Ce mémoire se penche sur un phénomène politique encore tout récent : celui du Tea Party. Le mouvement populaire et populiste américain est venu capturer l'imaginaire collectif – ainsi qu'une centaine de sièges au Congrès lors des élections de mi-mandat de 2010 – sans que soient fournies des explications convaincantes de ce qui a permis une ascension aussi fulgurante. Cette recherche a comme objectif de fournir ces explications. Nous postulons que trois approches sont centrales à la compréhension de cette percée électorale : les approches (1) contextuelle ; (2) culturelle ; et (3) institutionnelle. Plus spécifiquement, nous cherchons dans un premier temps à démontrer qu'une conjoncture économique et politique particulièrement éprouvante pour les politiciens au pouvoir, combinée à leur promotion d'un programme politique national controversé, les rendent vulnérables à une montée populaire contre eux aux urnes. Nous exposons par la suite la façon dont le Tea Party instrumentalise certaines valeurs américaines historiques renvoyant à l'ère révolutionnaire. Cette instrumentalisation lui permet de se présenter à l'électorat comme une réponse rassurante à une situation de crise l'ayant déstabilisé et déboussolé – un concept théorique que nous appelons le « refuge identitaire », inspiré des écrits de l'historien Gordon Wood. Finalement, nous mettons en relief une série de particularités institutionnelles caractérisant le système politique américain et favorisant, directement et indirectement, le Tea Party en 2010. Ainsi, la dynamique de la « campagne perpétuelle » s'observant aux États-Unis, en plus du rôle des primaires et des lois régissant le financement électoral, convergent pour faciliter la poussée du mouvement. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Constitution, Démocrates, élections américaines, élections de mi-mandat, États-Unis, Tea Party, refuge identitaire, Républicains, Révolution américaine.

Americans express support for “the environment” with environmental support cutting across political and demographic differences and cleavages. In the past 15 years, however, period effects, political sorting, and the emergence of a powerful anti-environmental movement have lessened the generalized levels of environmental support. Using the 2012 CCES survey, the expressed attitudes regarding multiple environmental issues found significant differences in levels of environmental support nationally by party, Tea Party attitudes, ideology, and certain demographic characteristics. For Floridians, the differences between the most pro-environmental respondents and the most anti-environmental are narrower; partisan identification itself is not significant in environmental attitudes; but ideology, Tea party support, and to a lesser degree, gender and race are associated in explaining variances in environmental attitudes. Voting decision behavior previously observed only for certain environmental issues appears to be influenced by multiple environmental positions. The significance of age on environmental attitudes remains perplexing with evidence for both younger and older respondents' support for environmentalism, as compared to the support expressed by persons aged 40-59. Support and opposition for a specific Florida constitutional ballot proposition on environmental land conservative acquisition reflect partisan and gender divides, and the impact of attitudes regarding an unpopular elected national official. Environmentalism appears to be further evidence of the “Big Sort” in American politics, increasingly likely to be used as an interparty wedge issue and for intraparty base mobilizations. The need for further research and the implications for environmental activists conclude this thesis.

Over the course of the last few years, a new movement has taken the American political system by storm, the Tea Party. The movement has not only captivated our media but also the minds of ordinary Americans and political elites. According to popular consensus and academic opinion, the Tea Party is comprised of a group of conservative-leaning Republicans who want a smaller government and a lesser tax burden. This is what we think of the Tea Party, but is it true? It is perceived that Tea Party members differ significantly from their Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives, but do they? Do they truly represent the Tea Party philosophy and agenda? By creating an original data set on the Republican members of the United States House of Representatives, and examining variables such as the political lean, economic and employment make-up of a member's district, their endorsements and incumbency, as well as high priority legislative votes from the 112th Congress, I will be able to investigate the characteristics and tendencies of Tea Party Caucus members. Once one looks at the 242 member House Republican Caucus and further examines the sixty members of the Tea Party Caucus, the data shows that Tea Party Caucus members largely originate from safe Republican districts and have served in previous congressional terms. Analysis shows that Tea Party Caucus members do vary significantly from their House Republican colleagues when examining their districts, but do not vary as considerably when examining their voting patterns.

Following the historic election of Barack Obama, the largest overhaul of the nation's health care system since the Great Society, and with the country still reeling from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a group of disenchanted conservative Republicans and elected leaders wary of government policy gave rise to a new political movement - the Tea Party. Since taking the American political system by storm in 2010, considerable research has focused on the electoral consequences of the Tea Party. Using an original dataset and the American National Election Study, I study the Tea Party Caucus at the elite level by analyzing roll call votes, incumbency, and endorsements, and at the mass level through an examination of congressional districts and constituencies. Findings show that members of the Tea Party Caucus and their Republican House colleagues are largely homogeneous. Exceptions to this include economic final passage votes, legislation receiving presidential support, district lean, census region, and presidential vote in congressional districts. Furthermore, evidence is seen that economic factors in members' districts affected the election of freshmen representatives in 2010, and that district variables strongly influence legislative voting behavior. Finally, discontinuity is discovered between the Tea Party movement at the mass level and the Tea Party Caucus at the elite level.

Le Tea Party entre en scène en février 2009 aux États-Unis. C’est notamment la tirade d’un journaliste qui s’insurge contre les plans de sauvetage de l’économie votés par le Président Barack Obama, en direct sur la chaîne CNBC le 19 février, et invite à organiser une « Tea Party » dans le port de Chicago, qui déclenche ce phénomène sans précédent. S’ensuivent de nombreux rassemblements protestataires de masse à travers le pays, puis la création de dizaines, puis de centaines de groupes Tea Party locaux. La rapidité et l’ampleur de ce mouvement surprennent les spécialistes. D’autant que dès 2010, le Tea Party affirme des objectifs politiques et une volonté d’institutionnalisation, se révélant une menace pour l’establishment républicain. Mais en 2012, la réélection du Président Obama peut être lue comme une défaite colossale pour le mouvement, et des chroniques de mort annoncée sont publiées par la presse libérale (au sens américain). Des résultats peu spectaculaires aux élections de mi-mandat en 2014 semblent confirmer ce pronostic, surtout que le Parti républicain réussit à tenir le mouvement en respect jusqu’aux primaires pour l’investiture présidentielle en 2015. C’est alors qu’on assiste à un retournement de situation ; la radicalisation du Grand Old Party est nette, visible entre autres dans la plate-forme très conservatrice des candidats républicains. En novembre 2016, l’élection de l’outsider Donald Trump à la présidence, conjonction de nombreux facteurs électoraux, est également le résultat d’efforts organisationnels de la Droite auxquels le Tea Party a largement contribué. Pour appréhender ce mouvement, il faut comprendre qu’il combine des forces top-down et bottom-up. Certes, le Tea Party bénéficie depuis son émergence de ressources inestimables de la part de groupes de pression et de think tanks comme FreedomWorks, American Majority, Americans for Prosperity ou Heritage Foundation, ainsi que des médias conservateurs. De nature organisationnelle ou rhétorique, ces ressources sont fondamentales car elles permettent au mouvement de s’organiser et de mener ses actions militantes. Il n’en reste pas moins qu’à la base se trouvent des acteurs bénévoles, qui consacrent leur temps et leur énergie au Tea Party, et revendiquent leur caractère grassroots. Des organisations nationales comme Tea Party Patriots s’imposent pour fédérer les groupes qui leur sont affiliés, cependant certains groupes locaux cherchent à protéger leur indépendance. Autour des groupes Tea Party gravitent des organisations libertariennes et conservatrices, l’ensemble formant une nébuleuse complexe, qui fonctionne par réseaux à différents niveaux et selon diverses configurations. L’objet de cette étude de terrain est donc d’apporter un éclairage de l’intérieur du mouvement Tea Party, par l’observation en immersion de groupes locaux situés dans les régions de Philadelphie en Pennsylvanie, et de Boston dans le Massachusetts. Il s’agit d’abord de comprendre les motivations et l’idéologie des militants, principalement d’orientation conservatrice, libertarienne et populiste. Ce sont les notions de souveraineté individuelle, d’anti-fédéralisme, et de respect de la Constitution qui dictent toute lecture des Tea Partiers. Ensuite, l’analyse des modes opératoires des groupes permet de clarifier le fonctionnement de l’ensemble. Le Tea Party se démarque en tant que mouvement de droite recourant à des stratégies organisationnelles jusqu’ici plutôt réservées aux mouvements progressistes - la façon dont il applique les principes de l’organisation communautaire est l’une de ses forces indéniables, en particulier à l’ère des nouvelles technologies, et des réseaux sociaux. Son utilisation de ressources Web et d’outils concrets pour l’action militante est remarquable. Enfin, il est essentiel de saisir que le Tea Party veut s’implanter dans le tissu décisionnel local. Pour y parvenir, l’une de ses tactiques consiste à infiltrer progressivement le Parti républicain / The Tea Party enters the scene in February 2009 in the United States. On February 19, a CNBC journalist protests on-air against the economic bailout plans voted by President Barack Obama, and invites viewers to organize a « Tea Party » in the Chicago harbor. This contributes to trigger an unprecedented phenomenon, as numerous mass protest rallies soon organize throughout the country, followed by the creation of dozens, then hundreds of local Tea Party groups. Experts are astonished at the swiftness and magnitude of the movement. All the more so in 2010, when the Tea Party starts claiming political objectives and shows intent of institutionalizing, proving a threat to the Republican Establishment. However, President Obama is reelected in 2012 and this is interpreted as a devastating loss for the movement, for which obituaries are published in several liberal media. Lackluster results in the 2014 mid-term elections seem to confirm this forecast, especially since the Republican Party succeeds at keeping the movement at bay until the primaries for the presidential candidate nomination in 2015. But then there is a reversal; the Grand Old Party clearly radicalizes, as the extremely conservative Republican platform notably shows. And the election of outsider Donald Trump to the presidency in November 2016, a conjunction of numerous electoral factors, is also the result of organizational efforts on the right side of the political spectrum, to which the Tea Party largely contributed. To better apprehend this movement, it is necessary to understand that it combines top-down and bottom-up forces. From its appearance, the Tea Party has indisputably benefitted from colossal resources from interest groups and think tanks such as FreedomWorks, American Majority, Americans for Prosperity or The Heritage Foundation, but also from conservative media. Either organizational or rhetorical, these resources are primeval for the movement’s organization and activism. Nevertheless, there are voluntary activists working at the basis of the movement, who devote their time and energy to the Tea Party, and claim its grassroots nature. National organizations such as Tea Party Patriots try to establish themselves as federations for the groups affiliated to them, while some local groups seek to remain independent. Libertarian and conservative organizations gravitate around Tea Party groups, the whole forming a complex cluster that operates at different levels and following diverse configurations. Thus the object of this field study is to shed light on the Tea Party movement from the inside, thanks to the observation of local groups from an embedded position. These groups are located in the Philadelphia and Boston areas, respectively in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. First, it is necessary to understand activists’ motivations and ideologies, which are mainly conservative, libertarian and populist; and that Tea Partiers interpret everything though the lens of individual sovereignty, anti-Federalism, and respect of the Constitution. Then, analyzing the modi operandi of the groups allows to illuminate how the whole system works. The Tea Party distinguishes itself as a right-wing movement that recurs to organizational strategies that were predominantly used by progressive movements until recently – the way the movement applies the principles of community organizing is undeniably one of its strengths, particularly considering the new media revolution, and social networks. Its use of Web resources and concrete tools to encourage activism is impressive. Lastly, it is indispensable to grasp that the Tea Party aims for local decision-making positions. To this end, one of its tactics consists in progressively infiltrating the Republican Party

The Tea Party’s influence in the recent 2010 elections suggests that the group is making an impact within American politics. This project seeks to identify the cultural forces at work and ground them within Antonio Gramsci’s framework of hegemony. Taking a cue from Michael Bérubé’s recent book The Left at War, I perform a close analysis of the Tea Party’s project for hegemony. I focus on the media discourses of the Tea Party movement, performing a close reading of two key Tea Party websites and unpacking two important televised moments relating to the Tea Party’s rise as a grassroots movement. I argue that the Tea Party uses the practice of articulation to persuade the American public that Tea Party members are the rightful heirs to the project of “America” that the Founding Fathers began centuries ago by using the theories of Bérubé, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as reference points. Finally, I use my analysis of the Tea Party’s articulatory practices to begin exploring a way forward for the American Left, building on the groundbreaking cultural work of Bérubé, Hall, and Laclau and Mouffe. / text

This thesis uses discourse theory on speeches made by four Tea Party elites: Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and Rand Paul, to see how they construct an American identity. My purpose is to show how the Tea party movement articulates the American identity by exploring the way in which they use chains of equivalences to produce meaning to their identity. My methodological tools rely on the framework developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and further refined though the work of Norman Fairclough and David Howarth, where meaning is produced by articulating elements into nodal points that taken together constitutes a discursive hegemony based on inclusion and exclusion in social antagonisms, where the movement articulates who they are in relation to what they are not. My results indicate that the Tea Party movement does not find a way to stabilize a cohesive identity, instead their conception of the American identity exists within both a libertarian notion of freedom and liberty as the absence of external force, while at the same time articulating conservative social values such as God, family, and marriage; they also tow the line of dogmatic individualism and populist collectivist notions of a people and a nation. This shows how the Tea Party movement is an eclectic movement that bears similarity to historical conservative movements in America that has often articulated philosophical impulses that are conflicting and sometimes even incompatible with each other.

The Tea Party movement’s effect on local and regional planning in Virginia has received little study. This work identifies how conservative political activism has impacted planning in the Commonwealth and how planners have responded. The study relies on a qualitative approach involving 22 semi-structured interviews with activists, planners, and citizens, as well as textual analyses of planning documents, local and regional news reports, and Tea Party social media. The resultant findings show that Tea Party activism is rooted in deep seated ideals about private property rights and individualism. It also reveals that planning processes that increased the amount of public input had the effect of mitigating the impact of activism. The study concludes by suggesting that strategies based in the communicative style of planning offer an effective way to overcome such opposition while enhancing the many benefits of having significant citizen input in the planning process.

Barack Obama's administration inherited one of the most severe economic crises in the history of the United States, which severely undermined the American public's confidence in the country's political and economic future. Declining trust in the federal government and its handling of the economic recession gave rise to two influential movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which were thoroughly critical of the country's leadership. Both movements made use of a strong populist rhetoric and mobilized masses by denouncing the political and financial elites, calling for returning control over the country's fate into the hands of ordinary citizens. My master's thesis is an analysis of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street that focuses on the ideology and goals that drove these popular movements, as well as highlights the most crucial commonalities and differences between them. I argue in favor of interpreting the ideologies behind the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as two distinct types of populism, in addition to which I emphasize the different degree of outside support the two movements enjoyed during their rise to prominence. To determine how influential the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street became during Barack Obama's presidency, I also study their relationship with the political...

Tea Party affects American politics since 2009 when she began under the name of former revolutionary movement to fight government interventions with massive demonstrations. There was often incorrect expectation concerning Tea Party's potential in the first years of her activity. Tea Party supporters cannot be easily characterized, since a very differentiated group of Americans identifies itself with the movement, they come from a broad scale of social groups from Religious Right to libertarians or radical populists, which makes Tea Party an easy subject of criticism. Such criticism is often related to accusations of racism and rigid approach to social issues, to which contributed also certain Tea Party candidates. Nationwide political radicalization, which Tea Party allegedly caused up to a great extent, cannot be confirmed, though, radicalization can be discerned rather within the ideologically differentiated Congress. Although the elections of 2010 and 2012 brought a group of Tea Party supporters into the Congress, it wasn't such a significant success, as many of her protagonists expected. Tea Party established the Tea Party Caucus as an organizational tool. The members of the Caucus ranked among the most active congressmen, the number of their achievements is questionable, though. Throughout the year...