Karlo Basta. “Secessionist De-Mobilization: From ‘exit’ back to ‘voice’” in Ryan Griffiths, Aleksandar Pavkovic & Peter Radan, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Self-Determination and Secession. London: Routledge, 2023. Click here to access

This chapter outlines a preliminary conceptual map of secessionist demobilization in order to foster the study of that little-understood phenomenon. The central claim is that successful secessionist mobilization creates cognitive and social thresholds that make it difficult for secessionist organizations to reverse course or, to use Hirschman’s metaphor, transition from the politics of ‘exit’ back to the politics of ‘voice’. The chapter further examines the way three additional factors – the purpose of secessionist mobilization, the organizational character of independence movements, and the response by central governments – shape the likelihood of demobilization.

Karlo Basta. “‘Time’s Up!’: Framing Collective Impatience for Radical Political Change,” Political Psychology Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020):  755-770. Click here to access

Grievance is a prominent feature of mobilization for radical political change. Existing scholarship, however, does not pay sufficient attention to the temporal texture of grievance narratives. Temporally “flat” narratives of grievance are ill equipped to provide either the cognitive or emotional stimulus for major political reorientation. In response to this issue, the article develops the concept of collective exhaustion master frames. These are frames that narrate the aggrieved community's arrival to a threshold of collective impatience. Such narratives have two functions—to legitimize radical departures from prevailing political habits (a cognitive task) and to stimulate collective impatience with the political status quo (an emotional management task). In addition to developing the concept of exhaustion frames, the article demonstrates its empirical relevance by outlining five distinctive framing episodes, starting with the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The conclusion outlines the future directions for the study of collective impatience and points to the range of implications for political psychology and adjacent disciplines.

Karlo Basta. “The Social Construction of Transformative Political Events”, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 51, No. 10 (2018): 1243-1278. Click here to access

Comparative political scientists have sought to remedy their subdiscipline’s structuralist tendencies by paying greater analytical attention to transformative political events. Yet, our conceptual understanding of events remains rudimentary. The article addresses this conceptual gap in two ways. First, it foregrounds symbolic meaning-making as the constitutive attribute of events. Second, it demonstrates that events are not inherently agency-facilitating by developing the concept of prospectively framed events. These are occurrences that actors know will take place, but of whose outcome they are uncertain. Political challengers frame the upcoming event so as to discursively trap incumbents into political action they would rather not undertake. The article demonstrates this process by tracing the conflict between secessionist challengers and political incumbents within the Catalan nationalist movement between 2006 and 2010. The concluding section discusses the causal implications of the argument.