Dismissing the “Vocal Minority”: How Policy Conflict Escalates When Policymakers Label Resisting Citizens

Abstract

This article investigates, through the theory of social construction and policy design, the feedforward effects of labeling on policy conflicts. It argues that such conflicts escalate when policymakers distinguish between more and less deserving and more and less powerful segments of the population. It draws on the empirical analysis of 32 narrative interviews with vital stakeholders in the conflict over the contested multibillion‐euro Oosterweelconnection highway in Antwerp (Belgium), as well as on the media analysis of 739 articles. According to such analyses, Flemish policymakers became increasingly hostile toward action groups as the latter moved beyond conventional policy‐making procedure, labeling them as a powerful but undeserving “vocal minority.” Meanwhile, they endorsed the Oosterweel policy, claiming that it represented an increasingly powerless but deserving “silent majority.” However, labeling action groups as powerful but undeserving and consequently dismissing them resulted in the escalation of a substantive policy conflict to a relational policy conflict, which became increasingly difficult to settle as parties fought each other rather than fighting over policies.

Fatal remedies. How dealing with policy conflict can backfire in a context of trust‐erosion

“…More objectives are perceived to be incompatible and fewer opportunities remain to resolve conflict. Policy dialogue, after all, is hampered when parties refuse to participate in procedures (procedural conflict) (Wolf & Van Dooren, 2018b) or refuse to talk to each other (relational conflict) (Wolf, 2019). Different types of conflict thus demand different kinds of practices.…”

Beliefs, social identity, and the view of opponents in Swedish carnivore management policy

“…In fact, notions of how and why the devil shift occurs are mostly assumed and not empirically investigated in the wider policy science literature. Some recent exceptions are found in research on policy narratives (Jones and McBeth 2010;Shanahan et al 2011) exploring both the devil shift and its counterpart angel shift (e.g., Shanahan et al 2013: Merry 2019Wolf 2019). These studies have advanced our understanding of the existence and drivers of the devil shift.…”

Editorial Introduction: Reaching Policy Change: Theoretical and Practical Advances in Policy Learning Research

“…And, to close our first issue of 2021, we wish to highlight the methodological contributions of the article written by Isoaho, Gritsenko, and Mäkelä (2021). In this study, the authors examine ways in which researchers can integrate the increasing use of "text-as-data" methods in qualitative policy research (e.g., Wolf, 2019). Specifically, the authors examine topic modeling (TM) and its interactions with content and classification methods-which focus on words as units of communicationand discourse and representation methods (D&R)-which focus on the meaning of communication.…”