Political action at the individual level has mainly been explained by resources, political attitudes and networks (Hutter & Lorenzini, 2017). However, as people are “voracious meanings makers” (Weber, 1978), their interpretation of the political and social environment shape how they act politically (Passy and Monsch, 2020). Passy and Monsch show that the mind shape political action. More precisely, they argue that the way people conceive political citizenship is linked to their political action. However, the link between those meanings and political action remains understudied. This paper aims to build a theoretical framework linking political citizenship understandings and political action of stigmatized persons. It offers theoretical tools to explain micro-political behaviors. This framework enables us to compare two stigmatized groups’ citizenship understanding in Switzerland, disabled and gay people. Those groups are chosen because they differ in the way they collectively mobilize in the Swiss public sphere. This variation allows to know if different citizenship understandings circulate in those groups which in turn affect the way people act politically.
Relying on Passy and Monsch’s (2020) idea, this paper presents a cognitivo-relational approach which allows to explain political action at the micro-level by linking perception (mind) and action. Moreover, it aims to go beyond a structuralist conception of culture which has mainly been conceived as an objective reality shaping from the outside individual and collective behaviors (Goodwin and Jasper, 2004). On the contrary, by entering in people’s head, this approach enables one to grasp cultural scripts as they are constructed throughout interactions and analyze how they shape action.
First, this paper argues that the mind is a social product (Zerubavel, 1997) as it is constructed by interactions and discussions between individuals belonging to a same network (Passy and Monsch, 2020). Networks are thus defined as “islands of meanings” (White, 1992) and shape people’s mind. However, as Passy and Monsch (2020: 202) argue, a mutual construction between individual’s mind and social network occur. Thus, the network is not only a structure which shapes people minds, it is also shaped by people minds which contribute to build the network. In our case, this allows to grasp the types of citizenship understandings that circulate in the stigmatized groups under study: for example, does a radically more active conception circulate in a gay association than in a self-help group for a person with disability?
Second, the paper builds the link between the mind (in our case citizenship understandings) and the action. It is argued that a “cognitive funnel” (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980; Passy and Monsch, 2020) links broad understandings to a specific action. The main idea is that citizenship understandings shape what is thinkable and imaginable for people as a political action. In our case, this raised questions as: Does a person with disability conceive to be an active citizen? Does he/she rely more on a liberal conception of citizenship by emphasizing the importance of individual rights which protect her as a member of a minority? Which conception is linked to the way people act politically?
