Winning Coalitions Have the Right Kinds of Differences

Shortly after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, Kansas became the first state in the nation to vote on abortion rights through referendum. The proposed constitutional amendment empowered Kansas state legislators to impose a total ban on abortion access. Republican lawmakers led a campaign based on misdirection—drafting confusing ballot language, refusing to speak on the record on what policies they would enact if the amendment were passed, and scheduling the vote on a day with historically low turnout.

A bipartisan coalition called Kansans for Constitutional Freedom (KCF) mobilized in response. KCF brought together more than 40 organizations, including advocates for reproductive justice, civil rights organizations, healthcare providers, religious groups, and more. Over the course of just a few months, KCF spearheaded the opposition to the amendment and spent more than $10 million educating and mobilizing Kansas voters. On August 2, 2022, they triumphed in a landslide victory—the first in a number of pivotal wins for the pro-choice movement in conservative states post-Dobbs. 

In the weeks and months that followed, organizers, strategists, and political commentators across the country puzzled over how KCF managed to pull it off—in a state Donald Trump won by 15 points in 2016, no less! “Coalition building is absolutely critical,” KCF’s de-facto leader Ashley All told Rolling Stone. “No matter where you live, whatever state you’re in—I don’t care if you’re in New York, California, Montana, or Kentucky—coalition building is critical. You’ve got to bring a lot of different voices to the table.”

But any organizer will tell you that building coalitions isn’t simple. I should know. I spent seven years speaking with political organizers about the complexities of coalition work, all while observing and recording the behavior and outcomes of more than 20,000 organizations and 1,700 coalitions advocating for social, racial, and economic justice in American politics. My new book, Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, distills the lessons from my research—namely, that not all coalitions are created equally, and that successful coalitions tend to have some very specific characteristics. 

The Best Practices of Coalition Work

“There are good actors [in coalitions], people who do good things even when it’s hard . . . and there are . . . actors who free ride. And there are a bunch of people in the middle.” Students Lead Students Vote co-founder Sam Novey continued, “If you don’t have a good metronome, a good structure, you end up having all these people do unproductive stuff. You need to have that monthly meeting that starts and ends on time and has quality meeting notes sent out afterwards. That matters a lot. And [. . .] I think a core leadership team is really important too.” 

In my conversations with organizers, the power of coalitions came up time and time again. But in the next breath, each organizer was quick to qualify that successful coalitions require hard work. They pointed to the importance of a united front, “where there isn’t unity in a coalition…things break off or [you] lose on what [you’re] trying to achieve,” said a racial justice organizer. “Coalitions that do really well…have a forward-thinking mindset…they convene after the fact and talk about what went well, what didn’t, and what they can do better next time,” said a labor organizer. They repeatedly talked about the importance of, in Novey’s words, “a good metronome, a good structure…[and] a core leadership team.”

My long-term tracking of organizations and coalitions confirmed organizers’ insights. Only certain kinds of coalitions consistently enable successful advocacy outcomes: those with architectures and complementary capacities.

Architecture

Successful coalitions have clear and durable architectures that govern membership, leadership, and decision-making. These structures enable coalitions to develop the capacity to plan over long periods of time and learn from each iteration of advocacy. They can also clear up ambiguities that tend to cause coalitions to break, such as murkiness about how to make decisions, who is or isn’t in the coalition, and the role of each partner. 

Take, for instance, the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ, founded in 2006), a coalition of six statewide grassroots organizations advocating for immigrant rights in Alabama, and the Campaign for Better Health Care (CBHC, founded in 1989), a national coalition of three hundred nonprofit organizations, health care advocates, and labor unions organizing for accessible and affordable health care for all. ACIJ and CBHC are quite different from each other – but they have some striking similarities. Both coalitions are long-standing, maintain their own staff and membership, and have clear missions that guide and facilitate their advocacy work. In other words, they have architecture. 

About 45% of social, racial, and economic justice-oriented coalitions, by contrast, are typically informal working arrangements that may come together only once or recur a handful of times. They can contain just two groups or unite tens of separate entities without a clear blueprint or mechanisms of support. These ad hoc coalitions or advocates choosing to go it alone tend to be less successful than those with architectures like those of the ACIJ or CBHC. 

But building these architectures takes serious investment. Partner organizations need to:

• Have difficult conversations about who is in the coalition and who is in charge of it.
• Decide what the leadership structure will look like, and whether leadership will rotate among member organizations. Existing research, for instance, suggests that in coalitions where there are large power differences among members, attempting to represent all groups across leadership roles can help enhance unity. 
• Consider who the best leader(s) might be – typically, the most effective leaders are “organic” – people who are influential, trusted, and well-respected by their collaborators. 
• Sketch out how they plan to make decisions and resolve disagreements. There is no single answer here – simply establishing a clear and consistent process is the mechanism for success. Common systems for decision making in coalitions include requiring unanimous consent (100% of all members agreeing), majority rule (50% or more of members agreeing), supermajority rule (two-thirds of members agreeing), or even “consent-based” decision-making, where a delegate (such as a coalition leader) is responsible for the final decision, but works with each partner to ensure that the final outcome is within their “range of tolerance.” 
• Create regular venues for information-sharing, like monthly or bi-monthly meetings. Adopt norms about developing and sharing meeting minutes and receiving updates or reactions from each partner. These practices enable transparency, which facilitates more informed decision-making.

Complementary capacities 

Deciding who to partner with—and defining the division of labor—in a coalition can also be a major challenge. “[We] need to be able to come together and have very real, candid conversations about complementary capacities,” said Lynsy Smithson-Stanley, a longtime environmental justice organizer. “There is this very real tension. You feel like you have to have everything. You have to have a membership that acts, you have to have legal staff, you have to have policy know-how. It seems to me that the healthier, more effective coalitions have recognized that those skills and capacities are unequally distributed across organizations and then are brave enough to actually have conversations about how we do this together,” she said.

Smithson-Stanley’s comment touched on the importance of “complementary capacities” in coalition work. Coalitions that unite diverse memberships (i.e., advocate for many different communities) are significantly more successful than their homogenous counterparts or than organizations advocating alone. Diverse coalitions bring together partners that represent different constituencies and thus, “complement” each other through the distinct experiences, perspectives, and specialties they each bring to the table, as the member organizations in KCF do. This enables these coalitions to position themselves more strategically. 

Building these sorts of coalitions is easier said than done. Diverse coalitions can lead to strain, conflict, and greater disagreement. They’re also more likely to magnify uneven power dynamics, which can cause friction and compound feelings of discomfort or distrust among partners. For instance, researchers have found that organizations that enter coalitions with greater resources and legitimacy are more likely to hold leadership positions and exert greater power over coalition decisions. Thus, in diverse coalitions, less powerful groups—advocates with fewer resources—can be excluded from or marginalized in conversations and decisions about key issues. 

However, uniting partners with many different constituent interests assembles the kinds of complementary capacities that facilitate better, more compelling advocacy—from information that a certain class of organizations just isn’t privy to, to experience implementing certain tactics, like writing a public comment or organizing a protest. For instance, an economic justice organizer I spoke with recounted the importance of this coalition characteristic to a policy initiative he worked on in 2019:

In 2019, I was working for a group that was advocating for the expansion of the child tax credit, before it was cool. It was a piece of policy that was called the Working Families Tax Relief Act. We didn’t win that change in 2019, we did in 2021. And it was massive. It reduced child poverty by 40%! We did it by [building] this coalition of social policy organizations, think tanks, advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations from the national level all the way down to the state and local level. Without that coalition, I don’t think we would have been able to put that piece of policy together and actually pass it.

This points to the need for advocacy organizations to carefully consider the company of the coalitions they build and join. Coalition architecture can help resolve the difficulties of—and power dynamics inherent in—diverse coalition work. Researchers have demonstrated that clarity and structures in coalition work can help ameliorate power imbalances and foster greater trust between coalition partners. Unaddressed, these imbalances can manifest in conflict and reduced commitment to the coalition. But structures that balance power, like establishing practices that allow for equitable participation, equal roles for partners in key decision-making bodies (like working groups or committees), and rotating leadership responsibility, can reduce this risk and help the coalition realize its full potential.

Some of the organizers referenced in this piece were initially interviewed for an academic research project subject to Institutional Review Board (IRB) review. IRB rules require that these interviewees not be named.

Featured image by Kimmie Dearest