Soft Skills and Hard Work: Organizing as a Political Behavior Rooted in Relational Labor

Abstract

What qualities of individuals make them willing and able to organize? Healthy representative democracies depend on citizens consistently overcoming collective action problems. This quality makes organizing - systematic efforts by activists to recruit others and invest in their political engagement - a critical democratic practice. Existing explanations for organizing's emergence tend to focus on political organizations and available opportunity structures. However, organizing is a labor-intensive form of political advocacy which is dependent on the recruitment activity of individual activists. As a result, addressing what makes individuals choose to do the work of recruitment can help to expand our understanding of the conditions that will produce an active and engaged citizenry. I, therefore, evaluate how a potential organizer's disposition, skills, and positionality uniquely shapes their willingness and capacity to recruit compared to engaging in alternative forms of political activity. To this end, I draw on interviews, experiments, and original surveys in the United States and South Africa, as well as cross-national data from 57 countries. Perhaps, by centering those who bring others into the political process, we can better understand how to protect and strengthen our democracies.