Research Information System
121st American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting & Exhibition Pre-Conference Workshop, Vancouver, Canada, 9 - 10 September 2025, pp.1-2, (Summary Text)
Diversity has often been viewed as an obstacle to solidarity. Yet, social movements have adopted a wide variety of approaches to building and maintaining solidarity across social divisions (such as race, gender, ethnicity, and religion), to varying degrees of success. Nevertheless, few have undertaken the task of conceptualizing and assessing the range of approaches to diversity that social movements do or could employ. This paper offers a conceptual framework that systematizes a set of distinct approaches to building political solidarity in the context of diversity and develops specific hypotheses about the impacts of these different approaches on movement persistence and political success. Drawing on a set of illustrative cases of social movements, we examine the degree to which movements embody the various approaches we identify— namely, active solidarity, drive-by solidarity, pop-up solidarity, and universal solidarity. In previous studies, we have empirically examined several individual cases and forms of solidarity (Einwohner et al. 2019; Wright et al. 2021; Kelly-Thompson et al. 2025). Now, we seek to combine our empirical work into an overall theoretical framework tracing the impacts of these different models of solidarity on organizational and political outcomes, as well as how they interact with each other within and between movements. While not an exhaustive typology, these analyses generate useful theoretical insights into thinking about different practices.