How can social movements create enduring and permanent influence of their social advocacy and political cause in a democratic polity? In this ambitious book, Deva R. Woodly argues that the answer lies in the movements’ mainstream democratic discourse—more specifically, the way that the movements craft and communicate their issues and concerns in a consistent and resonant way to the citizen-audience in the public sphere of mainstream news media. Weaving insights and literatures across several subfields within political science—from American politics and democratic theory to political communication and social movements—Woodly advances her central argument that “changing politics requires not merely a series of victories in discrete policy battles but an ongoing struggle that shapes political meanings in the public sphere” (p. 1). The success of a movement, Woodly suggests, hinges on its capacity for public political persuasion, for it is through its power to persuade that it can alter the political meaning and public understanding of an issue and redefine what is at stake, thus fundamentally transforming power relations and exerting lasting political impact.

Directing her pragmatic insights at grassroots challengers who seek to transform policy and advance social change, Woodly offers a counterintuitive suggestion that the success of social movements does not lie in winning favorable policy outcomes in the short run, but in achieving political acceptance in the long run. Political acceptance is not equivalent to political agreement; rather, it means that political challengers are able to generate frequent and sustained attention to and discussion of their issue among news media, the general public, and elected officials, such that the issue gains “relevance . . . in the limited lexicon of regular political subjects that the mainstream media covers, the public acknowledges as significant, and official are compelled to address” (pp. 16–17). And this, Woodly argues, “is a win in and of itself because it means that the ordinarily competent citizen finds their claims intelligible and worthy of attention, even if not agreement” (p. 116). Especially for grassroots campaigns with limited access to monetary resources and official networks, Woodly asserts, gaining political acceptance is the key to attaining what Robert Dahl calls an “effective hearing” in the mainstream political arena (Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, 1961, p. 145), enabling them to “acquire the kind of public authority and credibility that they need to make their case to the general public and challenge established arrangements of power and privilege” (p. 129).

Focusing her investigation on two contemporary movements in the United States after their emergence between 1994–2004—the living wage and marriage equality campaigns—Woodly demonstrates in depth how the living-wage movement failed to articulate a well-focused and resonant political discourse that led to ambiguous political outcomes despite achieving over 120 policy victories. In contrast, the marriage-equality movement succeeded in cultivating a well-patterned and salient frame of common-sense understanding and arguments that generated serious and sustained national attention and social awareness on gay marriage despite suffering many judicial and legislative defeats. The success that the marriage-equality movement was able to achieve in public persuasion and political acceptance paved the way for its increasing visibility and popularity as well as its series of policy victories in the second decade of the twenty-first century (p. 86). As Woodly evocatively advises, even if public opinion may not be sympathetic to the challenger’s cause for the time being, gaining political acceptance “introduce[s] an element of risk for the status quo because . . . [it] raise[s] the issue from the presumptive background ether of ‘goes without saying’ to the deliberative platform of contestability” (p. 116).

Importantly, Woodly not only emphasizes the essential role of political discourse and communication in democratic movement activism, but also brings it to bear on the dominant approach of political science in general and social movement studies in particular. Specifically, she contests the assumptions of methodological individualism in empirical political science (i.e., a purely rational or decision-making approach) for ignoring that the ways people enact their political choices are not purely individuated psychological processes, but are rather situated in—and thus both enabled and circumscribed by—the shared public meanings/understandings surrounding the interests, values, and judgments of their political decisions (pp. 22–23, 209). She also points to the limits of existing social-movement literature for its lack of positive and proactive engagement on how mainstream public discourse can be productively utilized as an essential political tool due to the field’s bias toward resource mobilization explanation, its exclusive focus on the direct participants of the movements rather than on the general public, and an antagonistic view toward the media as a mouthpiece of official ideologies (pp. 132–44). To overcome these limitations, Woodly draws adroitly on the public-opinion literatures on priming, framing, agenda-setting, and political persuasion to center mainstream democratic discourse in movement analysis, while shifting from the conventional top-down approach in political communication that focuses on the dissemination of political messages from the governing elites to the general public, to critically examining how political discourses can also flow bottom-up from grassroots challengers to public officials (pp. 129–32).

Overall, the book’s content is erudite, its objective is ambitious, and the argument is backed up by an inventive and sophisticated mixed-method analysis (both theoretical and empirical) that involves critical reading and application of political theory (e.g., Habermas, Foucault, Aristotle, Bourdieu, and Arendt), unstructured interviews with key activists in the two movements, use of public-opinion data, as well as textual analysis and statistical analysis on more than a thousand articles from the New York Times and USA Today. Woodly also does an admirable job in anticipating and addressing potential critiques from different angles, especially those who demand a more radical politics, while keeping up her hope in movement activism in liberal democracy. Her unique project offers rigorous intellectual insights and thoughtful political strategies that exemplify what an original political science scholarship can offer for scholars and activists concerned about the prospect of creating democratic transformative change.

Yet while this book excellently shows that mainstream political discourse should be considered one important strategic arena in the intellectual-political work on movement building by critical scholars and social activists, I think there remain some unresolved questions on whether such discourse should be accorded the kind of central role or status in social movements in the way that Woodly suggests. I will share these questions here in the spirit of keeping up the broader inquiry on ways of creating social change. The first two questions concern the realm of political communication, the second two questions relate to the aspect of social movement, and the last question specifically addresses the success of the same-sex marriage campaign.

First, while this is outside the scope of Woodly’s book, I think it might be helpful to consider a broader and more holistic conception of “political communication” in general that takes into account how the realm of popular culture may also exert political influence by changing people’s perception of issue salience and what is at stake. Take same-sex marriage as an example; recent reports have shown that the young generation tends to support same-sex marriage by the greatest percentage compared to other age groups (Pew Research Center, “Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” May 12, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2016/05/12/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/). And yet, recent surveys have also pointed to the increasing decline of newspaper readership and network-news viewers across all age groups, with young people especially being the least likely to regularly read or watch news (Pew Research Center, “Daily Newspaper Readership by Age Group,” March 12, 2007, http://www.journalism.org/numbers/daily-newspaper-readership-by-age-group/; Pew Research Center, “Who Is this Man? Many Americans Don’t Recognize Top News Anchor,” January 9, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/09/who-is-this-man-many-americans-dont-recognize-top-news-anchor/). This is not to say that news media are not important, but the paradox suggests that the influence on young people’s attitudes toward gay marriage might likely come from other sources than strictly from political news. Given that young people are avid consumers of popular culture in forms of movies, music, television shows, and fashion, it is worth exploring whether these other communicative realms may also have a significant political effect on shaping their views on gay marriage.

Second, as Woodly focuses her examination on the “sending” side (i.e., social movements) rather than the “receiving” side of the political communication (i.e., citizen-audience), it is not clear to the reader how the diverse audience are actually processing and interpreting the movements’ political discourses in the news media, and thus to what degree the movements’ frames of the issues really cohere and resonate for them. In fact, this opens up an interesting question for future research on whether there is just one singular and universal frame or narrative that resonates with all audiences or whether there may be multiple and particular frames or narratives that social movements may adjust and tailor to different types of audience based on their racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, class, educational, age, cultural, or religious differences, in creating discursive resonance.

Third, given the book’s focus on two single-issue struggles (i.e., living wage and same-sex marriage), a further question may come up from the perspective of intersectionality. Specifically, while Woodly pertinently acknowledges the problem of the politics of respectability and internal racial and class exclusions within the same-sex marriage movement (pp. 93–96), she does not sufficiently address how it can be more challenging for marginalized communities/movements that seek to address multiple jeopardies and intersecting oppressions (i.e., cutting across race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, or disability) to construct and articulate the kinds of resonant frames that would appeal to the general public in their mainstream political discourse (and without significantly compromising the complexity and integrity of their political analysis and concerns). Further demonstration on how such an intersectional discourse can be crafted by examining more cases/examples in this regard would make her argument more convincing for marginal movements dealing with multiple oppressions.

Fourth, one may also ask whether Woodly’s criterion of “success” for social movements as the capacity to attain mainstream political acceptance should be universally applied to all movements or should be relatively determined by the particular goals/objectives set by each movement at a particular historical point in time based on its contingent political contexts and social circumstances. As Woodly herself points out, there is only a “short list” of policies that can get regular and sustained national attention (pp. 86, 183), which suggests that there is limited room for mainstream political acceptance in the mass-mediated, liberal, national, public sphere to begin with. By broadening the conceptualization of movement “success,” it might help expand rather than constrict our viewing horizon on ways of engendering social transformation.

Lastly, specifically concerning the success of the same-sex marriage campaign, there remain questions on whether its political acceptance is solely attributable to the movement’s mainstream democratic discourse or tied to other larger sociopolitical factors. For instance, recent literatures in queer studies have produced searching investigation on different global cities’ courting and enfoldment of queer professionals, consumers, and tourists into their neoliberal gentrification projects, marketing ethnic-sexual tolerance as a way to attract high-tech businesses and signify consumptive modernity and entrepreneurial progress (refer to the 2002 special issue, “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization,” ed. Jasbir K. Puar, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8, no.1–2). This process is enjoined by what Jasbir K. Puar refers to as the rise of U.S. “homonationalism” in the post–9/11 climate—that is, the mainstream integration of gays and lesbians into liberal normativity and freedom juxtaposed against Islamic sexual repression and homophobia in mobilizing the support of both heterosexual and homosexual citizens in the U.S. war on terror (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 2007). Without taking away the central tenet of Woodly’s argument, these studies might nonetheless add to a more holistic consideration of the entangled and interlinked political facets that may also have helped advance the gay marriage cause in the United States. In the end, while these questions may unsettle the closure of Woodly’s argument, the significant suggestions advanced in her book deserve to be seriously considered, engaged, and even practiced (along with other political tools) by any scholars and activists invested in social movements and transformative change.