Abstract
Cooperation between movements and political elites are frequently associated with the risk of cooptation. Because it undercuts contentious actors, cooptation may seem rational for elites that seek to protect their interests. However, recent scholarship questions whether this view is empirically valid. Adding to these debates, this article demonstrates that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that elites always act to maintain power, cooptation may often not be the rational choice of strategy. This article presents a typology of elite responses that focuses on three phases of elite–movement interaction: preparatory, term-setting, and confrontation phases. In each phase, elites’ choice between cooptation and conditional cooperation depends on whether legitimacy appears instrumental to achieve their goals. Cooperation, as opposed to cooptation, generates legitimacy and can, therefore, be used strategically by movements.
Keywords
By the conventional definition, we say that a movement has been coopted if elites have gained its cooperation without giving it new advantages in return (see Gamson, 1975: 29; Selznick, 1949: 34). Coopted movements lose credibility and can no longer challenge the elites. From the elites’ perspective, cooptation thus provides a cost-efficient means of domination. 1 When successful, cooptation undermines the power of movement leaders, because it makes them appear to accept cooperation without gaining anything in return. The risk of losing credibility, and thereby the public support they need to have political influence, makes cooptation an important concern for social movements. Leaders of environmental organizations, labor unions, anti-racist protest movements, and feminist groups are therefore reasonably watchful of attempts of members of the political establishment to disarm them by convincing them to support policies that are less radical than their demands. Due to its obvious rationale, cooptation appears a powerful obstacle to social change—why would not the powerful coopt challengers if this means maintaining domination at low cost? (e.g. Coy and Hedeen, 2005; Gamson, 1975; Piven and Cloward, 1977; Trumpy, 2008)
Empirically, however, elites and activists interact in various ways other than cooptation. Some researchers even suggest that cooptation is rare (Gamson, 1975; Gamson and Schmeidler, 1984). Recent scholarship has suggested that effective mobilization may help reduce the risk of cooptation (Wampler, 2010) and that elites may even find cooperation preferable to cooptation (Holdo, 2019a). These arguments suggest that movements should not assume that elites only cooperate for the sake of cooptation, but need to assess the risk of cooptation more carefully by considering various factors that could influence elites’ strategic calculations. This article seeks to contribute to this discussion by focusing on the ways that movements may themselves influence the elites’ analysis of costs and benefits of different strategies by offering conditional cooperation. The article’s contribution is a rationalistic analysis of elites’ strategic choices applied to three different phases of elite–movement interaction: preparatory, term-setting, and confrontation phases. In each phase, cooptation appears preferable to concession or repression, but may often not be preferable to conditional cooperation. A typology of a total of six rationales of either cooptation or conditional cooperation helps to specify the logic of the game.
The article highlights the strategic agency of movement leaders in ways that previous discussions of cooptation have often neglected. The two most common ways of explaining why elites do not always coopt subversive actors give very little importance to how the actions and interests of movement leaders affect the considerations of elites. The first of these is to explain non-cooptation as a product of movements’ resources. Are they well-organized and have considerable material resources of their own, or do they already depend on support from elites? (Gamson and Schmeidler, 1984: 374; Lapegna, 2014; Murphree et al., 1996; Swan and Fox, 2010; Wampler, 2010). From this perspective, either the elites are already dominant, and therefore have no interest in cooperation, or movements have sufficient resources to force elites to cooperate. The second explanation typically tones down the importance of resources, but suggests that elites may not choose cooptation if they are sufficiently motivated by ideological commitments or democratic ideals (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2014; Wampler, 2010). Together these views suggest that cooperation is chosen over cooptation when elites are not sufficiently dominant or when they are not sufficiently motivated to coopt social movements. By contrast, recent scholarship (Brooks, 2004; Holdo, 2019a) suggests that elites may also benefit strategically from cooperative relationships with movement leaders. This article shows that even if elites face an essentially strategic choice to coopt or not coopt, movement leaders may significantly influence the elites’ choice.
The article has three parts. I begin by outlining the conditions of elite–movement interaction in game theoretical terms. In the second part, I describe the logic of cooptation and the conditions that make it a rational strategy and illustrate its general relevance by describing the three different phases in which cooptation may be effective. In the third part, I juxtapose this strategy to conditional cooperation. I describe three corresponding reasons to choose this strategy over cooptation (proactive, negotiation, and reactive reasons). Whereas cooptation serves to undermine movement leaders’ integrity, conditional cooperation serves to maintain it. Movement leaders may affect the choice between these strategies by demonstrating their capacity to enable the achievement of political goals through legitimacy, which cannot be generated through cooptation.
The Terms of Engagement: Legitimacy and Trust
The analysis of elite–movement interaction offered in this article begins with the observation that elites may seek to achieve their goals either by resting their power on principles and norms that are widely accepted and seen as justified, in which case we may say that their leadership and decision-making enjoy legitimacy, or by undermining and resisting opposition to their position of power (Arendt, 1970; Holdo, 2019b). In practice, leaders may rely on both these strategies, but in specific situations, interaction with movement leaders may be characterized by either the assumption that they need cooperation to gain stronger legitimacy or that they should coopt the challengers to undermine their capacity to oppose the elites’ agenda. In other words, the elites and the movement leaders may interact on different terms, and a key variable is whether the actors involved understand the power of elites to rest on legitimacy or on their capacity to dominate.
Theorists of cooperation might call the first type of interaction, in which the actors see cooperation as instrumental in achieving legitimacy and power, a positive-sum game, as opposed to a zero-sum game, where each gain for one actor means a loss for the other. 2 In a positive-sum game, the actors may find it mutually beneficial to cooperate. Elites may find cooperation preferable if the gains of the movement leaders do not cause losses for the elites, in terms of, for example, being seen as weak or failing to realize significant political goals. In practice, actors can achieve positive outcomes for all only when each actor agrees that such an outcome would be valuable. But to reach such an agreement about the terms of interaction requires trust (Hardin, 2002). Elites may distrust movement leaders, in the sense that they suspect them of hoping to use cooperation for other purposes than the ones declared. Movement leaders may also distrust elites, in the sense that they suspect elites of hoping to coopt them. Because one cannot know the intentions of the other actor, nor how that actor understands one’s own intentions, it is often rational not to cooperate.
Game theory helps to understand why this is the case by seeing this kind of situations as analogous to a “prisoner’s dilemma” (Hardin, 1968). In short, in the prisoner’s dilemma scenario, two actors, or two “criminals,” face the choice of cooperating (remaining silent) or defecting (speaking to the police). Just as people in real-world situations may often choose not to cooperate because they cannot trust the other’s intentions, these criminals cannot know what the other person will do because they are not allowed to communicate. The prosecutors offer both criminals a bargain. They now need to decide whether to cooperate with the other criminal or not. The game has four outcomes: (1) if they both remain silent, they will be committed for a minor offense of which the prosecutors already have enough evidence; (2) if they both testify against each other, each of them gets a substantial prison sentence; (3) if one prisoner betrays the other, and the other remains silent, the first is set free while the silent one will serve even more time in prison, and (4) vice versa. What the prisoner’s dilemma shows is that both must, if they are rational, choose not to cooperate. But if both are rational, both will get an outcome that is worse than if they had both chosen to cooperate.
The actors involved, by choosing not to cooperate, thus rationally opt for a course of action that leads to sub-optimal outcomes (see also Ostrom, 1990). In elite–movement interactions, elites may according to this logic choose not to cooperate. This is because if the movement leaders choose to cooperate, the elites can take advantage of their cooperativeness and coopt them, which means the movement leader do not gain any advantages (Gamson, 1975). Moreover, if the movement leaders turn out not to be cooperative, the elites will have avoided exposing themselves and making themselves vulnerable. Similarly, the movement leaders should rationally choose not to cooperate to (1) avoid cooptation and (2) if the elites turn out cooperative, take advantage of their cooperativeness, which reveals a need for legitimacy, by exposing their weaknesses and undermining their standing. The most likely outcome, if both sides act rationality in this way, is a suboptimal outcome. If neither cooperates, there will be continued contestation without significant results on either side.
Social movement scholars often suggest that if movement leaders do cooperate rather than continue to protest, they will likely be coopted (Meyer and Tarrow, 1998). 3 Based on the reasoning of game theorists, we can see why this makes sense. Because elites do not have reasons to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma scenario, they should hope for cooptation, which is the optimal outcome. The implication, however, is that movement leaders also do not have reasons to cooperate, and therefore cooptation should actually be unlikely. In this scenario, it seems that the only reasonable outcome is continued contestation, where neither cooperates. However, theorists of cooperation also add one reason why cooptation might occur even if it seems irrational for movement leaders to be cooperative: they might be coopted because they do not have resources sufficient to choose continued contestation (see, for example, Hardin, 2002). Thus, they may feel forced to cooperate even if this means a risk for cooptation. Powerless actors need cooperation more than powerful actors. If the powerful appear cooperative nevertheless, it should be, this perspective suggests, because they hope to gain the cooperation of subordinate actors, only to then deny them the advantages they hope for (Przeworski, 1998; Selznick, 1948).
The problem of trust between elites and movement leaders stems from the idea that the dominant may pursue their interests without depending on their relationship to less powerful actors. We can call this the assumption of non-dependence. If dominant actors do not depend on maintaining a functioning relationship with subordinate actors, they should not be trusted to honor any commitments (Hardin, 2002). Whether the assumption of non-dependence holds for most, or any, actual social interaction is debatable, however. One may question whether one can ever be said to be powerful if one does not base power on the subordinates’ consent or recognition (Arendt, 1970). Protest movements are in general a problem for elites precisely because they call attention to how power depends on legitimacy and seek to question whether current possessors of official power have such legitimacy (Krause, 2011; Piven and Cloward, 1977). When they succeed in this regard and compel elites to recognize their need for legitimacy, this shifts the terms of the game. At stake are now the conditions under which the elites may regain legitimacy. In such case, the game is played under the condition of dependence on legitimacy.
Whether the political game between elites and movement leaders should be played in accordance with the assumption of non-dependence or on the condition of dependence on legitimacy is a matter for political contestation. The elites naturally prefer if the subordinates believe the elites are not dependent on their acceptance and participation. However, they will usually not maintain power for long if they believe this themselves. In this gap between what elites prefer subordinates to believe and their real dependence on the participation of subordinate actors lies opportunities for movements to gain leverage, that is, movements may strategically use their position and resources to alter elites’ cost–benefit analyses to their advantage (see Friman, 2015). A social movement can affect elites’ legitimacy negatively, by calling attention to decisions and actions that the public is likely to disagree with, but also positively by cooperating, which means participating in actions that generate a sense of legitimacy. Effective movements thus recognize this gap between what elites want subordinates to believe and their actual dependence on cooperation. Movement leaders may use their popularity and credibility to offer such cooperation on conditions that serve their interests. In this sense, the need for legitimacy gives movement leaders leverage. 4
The capacity of movement leaders to provide legitimacy is different from other kinds of resources that they might use to gain leverage, such as economic resources or political connections (Jenkins, 1983; McCarthy and Zald, 1977). It is not a static condition, but subject to demonstration through strategic action vis-à-vis the elites (Holdo, 2016). In Hardin’s (2002) terms, the need for legitimacy may help establish that the actors have “encapsulated interests.” Elites may advance their own interests by considering the interests of movement leaders. If this succeeds, elites will see that cooperation does not necessarily constrain the pursuit of their interests, as much as it enables it. Moreover, in the case where elites have previously refused to recognize the condition of dependence on legitimacy, cooperation may now broaden their possibilities, because legitimacy allows elites to count on acceptance of their decisions and actions (Tyler and Jackson, 2014). In such case, the value of mutual cooperation goes beyond overcoming resistance or opposition, because, while it may constrain elites’ options, it also enables actions that were previously difficult or impossible. In the next section, I will examine three different situations in which cooptation occurs. In each type of situation, cooptation appears rational on the assumption of non-dependence.
Cooptation in Three Phases of Elite–Movement Interaction
Social movements base their credibility, and their capacity to gain support and following, on the perception that their leaders and activists have integrity, that is, that they are acting to advance the interests of their constituencies, not the interests of some elite group or establishment. To coopt a movement is to undermine its integrity. Absent integrity, the movement is unable to challenge the elites, who may then, without resistance, advance their political interests. This strategy may be useful in at least three different kinds of situations: (1) when elites hope to prevent the emergence of mobilization and protests (what we may call preventive cooptation), (2) when elites seek to free themselves from dependence on the approval from allies (liberating cooptation), and (3) when elites aim to eliminate overt resistance (destructive cooptation).
Preventive Cooptation
“Preventive cooptation,” first, is used to undermine the capacity to mobilize protests against unpopular policies. Selznick’s (1948, 1949) classic cooptation study of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) exemplifies this scenario. The federal government hoped to expand access to electricity in the American rural South through water power plants by the Tennessee River, but this required confronting anti-government sentiments and opposition to interference in the South’s agricultural sector. The solution was to frame the TVA as a project that was born out of a process of grassroots democracy. This made the project seem less objectionable, especially to the actors that could have initiated and led protests against the TVA. Instead of protesting, they willingly took credit for it. In Selznick’s (1948: 34) words, what made cooptation a rational strategy was that it allowed the government to share “the responsibility for power rather than power itself.” As this case illustrates, preventive cooptation takes place even before a movement mobilizes.
Liberating Cooptation
The second kind of situation where cooptation is useful is when elites’ possibilities of achieving political goals are constrained by alliances with grassroots activist leaders. In such cases, cooptation serves to free the elites from such constraints. By making the movement leaders commit and invest themselves in the elites’ agenda, their integrity and credibility is undermined, which makes it possible to disregard their interests and preferences. President Trump’s treatment of his former strategist, “street fighter” Steve Bannon may serve as an example. Bannon, who was a popular and leading figure within the populist movement, and especially in right-wing media circles, was practically, following the publication of embarrassing comments in the book Fire and Fury (Wolff, 2018), forced by Trump into a position where he first needed to declare his unconditional loyalty to the president, only to then see his apologies and proclamations publicly rejected. This did not only mean that Bannon was no longer part of Trump’s team, but completely altered the power relation. Whatever leverage Bannon might have had, based on his own personal capital as a populist strategist, had now been surrendered, and Trump no longer needed to consider his views and interests.
A similar fate was suffered by the popular poet and intellectual leader of the Italian fascist movement in the 1910s and 1920s, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Until the beginning of the 1920s, D’Annunzio’s popularity surpassed that of Benito Mussolini. Having established himself as public intellectual and orator, D’Annunzio’s power within the movement culminated in 1919 as he led an army of 2000 volunteering men to liberate the city of Fiume from British, French, and American forces. Mussolini, who had considered, and allegedly attempted, to murder his rival, eventually chose instead to bring him closer (Ledeen, 2018). “When you have a rotten tooth, you have two possibilities open to you,” he told a friend, “either you pull the tooth or you fill it with gold. With D’Annunzio, I have chosen for the latter treatment” (Licht, 1982: 318). Mussolini demanded loyalty in exchange for influence, but never gave D’Annunzio any political rewards. Marginalized, D’Annunzio was instead only materially compensated; his villa at Lake Garda was turned into a luxurious residence and a national monument (Hughes-Hallet, 2013; Ledeen, 2018; Woodhouse, 2001). Politically, he was made irrelevant. When, in 1937, D’Annunzio strongly criticized Mussolini’s plans to team up with Nazi Germany, he had long lost his credibility as a movement leader.
As these two examples illustrate, liberating cooptation cuts the elites loose from constraining alliances without creating new powerful enemies; instead, it makes previous commitments irrelevant.
Destructive Cooptation
Finally, cooptation may be used to handle overtly oppositional movements that seek to effect political changes that run counter to the elites’ interests. To succeed, elites need to convince movement leaders to change position, without giving them anything in return (Gamson, 1975). This is perhaps how we typically imagine cooptation to happen, but it is also the most difficult type of cooptation to carry out.
An example of this type of cooptation is provided by the way the Egyptian military used the momentum of the Democratic Youth Movement after the Arab Spring uprising to effectively end the transition process and restore the authoritarian regime. One year after the ousting of General Hosni Mubarak, youth activists, under the name of Tamarod, had begun to protest against the new president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. They questioned his commitment to democracy, human rights, and gender equality, as well as his competence to handle the post-revolution economic crisis. The military establishment, led by General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, seized on this new opportunity for a political comeback. al-Sisi negotiated an alliance with Tamarod, apparently based on a combination of promises of personal favors and their shared hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood. The leaders of Tamarod became increasingly explicit in their support for al-Sisi, and ultimately, in the name of democracy, supported the military coup that restored the dictatorship (see Abdalla, 2016; Holdo, 2017). Restoring its power by other means (violently or through outside help) would likely have been too costly politically, possibly causing international condemnations and economic sanctions. Through cooptation, al-Sisi managed to share responsibility for the outcomes with Tamarod’s leaders, including for the subsequent massacres of political opponents, which Tamarod publicly praised. The popular democratic movement, as such, was eliminated, as activists were massacred, imprisoned or deterred from protesting. Tamarod’s leaders kept their place in the spotlight by continuing to support al-Sisi and applauding his government’s actions. Through cooptation, the military gained more freedom to suppress political opponents and carry out its agenda. As this example illustrates, “destructive cooptation” is the more dramatic kind of cooptation, as it works on the condition that the opposition movement publicly betrays its own cause.
Cooptation can thus be useful in quite different situations—to prevent resistance, remove constraints, or eliminate opposition. In each case, the power of actual or potential opposition groups is weakened as elites undermine their integrity. What makes cooptation different from more genuinely cooperative strategies 5 is that it brings such groups over to the side of the elites and creates a new situation: the challengers now have an interest in defending the position of the elites (Selznick, 1948: 34). Cooptation appears rational because it helps the elites maintain or regain domination without any significant costs. The condition is, however, that the elites can achieve their goals without cooperation. In the next section, we turn to situations in which this assumption appears false, and where elites recognize, or are made to recognize, that they may accomplish their goals only, or at least more effectively, if they can gain legitimacy through cooperation.
Conditional Cooperation
Conditional cooperation is the type of interaction in which both sides recognize having an interest in a strategic relationship and where both recognize that the relationship can only be sustained if it is of mutual strategic benefit. Cooperation is thus conditional in the sense that neither actor is willing to participate unless they gain strategic advantages. In conditional cooperation, both sides must carefully consider the interests of the other side. Movement leaders trust the elites to cooperate and to deliver public recognition and political decisions because they think that the elites value the relationship and the advantages that come with it. Similarly, the elites trust the movement leaders to reciprocate, by delivering popular support and legitimacy, because they think that the movement leaders recognize the strategic advantages they gain from maintaining the relationship. 6 Conditional cooperation is the opposite of cooptation in the sense that each actor’s integrity is respected, as opposed to cooptation, in which one actor’s integrity is being strategically undermined and called into question by the other.
Conditional cooperation is both a movement strategy and an elite strategy. It is, first, a movement strategy, because activists may seek change by making their cooperation in social and political interactions conditional. For example, in The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman argues that the idea that a social order may be legitimized through reference to an implicit social contract (as in social contract theory, after Rousseau and others) usually does include any careful consideration of how that contract takes women’s interests into account, as opposed to merely counting on women to participate under terms set by men and that consider the interests of men (Pateman, 1988). The implication is that the contract needs to change and that women should demand change in return for their continued cooperation. This normative argument for gender equality also provides an analytical perspective for interpreting the demands of feminist movements. In early British feminist movements, for example, women’s subjugation in both private and public spheres was likened to tyranny and slavery, thereby calling into question justifications of social practices that claimed them to be rational or in everyone’s interest (see Nym Mayhall, 2001).
Conditional cooperation is also an elite strategy since it involves making terms of cooperation mutually beneficial. The elites should rationally choose conditional cooperation over cooptation if the value of the legitimacy gained from the relationship exceeds the cost of committing to the relationship—in other words, if the relationship appears to enable more than it constrains. Figure 1 illustrates the game played when the elites and the movement leaders are uncertain about whether this is the case—when, in fact, they are negotiating over this. Hypothetically, the ideal outcome may often be conditional cooperation, as the figure suggests (bottom right corner). But the question is if both actors agree that this is the ideal outcome—if, that is, the relationship enables more than it constrains for both sides.
The Political Game When Interaction Could be the Beginning of a Relationship.
Consider the elites’ options. First, the elites may either aim for cooptation or cooperation. If they choose cooptation, there is no guarantee that it will succeed. If it does not succeed, and contestation continues, the elites will have wasted resources. Even if it succeeds, this may still be less than optimal, if there were a scenario in which cooperation, through legitimization, would enable the elites to achieve their goals more effectively. As we have seen, cooperation in the context of unequal power relations is risky: if either side thinks that they can get what they want regardless of cooperation, or if they believe that the other side believes this to be the case, then they rationally distrust the intentions of the other side. To get to conditional cooperation, each side needs to see reasons to trust the other side. The movement leaders need reasons to trust the elites to not aim for cooptation, and the elites need reasons to think that the movement leaders will not seize the opportunity to undermine the authority of the elites. For the elites, the worst-case scenario is that the movement leaders can use the elites’ cooperation to gain public recognition, but instead of reciprocating, use this moment to undermine the legitimacy of the elites. 7
Why, then, would either side trust that the other side calculates that cooperation enables more than it constrains? There are at least two ways to reach that conclusion. First, the actors may signal their intentions to cooperate in order to make the other side trust them. Signaling means the use of personal displays to gain the other’s confidence in one’s intention to cooperate. Such personal displays rely on shared social codes and therefore on pre-existing experiences of cooperation that are not dependent on the actors’ relationship. Signaling facilitates predictability even if the actors have no specific reason to trust each other besides such subtle references to signs of honest intentions (Bulbulia and Sosis, 2011: 365). One common way of signaling is to rely on mechanisms of honor and virtue: I ask you to trust me as an honorable person, recognizing that my reputation is at stake. However, even if the actors involved initially fail to sufficiently signal trustworthiness, the actors may still choose to trust the other. As Read and Shapiro have suggested, leaders often do this because they dare to commit even in the absence of objective evidence or reasons to believe that it will succeed (Read and Shapiro, 2014). Acting on personal conviction or hope could be reasonable if they have little to lose or much to gain, or for altruistic reasons (I trust you not because you are trustworthy but because I believe trust is good for us in the long-run; Mansbridge, 1999).
As with cooptation, there are several different situations in which conditional cooperation may appear beneficial to elites: (1) to build relationships with civil society leaders that are not presently in a position to challenge the elites’ authority (i.e. as a proactive strategy), (2) to negotiate the terms of interaction with current allies (as negotiation), and (3) to turn opposition into cooperation (as a response to opposition). In each case, conditional cooperation results from strategic interactions between elites and movement leaders, in which signaling plays a central part, along with hope, altruism, and building trust through gradually closer collaboration.
Conditional Cooperation as a Proactive Strategy
Elites may use conditional cooperation to seek out potential partners, who are not presently powerful movement leaders, and commit to empowering them in order to build a strategic relationship. Some forms of participatory decision-making develop in this way. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, social movements and the Workers’ Party formed a powerful alliance, which culminated when, in 1989, after winning the local elections, the party initiated “participatory budgeting” as a way of directly including civil society in the exercise of power (Abers, 2000). This enabled various important policy changes, because participants, most of whom were party sympathizers as well as community leaders, were given direct influence over the majority of decisions on direct investments (Cabannes, 2004; Wampler, 2010). This effectively marginalized the opposition parties, both because the representative city council no longer had the practical ability to oppose or debate the decisions and because any form of opposition could easily be framed as opposition to the people (Wampler, 2010: 128). Participatory budgeting was used simultaneously to boost the reputation of the Workers’ Party as the pro-civil society and pro-transparency party and to empower civil society leaders by giving them important and influential roles in decision-making. Participatory budgeting as a form of cooperation had to be based on a strong condition: the role of the participants would be to work for their communities, not for the elites.
In contrast to cooptation, as in the otherwise similar TVA project studied by Selznick, participatory budgeting did not, in these cases, aim to absorb participants, but to work out the conditions that make cooperation mutually beneficial, which requires respect for each actor’s integrity. 8 The participants did not necessarily view the elites as trustworthy, but constantly acted to remind them that the benefits of participating budgeting would only be produced if cooperation was beneficial for them too (Holdo, 2016; Wampler, 2010). The elites trusted the participants, moreover, because the participants sought to gain recognition in the capacity of responsible and cooperative community leaders. As a proactive strategy of conditional cooperation, it served a mutual interest in generating legitimacy.
Conditional Cooperation as Negotiation
The second type of situation in which conditional cooperation becomes an option is when elites need to negotiate the terms of their alliances with movement leaders. The elites and the movement leaders may want the same thing, but the question is on which terms they may cooperate, and take advantage of each side’s strategic resources to achieve common goals. The interactions between President Lyndon B Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr, in December 1964 to March 1965, exemplify how conditional cooperation may work in such contexts (Holdo, 2019a). Both Johnson and King believed that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not do enough to secure the freedom of African Americans to exercise their right to vote, in particular in southern states (Branch, 2007; Dittmer, 1986). Johnson’s concern at this moment was that continuing to advocate for racial equality would mean further alienating White voters in the South. To convince him, King stressed that it also meant an opportunity to increase the electoral participation of African Americans (Miller Center, WH6501.04). However, Johnson still did not believe that there was sufficient support for another civil rights bill, either in Congress or in the public. Andrew Young, then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recalls from the December meeting that Johnson “kept saying ‘I just don’t have the power. I wish I did’. When we left I asked Dr. King ‘well, what did you think?’ He said, ‘I think we got to figure out a way to get this president some power’” (LBJ Presidential Library, 2014). Two weeks later, they began organizing the first protests in Selma, which culminated with the Selma to Montgomery marches 2 months later. The civil rights movement, as Young puts it, gave the president “all the power he needed to get that voting rights act introduced” (LBJ Presidential Library, 2014).
Conditional cooperation serves to renegotiate alliances to make them mutually beneficial. In this case, King accepted that Johnson would act in accordance with political interests, but he changed the weights on the scale by showing that he would not constrain Johnson’s political options as much as he would enable him to achieve shared political goals. King committed to providing legitimacy, on the condition that Johnson would reciprocate. The strategy of conditional cooperation may be particularly clear in the case of the civil rights movement’s negotiation with President Johnson. However, this scenario is wide relevance to cases in which movements leaders seek to establish themselves as actors that have strategic importance as partners to elites. For example, in Northern Europe, union leaders have maintained powerful positions in politics for almost a century by conditioning their cooperation with employers’ associations, most obviously, but also with social democratic parties to which they provide qualified support (Jansson, 2013; Lewin, 1980). This cooperation has been sustained on the condition that it generates legitimacy for employers’ associations and political elites, on one hand, and that it advances the interests of union members, on the other hand.
Conditional Cooperation as a Response to Opposition
The most difficult situation for conditioned cooperation is when movement leaders are directly opposed to the elites’ policies. If trust is difficult in unequal power relations in general, it becomes even harder when the actors’ interests appear incompatible. Why would dominant actors cooperate if this means negotiating on matters they could have decided on their own, and why would subordinate actors trust them if they see no reason why the dominant would be interested in cooperation? The answer is that conditional cooperation may be used to change the terms of the game.
In 2013, the Swedish government found itself under considerable pressure to articulate a stronger policy on counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism after reports that recruitment to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was taking place in Swedish cities. The government was criticized for being weak on the issue in comparison to other European governments. It was politically important to have a tougher policy, but initiatives in that direction had generated opposition from Muslim civil society leaders, who were already outraged over what they saw as a general tendency to treat Muslim citizens as suspects of terrorism (Baker-Beall et al., 2014). Tensions built up as Muslim leaders criticized the government, and as the government criticized Muslim leaders in turn, for being soft on radicalism as well as on oppression of women.
The government needed, on one hand, to show a stronger commitment to the prevention of radicalization and, on the other hand, to stop protests from Muslim leaders from escalating. In other countries, including neighboring Denmark, Muslim leaders had been pressured to choose between cooptation—accepting a disliked government policy without gaining anything in return—or being criticized for being radical and suspected of aiding terrorist groups. In Sweden, however, political leaders already had experiences of cooperating successfully with Muslim leaders, in particular in the context of the “Muhammed cartoons controversy” in 2007 (Larsson and Lindekilde, 2009). Muslim associations had often been recognized for their role in the integration of new immigrants. The conflicts over counter-radicalization had, however, undermined some of that confidence. If the government needed a way to gain legitimacy, so did Muslim leaders. These interests formed a crucial part of the context in which Sweden counter-radicalization policy took shape. Leaders of Muslim associations skillfully demonstrated that they were stake-holders, who had knowledge and networks that would be crucial in the work against radicalism, not the least to give this work legitimacy. They offered support for the government’s initiatives and agreed to a tougher stance on support for radicalism among members of their communities. In return, they gained influence over the policy-making process as well as economic support and recognition for the work they were doing against radicalization as part of their social activism. The resultant Swedish policy on counter-radicalization focused on the importance of social inclusion and teaching democratic values, and was unique in its emphasis on collaboration with Muslim civil society (see Baker-Beall et al., 2014).
This case illustrates a third type of situation in which conditional cooperation provides an alternative to cooptation. Whether conditional cooperation serves as a proactive strategy, to renegotiate the terms of an alliance or respond to opposition, it works on the condition that the elites and movement leaders both agree that the value of cooperation exceeds the cost of acknowledging dependence, or that it enables more than it constrains. To make that judgment is complicated because it involves speculating about the intentions, and speculations, of the other side. To trust the other side’s intentions may require skillfully employing signaling techniques, as well as actors’ abilities to be hopeful even if the reasons to be hopeful do not always suffice, and develop trust through gradually closer collaboration.
Conclusion
The choice between cooptation and conditional cooperation is a strategic one, based on a judgment of which strategy most effectively enables the achievement of political goals. In each of the three phases of interaction, elites have reasons to coopt movement leaders. Cooptation may serve (1) to prevent resistance to unpopular policies, (2) remove political constraints, and (3) eliminate opposition. But in each phase of interaction, elites may instead choose conditional cooperation, which has the benefit of making it possible for elites to gain broader legitimacy by winning the approval of a movement’s base. Conditional cooperation preserves each actor’s integrity, and it is only as actors with integrity that movement leaders can provide legitimacy. In each phase, conditional cooperation has a distinct function: it may serve (1) to empower social activists that through continued interaction and representation of interests can help build legitimacy, (2) to negotiate and gain momentum for specific political changes, and (3) to gain the qualified support of political opponents.
In making this argument, this article has sought to contribute to scholarship on elite–movement interactions. Recent scholarship has suggested that elites may base their strategies on more complex calculations than previous research has acknowledged. This article has argued that movement leaders can significantly affect elites’ strategies by gaining their trust and developing mutually beneficial forms of cooperation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank María Marta Maroto for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and also the participants in a seminar at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, in particular Archon Fung, Quinton Mayne, and Charles Petersen.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this study was provided by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, grant number 2015-00943.
