The Political Socialization of Activism. the Case of the Housing Movement in Spain.

The few existing empirical studies on the personal cultural effects of participation in contentious social movements have mostly focused on the long-term consequences in the activists’ lives and rarely on the short-term impacts and the socialising effects. Therefore, recently authors such as Fillieule and Neveu (2019) or Passy and Monsch (2019) have called for the need to address these issues. This communication addresses these areas by studying the case of participation in the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in Spain. Data obtained from three local groups of the movement in three cities (Barcelona, Sabadell, and Terrassa) are analysed. The data were gathered through ethnographic fieldwork carried out from the beginning of 2014 until the beginning of 2019, which used the following methods: three months of observation in each local group, analysis of institutional documents, five informative interviews with leaders, and fourteen biographical-episodic qualitative interviews with activists. These interviews were analysed through discourse analysis focused on detecting changes in political identities, interest in politics, and issues related to the movement’s ideas and frames. The conclusion is that regular and active participation between one and two years in the PAH generates personal cultural changes, but in unequal intensities depending on the degree of cultural-ideological proximity previously held with the movement’s ideas and the comfort or discomfort experienced with participation. People who had political ideas and housing lifestyles close to those defended by the PAH and who experienced a comfortable participation, undergo some changes and reinforce and refine their previous ideas. People who had distant ideas and an uncomfortable experience of participation undergo fewer changes. Finally, people who were culturally distant from the PAH but who had a comfortable experience of participation are the ones who change the most profoundly.