event presents a unique opportunity for radical opponents of the status quo, who want to make sure that a potentially impactful upcoming occurrence is politically utilized and that it cannot be interpreted in ways that might be detrimental to their goals. Without prospective framing, an event might facilitate the continuation of existing politics or shifts that may undercut the challengers’ political program. 29 I consider the causal implications of prospective framing in the concluding section.
The Context: Catalan Nationalism From Cooperation to Challenge
Spain’s return to democracy gave rise to a unique system of territorial autonomy that was, in part, devised to accommodate the country’s minority nations. 30 The 1978 Constitution eventually led to the establishment of 17 Autonomous Communities (ACs), with Catalonia among the first (Bonime-Blanc, 1987, pp. 67-72; Moreno, 2001, pp. 60-61). During subsequent decades, the friction between the governments of Spain and Catalonia contributed to the emergence of a cluster of well-established Catalan grievances. Among the most politically relevant were the central government’s incursion into areas of AC jurisdiction; the perceived lack of stable fiscal resources and Catalonia’s disproportionate contribution to the central budget relative to investment received (and relative to other ACs); and the absence of symbolic recognition of Catalan nationhood. 31
In the early 2000s, these frustrations motivated an attempt to revise Catalonia’s existing Statute of Autonomy. Two elections provided the catalyst for reform. The 2003 Catalan election ended the 23-year hegemony of the centre-right Convergence and Union (CiU), and brought to power a coalition government consisting of ERC, the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), and the Initiative for Catalonia–Greens (IC-V). The Spanish general election of 2004 ushered in a federally inclined Socialist government. The alignment of proreform forces paved the way for the process of statutory reform that proceeded in two stages. After the initial draft of the new Statute was ratified in the Catalan Parliament, it was subsequently negotiated and revised in Madrid. 32 The Catalan proposal emerging from the first stage was scaled down in some significant aspects, notably in terms of the fiscal deal and symbolic recognition (Colino, 2009, pp. 271-273). Nevertheless, the Statute was endorsed by the Catalan electorate in a referendum, and subsequently adopted (Orte & Wilson, 2009, pp. 427, 429).
Even before the new document came into effect, the conservative Popular Party, the official opposition in the Spanish Parliament, challenged numerous provisions of the new Statute at the Constitutional Court (Guibernau, 2013, p. 381). Over the subsequent 4 years, the anticipated Court decision developed into an important political issue. 33 The empirical sections of the article demonstrate that the secessionist elements of political and civil society engaged in the prospective framing of the potential negative decision of the Constitutional Court. They did so in order to reduce the political maneuvering space of the two major Catalan nationalist parties, the then-non-separatist CDC—the larger partner in CiU—and the reluctantly separatist ERC, and steer them toward a relatively near-term process of disassociation from the Spanish state.
The Process: Making the Deciders Decide
The Popular Party took the Catalan Statute of Autonomy to the Constitutional Court on July 31, 2006. The Court issued its verdict 4 years later, on June 28, 2010. The intervening period saw secessionist actors in major parties and civil society organizations try to frame the potentially negative Court decision as exhausting the existing pattern of political activity in Catalonia. The framing efforts were spearheaded by the more radical members of ERC and CDC, the major nationalist parties in Catalonia, and were aimed at the more moderate or vacillating leadership of these parties. Figure 1 provides a schematic representation of the connections among the most significant Catalan parties, and the position of intraparty secessionist wings. In classifying the parties, I use Lluch’s distinction between separatist, autonomist, and federalist ideological orientations (Lluch, 2014). Intraparty challengers were joined by the independentist organizations active outside of the political sphere. While the framing efforts of these organizations were also important, my investigation reveals that they occurred subsequent to the intraparty framing activity—toward the second half of the 2006-2010 period.
Catalan political landscape, 2006-2010.
The framing process unfolded in a climate of vigorous political competition between ERC and CDC, with the latter periodically attempting to hive ERC off from its governing coalition partners. As both parties competed for the nationalist vote, their interaction contributed to a drawn-out process nationalist outbidding in which the anticipated Court decision proved to be one of the most durable issues. This durability is demonstrated in Figure 2, which tallies the number of public speech acts invoking the Court decision between 2006 and 2010. This context provided internal separatist factions with the opportunity to pressure party organizations into publicly endorsing the exhaustion frame. The result was less than they had hoped for: Party elites accepted the diagnostic component of the frame, but they resisted adopting its secessionist prescriptive component. Even the nominally secessionist ERC wavered in its response to the potentially negative CC decision. The findings presented in the upcoming sections demonstrate both the presence of prospective framing, and the awareness that both the challengers and the status-quo players had of their political implications. Moreover, the patterns of resistance by ERC and CDC leaders vindicate the challengers’ skepticism that a negative Court decision would inherently favor an immediate turn to independentism.
The court decision in public discourse.
The evidence that follows is based on the examination of daily editions of El País newspaper between July of 2006 and June of 2010, and is supplemented by participant interviews and primary materials. I use these materials to trace the discourses developing among Catalan nationalist parties with respect to the anticipated Court decision. 34 I divide frames articulated by the political actors into their diagnostic and prescriptive components. This division is analytical, as numerous statements frequently combine both elements. Nevertheless, distinguishing the frames in this manner facilitates a more accurate demonstration of the discursive tensions and their political significance. 35
The Nominal Secessionists: ERC
The Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) was the only openly secessionist party with regional parliamentary presence during the 1990s and 2000s. While the party supported the reform of the Statute of Autonomy during 2004 and 2005, this support was, according to one member, a gambit designed to shift the Catalan population and political elites away from autonomism and toward independentism. The party wagered that the attempt to obtain recognition of Catalan nationhood and greater autonomy via statutory reform would be rejected by the Spanish political elites, thus demonstrating the impossibility of achieving a plurinational federal framework preferred by most Catalans. 36 This was an early instance of prospective framing aimed at challenging the political status quo. However, subsequent developments with respect to the decision of the Spanish Constitutional Court suggest that near-term independence was not a consensus position within the party.
ERC’s leadership came closest to adopting the entirety of the exhaustion frame with reference to the decision of the Constitutional Court. Starting with the party president Lluis Carod Rovira, all major leaders of ERC accepted the diagnostic discourse that a negative Court decision would signal the end of the gradualist path to Catalan self-government (Company, 2006). 37 Yet, despite the party’s independentist profile, its leadership was much more circumspect in relation to the secessionist prescriptive frame. While ERC leaders continued to endorse independence as a long-term goal, they tempered their discourse with conciliatory statements. The only major exception to this pattern occurred in late March of 2007. Apparently bypassing the organization’s hierarchy, ERC’s vice-secretary Vendrell suggested that his party would abandon the governing coalition and bring CiU to power, provided the latter agreed to a referendum on independence in May of that year (Bauzà & Garriga, 2007). ERC leaders subsequently qualified this by noting a referendum would be needed in case of a negative CC decision, but its parliamentary motion to this effect failed to pass. The episode terminated with Carod Rovira arguing that ERC needed to (re)build its reputation as a mature party, maintaining the coalition and contributing to good governance (“Carod Reconviene,” 2007).
Simultaneously, internal secessionist factions worked to move the party to a more decisively independentist programmatic stance. After exerting pressure throughout 2007, the left-wing faction Esquerra Independentista (EI) succeeded in altering ERC’s program during the party Congress in June, 2008 (Foguet, 2008). The amendment EI introduced stipulated that, in case the Constitutional Court reduced the scope of Catalan autonomy, the Catalan parliament should
call a popular consultation, to coincide with the next regional election. The consultation will ask the citizenry [of Catalonia] to authorize the Catalan government to negotiate with the Spanish state about the recognition of the right to decide on the political status of Catalonia by way of a referendum. If the consultation yields a positive result, but the Spanish state refuses to negotiate with the Catalan government, the consultation will enable the Catalan parliament to exercise the right to self-determination via a [unilateral] referendum when a parliamentary majority decides on this. (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 2008, pp. 35-36)
Thus, against the party leadership’s opposition, the challengers shifted the party’s official stance closer to their own prescriptive framing of the Court’s decision.
The leadership countered by underscoring ERC’s reputation as a credible governing party in their public pronouncements, trying to downplay the importance of the amendment. Moreover, almost immediately after the Congress, the party’s parliamentary leadership voted in favor of raising the voting threshold for motions of confidence. Journalists interpreted this as the leadership’s insurance in case of a negative CC decision. The fear, according to analysts, was that ERC would be forced by its more radical membership to break with the coalition and endorse the referendum (Noguer, 2008a). Material in the online Appendix demonstrates that these trends continued for much of the period in question.
The Waverers: CDC
CDC’s leadership accepted the maximalist diagnostic frame slightly later than their counterparts in ERC. As one of the sponsors of the 2006 Statute, CDC (as part of CiU) at first upheld the new institutional framework as a major achievement in Catalan self-government (“El Mayor Nivel,” 2006). It then gradually adopted the diagnostic component of the exhaustion frame during early 2007, before briefly escalating its rhetoric in February and March, partly in response to ERC’s aforementioned secessionist maneuver. In a bid to outflank ERC, between September and November of 2007, CDC’s leader Artur Mas formulated a new discourse with the stated goal of resuscitating Catalan nationalism. In his November 20 speech, he fully accepted the radical diagnostic frame, arguing that the 2006 court challenge against the Statute meant that the gradualist approach to the pursuit of greater Catalan autonomy had by that point been exhausted. This diagnostic frame would continue to be voiced by CDC leadership over the next 2 years (see online Appendix).
On the other hand, CDC’s brass failed to develop a consistent prescriptive frame, the only constant being their refusal to endorse a secessionist response to a negative CC decision. 38 Initially, Mas considered constitutional reform as an appropriate response. In the fall of 2007, he proposed a referendum on the altered Statute, and, if this proved impossible, a new Catalan government of national unity, which would open negotiations with Madrid on the basis of the more far-reaching Statute of 2005 (Garriga, 2007b). While trying to balance a more robust nationalist message with a fairly anemic political strategy, the CDC leadership was subject to pressures from the party radicals. During the July 2008 party Congress, proponents of independence, notably the party’s youth wing, succeeded in including in the party platform a call for Catalonia to become “a free and sovereign nation [sic!] in 21st century Europe” (Foguet & Garriga, 2008). While the leadership prevented the inclusion of a more direct call for independence, the outcome was nevertheless a significant step toward the maximalist prescriptive frame. The leadership sought to counter this move with moderating messages. Mas suggested that, in case of a negative Court decision, the Catalan government ought to negotiate a bilateral transfer of competencies under Section 150.2 of the Constitution (Garriga, 2008).
Thus, whereas at times CDC’s prescriptive frame veered toward rupture, the leadership continued to “correct” the party’s discourse to keep it within the limits set by the Spanish constitutional framework (see online Appendix). These “continuist” prescriptive tendencies clashed with the diagnostic frame adopted by the leadership. In light of the assumption that a negative CC decision would demonstrate the futility of negotiating greater autonomy (the diagnostic frame), CDC’s proposals implying collaboration with the central government were politically incongruous. This inconsistency can be explained by dynamics similar to those prevailing in ERC. On the one hand, CDC had to respond to external (ERC and civil society organizations) and internal (primarily youth wing) pressures for radicalization. On the other hand, it sought to avoid antagonizing the more mainstream segments of its electorate, but also its autonomist partner in CiU, the Democratic Union of Catalonia (UDC). By refusing to commit to a specific course of action, CDC retained some maneuvering room after the June 2010 decision. CiU won the 2010 election, and took another 2 years before shifting to the independentist position (Rico & Liñeira, 2014).
The “Optimists”: PSC, UDC, IC-V
The other autonomist parties refused to accept either the diagnostic or prescriptive elements of the exhaustion master frame, attesting to the existence of alternatives to the maximalist discourse. Despite mutual differences, PSC, IC-V, and UDC all agreed that a negative Court decision would not foreclose the path to greater autonomy through negotiation. PSC placed the responsibility for an eventual adverse decision on the Popular Party, rather than on the entire Spanish political class, suggesting the continued presence of a political interlocutor on the Spanish side (Noguer, 2010; Pérez, 2007). The party’s prescriptive frame was correspondingly moderate, including proposals for future negotiations (Company, 2007b; Garriga, 2007a), constitutional reform (Noguer, 2008b), and, once the negative decision became imminent, the reconstitution of the Constitutional Court itself (Piñol & Noguer, 2010).
UDC and IC-V exhibited a similar discursive pattern. Duran i Lleida, the head of UDC, was the only major Catalanist politician to concede that elements of the 2006 Statute might be unconstitutional (“Duran Dice,” 2009). In relationship to the prospective negative CC decision, UDC cautioned against rush to judgment and advocated more extensive fiscal autonomy (Garriga & Foguet, 2008), implying the continued viability of further negotiations with Spain. IC-V explicitly rejected independence (Guillot, 2007), counseling constitutional reform instead (Noguer & Blanchar, 2009), or bilateral transfer of power via Article 150.2 of the Constitution (“La Generalitat Buscará,” 2009).
Civil Society Organizations
The examination of civil society organizations provides a different angle on the issue. The time period between 2005 and 2010 saw the proliferation of various entities advocating Catalan independence, including, inter alia, “Platform for the Right to Decide,” “Sovereignty and Progress,” “Platform for Sovereignty,” and a proindependence think tank, “The Sovereignist Studies Circle” (Company, 2007a). Some individuals were members of more than one such organization and a number were among the more independentist members of both ERC and CDC. These organizations were at the forefront of proindependence mobilization throughout the 2006-2010 period. They framed the decision of the Constitutional Court in much the same way as their counterparts within ERC and CDC—that is, as the final proof that the negotiated path to self-government in Catalonia was at an end. For the 2009 demonstration organized during the National Day of Catalonia (September 11th), “Sovereignty and Progress” and “Platform for the Right to Decide” produced a manifesto in which they reiterated the message that the negative Court decision would mean the definitive turning point in Catalan quest for self-government:
The history of Catalanism has, down to the present day, been replete with attempts to reform this state in order to [ . . . ] convert Spain into a multinational political space within which Catalans could feel comfortable. The most recent such attempt has been the reform of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, which will meet its definitive end once the Constitutional Court decides on the appeals presented to it. [That] sentence [ . . . ] will [ . . . ] destroy what little political potential remains of the 2006 Statute, ending the hopes of those who [ . . . ] still believe in the possibility of reforming the Spanish state and leading it toward the recognition of its own plurinationality. Nothing is more desperate and useless than trying to talk to a wall. Common sense tells us that it is time to recognize that Spain is a closed political project [ . . . ] in which there is no room for the aspirations of the Catalan people. [ . . . ] Third way options, alternatives to the independence of our country, have been discredited by the facts.
39
Given that some of the members of these organizations were also dissident members of Catalan nationalist parties, the similarity in the framing of the Court’s decision is hardly surprising.
The framing of the Constitutional Court decision was far from the most important activity of the independentist civil society organizations. They disseminated ideas about independence to diverse audiences, 40 held a number of large demonstrations, and spearheaded several waves of informal municipal-level referenda on Catalan independence between 2009 and 2011 (Muñoz & Guinjoan, 2013). These referenda were important mobilizing tools, meant to enhance the sense of efficacy among those Catalans who might have been favorably disposed toward independence, but did not find it politically feasible. 41 Nevertheless, demonstrating the efficacy of independentist political action was clearly not seen by the framers as sufficient to effect transformative political change. Stimulating outrage by framing the negative Court decision as a political point of no return was evidently important as well. Their activity, however, was not aimed directly at the political elites in the two main nationalist parties.
An Ambiguous Outcome With Meaningful Implications
The foregoing findings demonstrate the importance of events in power struggles between opponents and supporters of status quo politics in Catalonia. For the independence-minded segments of Catalan political and civil society, the negative decision of the Spanish Constitutional Court was a potential lever serving to undermine the political power of status quo actors. This power rested on two interrelated elements. The first was the broadly accepted political discourse at the centre of mainstream Catalan nationalism: that meaningful self-government for Catalonia was attainable through negotiations within the framework of the Spanish state. The dominance of this discourse moderated the nationalist parties’ appetite for independence. In 2007, ERC’s Josep Huguet noted that “to leap ahead of where the people are [by supporting a near-term turn to independence] would be a strategic error of enormous proportions” (Company, 2007c). 42 This amounted to conceding that a significant segment of ERC’s target electorate was hostile to the party’s formal raison d’être. It was also a discursive weapon against ERC’s pro-independence dissidents. The second source of status quo actors’ power was their ability to escape committing to a particular course of action in case of a negative Constitutional Court decision, while at the same time criticizing it from a nationalist position. 43 This approach was meant to maximize the gain of appearing to protect national interests, while avoiding the cost of moving against the dominant—and continuist—discourse.
The challengers sought to undermine both of these sources of power. The Court’s decision was framed in such a way as to erode the dominant political discourse and, by extension, to weaken the legitimacy of autonomism or plurinational federalism in Catalonia. At the same time, the prospective framing of the upcoming decision, particularly through intraparty activity as detailed above, was supposed to trap CDC and ERC leaders into a commitment to a more radical change than they were willing to countenance. As the previous sections demonstrate, the top brass of both parties was assiduously avoiding this trap, recognizing its power implications. By doing this, they managed to preserve some scope for discretion once the Constitutional Court issued its judgment in June of 2010.
The Court’s verdict diluted some of the key symbolic and substantive sections of the 2006 Statute. 44 Despite this outcome, and despite a massive demonstration against the decision in Barcelona on July 10th, the event did not result in near-term or obvious transformative change in the region’s political landscape. ERC did not call for an immediate turn to the strategy of independence, whereas CiU would waver for two more years before running on a separatist platform. The only party endorsing an immediate secessionist turn in the November 2010 election was the newly formed Catalan Solidarity for Independence, which won 3.3% of the total vote (Rico, 2012, p. 225). The support for Catalan independence would continue to rise in line with the previous period and would only spike in 2012 instead of immediately after the decision. 45
Prospective framing of the Constitutional Court decision points to the skepticism of the challengers that the event they were framing would be inherently politically transformative. They certainly viewed it as an opportunity to advance the independentist agenda, but were well aware both of the power of status quo discourses, and the possibility that mainstream nationalist parties might eschew independence even if the decision proved to be a negative one. Both the resistance that their framing engendered, and the absence of a political turn by nationalist parties and general population immediately after the Court’s verdict, vindicated this skepticism. Still, these framing efforts were not entirely fruitless. For both major nationalist parties, the decision of the Constitutional Court, and the prior framing thereof, changed the internal party dynamic, weakening the position of moderate leaders, and strengthening the hand of the more radical elements. Perhaps more importantly, the decision fostered a much more broad-based extrapolitical organization, most notably through the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), a proindependence organization officially formed in 2012, but under development since 2009. 46 It was arguably ANC’s massive demonstration in September of 2012 that changed the electoral calculus and shifted the mainstream nationalist parties toward secessionism (Martí, 2013, p. 509).
Toward Eventful Comparative Politics 47
In his 1957 article on events, William Riker lamented the lack of scholarly attention to that critical unit of “motion and action” (Riker, 1957). He also critiqued our understanding of events as objective phenomena, noting their intrinsically subjective character. Both assertions, with some qualification, retain much of their relevance for the study of politics today. This article provides a definitive empirical demonstration that, instead of being exogenous and objective factors influencing political outcomes, events are socially constructed outcomes of political struggle. The article’s specific contribution is the development of the concept of prospectively framed events. These are anticipated occurrences the contestation over the meaning of which occurs prior to them taking place.
The examination of prospective framing offers several unique insights into the study of political change. Most fundamentally, it guards against a flawed understanding of the causal efficacy of events. Retrospectively framed events are normally successful instances of transformational change—it is this feature that makes them stand out in the historical record. If we were to direct our analytical lens solely in this direction, we might conclude that events inherently favor challengers to the political status quo, enhancing their power-standing relative to those actors endorsing existing patterns of politics. If this were so, however, would event-based explanations really leave any room for agency? Prospectively framed events, such as the decision of the Spanish Constitutional Court examined here, serve as an important methodological and theoretical challenge to this view. 48 The very fact that the challengers frame an occurrence before it takes place demonstrates their skepticism about its predetermined political impact. Catalan independentists had an acute understanding of the power of entrenched political discourses. As importantly, they were attuned to the possibility that the leaders of nationalist political parties might interpret the Constitutional Court decision in a manner inimical to the cause of independence. That is, they recognized that events broadened their own agentic potential, but also that of their politically privileged opponents. Prospective framing was their attempt to reduce the discretion, and with it also the power, of the status quo players. Thus, in addition to being an important analytical prism for the study of major political change, prospective framing of events is also part of the challengers’ political repertoire, and therefore merits sustained scholarly attention.
The main goal of this article was to demonstrate the conceptual utility of prospectively framed events. Next steps should be to assess the causal implications of such framing. Two key questions are of particular importance. First, under what conditions can the political challengers coax status quo politicians into accepting radically transformative frames? The Catalan case study points to at least two significant political factors. The first is a precarious political position that predisposes the relevant parties toward greater risk-taking. In the Catalan case, the nationalist ERC and CDC competed for largely the same electorate. CDC was out of power after running the region for 23 years, whereas ERC’s governing pact with nonsecessionist parties threatened its legitimacy among Catalan nationalists. This configuration led both parties to escalate their nationalist rhetoric, an outbidding dynamic that opened the space for the challengers to advance more radical political options. In the event, the leadership of each organization was quite careful not to assume an openly secessionist position, but as the empirical sections demonstrate, their competition made them more amenable to contemplating it.
The second factor that may lead political incumbents to adopt a radical event frame is sustained and reasonably broad-based societal mobilization favorable to such framing. During the 2006-2010 period, even the formally independentist ERC was weary of appearing too radical for the moderate Catalanist electorate. On the other hand, as the Catalan National Assembly organized a series of demonstrations culminating in a massive show of strength in September of 2012, even the traditionally autonomist CDC decided to radicalize. Yet, this argument lends itself to the causality dilemma. Catalan independentists targeted mainstream nationalist parties because they hoped that their conversion to independence might drag the public opinion in its wake. If, however, the precondition for such a conversion is a change in public opinion itself, then both scholars and political upstarts would need to look elsewhere for the key causal factors.
This leads to the second key question for future inquiry, one related to the relative causal impact of prospective versus retrospective framing. Again, there are at least two feasible lines of investigation. First, even if targeted elites do not accept the challengers’ frame, the prolonged presence of framing efforts in the media and the public discourse keeps the issue alive. We should expect that such issue priming should predispose the relevant population to experience the event as more significant or “visible” than if it occurred without similar priming (either because nobody bothered to frame it, or because it was framed retrospectively). 49 The second line of inquiry is more speculative but potentially more analytically fruitful. Prospective framing may be a method of intensifying collective emotion, with the anticipated event acting as the saturation point that animates the target audience’s motivation for radical change.
As Gamson (1992) notes, one of the most pervasive motivations for participation in social movements is the perception of unfairness, codified in injustice frames. Yet, as work in psychology, sociology, and political science shows, explaining political behavior through cognitive mechanisms alone overlooks the very significant affective dimension of social action. 50 Differing interpretations of similar developments can change these developments’ emotional resonance, which in turn further shapes cognition (J. J. Gross, 1999; K. Gross, 2008; K. Gross & D’Ambrosio, 2004; Jasper, 2011). Emotional commitment is especially important in social movement mobilization (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Activists try to induce emotional reactions among those they seek to mobilize in order to elicit broader participation or shifts in perceptions, often through exploiting or creating “moral shock” (Jasper, 2011, p. 292). More recent studies have examined the specific role of “collective emotions” in mobilization, notably such emotions that are shared among members of a group. 51
Missing from these studies is the sustained attention to narratives of temporal intensification of grievances, and to the way in which such narratives may stimulate the amplification of individual and “collective” emotion. Where grievances are a persistent feature of politics, what accounts for their mobilizational potential at some times and not others? Zerubavel’s (2003) contribution provides possible clues since it is a rare account of narratives that captures their temporal texture, though even here the changing intensity of processes is relegated to several mentions of “final straws” (p. 12) and “watershed events” (2003, p. 83). 52 At the same time, he does not explicitly link the cognitive to the emotional dimension of narratives/discourses.
This is where the potential added value of prospectively framed events becomes apparent. If, as social psychology suggests, frames influence the content of emotional reaction, exhaustion frames, such as the one articulated in the case study above, may contribute to the heightening of collective emotion. They narrate their target event as the end-point of a long string of accumulating injustices, 53 normally tied to previous, emotionally evocative, events in the collective imaginary. 54 In other words, they attempt to create a sense of a collective emotional threshold. Naturalizing metaphors used to describe the relevant event (boiling point, breaking-point, trigger, spill-over) are deployed to confer an aura of taken-for-grantedness on an otherwise semimorphous process, converting it from an open-ended string of occurrences to a teleological, meaningful narrative (Zerubavel, 2003, pp. 7-8). 55 The successful creation of an emotional threshold justifies and legitimizes radical departures from existing patterns of political activity. The prior “patience” that the narrative claims the collective has exhibited through either political quiescence or political activity via established institutional channels becomes untenable. Exhaustion frames stimulate a sense of urgency for political change. It is worth exploring the possibility that pre-framed events dramatize, in real time, the metaphor of a pressure-cooker (build-up) represented by the frame, thereby animating collective emotion. 56 Retrospective framing logically cannot serve the same function, because by the time framing takes place, the relevant event is already in the past. 57
Mobilization for Catalan independence provides some suggestive evidence in support of this hypothesis. A member of the Catalan National Assembly and a long-standing participant in the independentist movement noted that the 2010 Constitutional Court decision was important because of the frustration that was already building up, and thought that without accumulation of frustrations, the 2010 reaction—notably the large demonstration in July of that year—would not have been the same. She noted that “the people were mad about the ruling itself, but it got big because of all the things that brought us to that [point].” 58 Asked to account for why the ruling did not immediately transform Catalan politics, she responded that whereas 2010 was about anger and frustration, 2012 was about efficacy. According to the respondent, the demonstration of 2012—the second in 2 years with a massive turnout—convinced the population already frustrated by the 2010 decision that their efforts might actually yield a political result. This accords with research in social psychology on the interaction between frustration and efficacy and the interaction of the two in explaining willingness to engage in collective action (van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004).
Systematic exploration of the social construction of transformative political events should be relevant to the study not only of nationalist mobilization, but also, inter alia, of regime change, social movements, political violence, populist mobilization, and major shifts in political economy. The hypotheses on the role of pre-framed events need to be assessed against other cases, refined, and, where appropriate, rejected. The strategies of causal assessment will require creativity given the problems inherent in parsing out the effect of ideas, narrowly conceived, from those of structural factors (organizations, resources, institutional rules, etc.). 59 Process-tracing methodology is especially well-suited for addressing just this type of problem (Jacobs, 2015). An alternative to process-tracing would be the experimental route, particularly important in testing the social psychological mechanisms through which prospective framing might influence collective emotional responses and subsequent political mobilization. Throughout, however, we ought to be mindful of the pitfalls of structuralism in the pursuit of generalizable theoretical insights. Rather than reinforcing the discipline’s deterministic tendencies, the study of events should provide an important countervailing influence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The article’s central idea was shaped by numerous and frequent exchanges with Zoran Oklopčić who, in addition to engaging with the material, supplied unstinting support and encouragement. Scott Matthews’ comments on an early version of the manuscript were crucial in moving the piece forward. I would also like to thank Yoli Terziyska, Patricia Greve, Stephen Larin, Martin Day, Beata Huszka, Jordi Graupera, and three anonymous CPS reviewers for a wealth of helpful comments, critiques, and suggestions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Xavier Arbós Marín, Elisenda Paluzie, Alfons López Tena, Laia Balcells, Liz Castro, and Adam Holesch, all of whom helped my research in Catalonia. Any errors are mine alone.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Fieldwork for this article was generously funded by two separate grants provided by Memorial University of Newfoundland.
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