The Disconnection In Online Politics: the youth political web sphere and US election sites, 2002-2004

In recent years, candidates and other political actors have dramatically increased their presence and activities online. Although the notion of these activities reaching beyond a limited set of early-adopters is relatively new, younger citizens have long been at the forefront of new developments on the web and continue to make up a substantial proportion of those seeking political information online. Given longstanding concern over levels of civic and political engagement among young people, questions concerning what young people seeking information and opportunities for political involvement online might find there are particularly relevant. In particular, we explore political websites that are directly targeted at younger voters (e.g. Rock the Vote and similar sites), websites produced by candidates and political parties, and possible linkages between these two web spheres. Based on content and hyperlink analyses spanning the 2002 and 2004 US election cycles, we find a complex evolution of the online political information environment offered to youth. Although the youth engagement web sphere experienced dramatic growth during this time period, our data also identify a reluctance of many mainstream political actors to speak directly to young people through the web, and a surprising underdevelopment of linkages between youth politics websites and the wider web of political information online. We conclude by considering the implications of these patterns for future research on the role of new media in processes of political communication and engagement.     

Old Voters on New Dimensions: Why Do Voters Vote for Pensioners’ Parties? The Case of the Netherlands

This article analyzes the electoral support of the Dutch pensioners’ party 50Plus. Due to its open electoral system and aging population, the Netherlands is a key case to study pensioners’ parties. Our study shows that this pensioners’ party appeals to voters who are characterized by their age and their dependence on the welfare state as well as their policy positions on new lines of political conflict. In particular, their position on the new economic dimension (which concerns welfare state reform) and the new cultural dimension (which concerns immigration and EU integration) is distinct. Moreover, even when the majority of voters for this new party once supported the larger mainstream parties, they are now dissatisfied with the established politics. With rapidly aging populations across established democracies, this study is not just relevant for those studying pensioners’ parties, but rather gives an important insight into the electoral dynamics and popular support for mainstream politics, the welfare state, and social security.     

Protests,signaling, and elections: conceptualizing opposition-movement interactions during Argentina’s anti-government protests (2012-2013)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interface of protest movements and opposition parties, considering this remains conceptually under-specified. It does so by proposing a processual framework involving three mechanisms of party-movement interaction – signaling, frame-alignment, and coalition-building – at play in different phases of a contentious cycle unfolding under electoral conditions. Drawing on novel interview data, the article validates this proposal by tracing direct and indirect effects between protest signals, activists, and Argentine opposition parties during the year-long contentious cycle that preceded the defeat of the Kirchner government in the 2013 legislative elections. On this basis, it is argued that interactive dynamics between protest actors and political parties can significantly affect opposition politics, supporting the emergence of collaborative strategies that may have major electoral implications. The article thus makes relevant theoretical and empirical contributions, by both offering an analytical bridge between social movement and party politics literatures with potential for further elaboration, while illuminating new developments concerning the positioning of Latin American center-right parties in relation to mass protests.     

CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS OF GENDER AND THE CARIBBEAN: TAKING IT INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

ABSTRACT

In the years after the Greek Junta, activists who had been involved in anti-dictatorship movements abroad returned as the country’s new pool of left-leaning, well-educated political actors. Drawing on interviews with former activists and borrowing from recent developments in cultural sociology, I analyse these returns as political projects fraught with moral conundrums. I argue that the contemporary crisis structure accounts of returns by placing speakers within what Boltanski and Thévenot call a ‘situation subject to the imperative of justification’. I make two arguments regarding the critiques and valuations used in accounts: First, the idealized political subject put forward by former activists promotes withdrawal over participation and silence over speech. Second, failure is valorized as a principled mode of self-exoneration. This article further demonstrates the importance of theorizing return migration within an ethnographic treatment of the present.     

Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election

Humour has long been a part of election campaigns but rarely has election humour been subject to scholarly analysis. The increasing popularity of new forms of Internet-based humour has, however, raised questions about the significance of humour in campaigning and whether online humour can be used as means of stimulating political engagement. This article assesses online humour in the context of the 2005 UK election, exploring both the motivations of the different actors who distributed web-based political humour and the nature of the texts themselves. We find that whilst the official party campaigns use humour very cautiously, there has been an upsurge in humour based campaigns from net activists as well as more traditional broadcasters. Yet, overall, the way that humour is used is paradoxical, since it often attempts to encourage participation but portrays politics as a cynical game, leaving the rationale for political participation unclear.     

Political entrepreneurship in the field of Māori sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand

Individual actors have the potential to shape political outcomes through creative use of opportunities. Political entrepreneurship identifies how such actors recognize and exploit opportunities, for personal or collective gain. The existing literature focuses on individuals operating within institutional settings, with less attention paid to other types of actors. In this article, I argue for an expansion of the political entrepreneurship framework, by considering individuals in the electoral and protest arenas. An examination of the field of Māori sovereignty, or tino rangatiratanga, in Aotearoa New Zealand allows exploration of prominent actors’ innovative strategies and practices. The findings highlight the actors’ reliance on identity in mobilizing support within the community, to press claims. Broadening the application of political entrepreneurship demonstrates the roles of social, cultural and political capital in influencing outcomes, by identifying opportunities available to individuals embedded in the community and according to the context of the arena.     

Becoming independent: political participation and youth transitions in the Scottish referendum

Sociological debates on youth engagement with electoral politics play out against a backdrop of supposed ‘decline’ in civic participation (e.g. Putnam 2000 , Norris, 2011 ), in turn contextualized by theories of individualization in ‘late’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity (Beck, Giddens). However, the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum catalysed remarkably high levels of voter turnout among this youngest group, and was accompanied by apparently ongoing political engagement. We explored this engagement among a strategic sample of young ‘Yes’ voters, in the immediate aftermath of this exceptional political event. Analysis of qualitative interview data generated an unanticipated finding; that interviewees narrated their political engagement biographically, articulated their referendum participation reflexively, and located their new political ideas, allegiances and actions in the context of their own transitions to ‘independent’ adulthood. This inspired us to rethink young people's political engagement in relation to youth transitions. Doing so enables a synthesis of divergent strands in the sociology of youth, and offers new insights into the combinations of ‘personal’ agentic and ‘political’ structural factors involved in young people's politicization.     

Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.     

Leadership Trends in Advanced Democracies

Political sociology suggests two inter‐related leadership trends in advanced democracies: the increasing prominence of political leaders, and the waning influence of political parties, especially the ideological‐programmatic ‘mass parties’ or Volksparteien. These trends intensified and reinforced each other over the last 30–40 years resulting in a rapidly changing physiognomy of contemporary democracy. Democratic politics becomes more elite driven, mass‐mediated and populist in style than in the past. Moreover, the power and elite structures in advanced democracies, as well as the electoral competition, increasingly resemble what Weber labelled ‘leader democracy’. The shift towards ‘leader democracy’ has coincided with the processes of party‐voter dealignment and decline of political parties, the rise of the electronic mass media, and the ascendancy of powerful leaders–reformers in the ‘core’ liberal democracies. The sociological argument about the shift is anchored in a theoretical framework derived from works of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter. It depicts democratic political leaders as key political actors embedded in broader elites, motivated by determination and commitment, and empowered by the resources of modern states and the mass media.     

Between political opportunities and strategic dilemmas: the choice of ‘double track’ by the activists of an occupied social centre in Italy

According to the political opportunity structure (POS) framework, mobilization tends to intensify when channels of access to the authorities open, leading the protest actors to hope for success. This happened during the protest campaign aimed at the reopening of the occupied Social Centre ‘Experia’ in Catania (Italy), after the eviction by police, because unexpectedly moderate centre-left political actors supported mobilization and the centre-right local government accepted to put the issue on the institutional agenda; nevertheless the social centre was not reopened. In order to explain why the mobilization was unsuccessful, we analysed the protest campaign combining the POS framework with the approach to strategic dilemmas by James Jasper; if opportunities and restraints of the political system influence the choices and behaviours of unconventional actors, in their turn the actions and decisions made by movement activists affect the POS. In this case, the social centre activists filtered the constraints and opportunities of the local political system through their cognitive lenses and faced some dilemmas (Naughty or Nice?, Extension, Shifting goals), whose strategic choices extended or reduced these constraints and opportunities, thus affecting the opening and closure of the POS. The failure of the solution attempted by the social centre activists to keep both options of the various dilemmas, i.e. the strategy of ‘double track’, demonstrates how it is very difficult to be successful by maintaining dilemmas rather than making the strategic choices they demand, when the local institutional POS is substantially closed.     

The Implementation of Voting from Abroad: Evidence from the 2014 Turkish Presidential Election

Voting from abroad (VFA) is a complex norm and practice due to the multilevel processes, structures and actors involved. This article explores the reasons behind the eventual adoption of this practice within the context of a long and well‐known history of emigration in Turkey. During the 2014 Turkish presidential election, emigrants from Turkey were finally allowed to participate from abroad even though legislation giving them this right has been in place since 1995. Based on archival research and fieldwork in Germany and the United States, this article discusses the varying relevance of three central explanatory factors to the implementation of VFA: emigrant lobbying, the electoral expectations of potential benefit by the governing party, and the presence of broader, state‐led diaspora engagement policies. The first of these is important but insufficient, whereas the second factor is necessary. Moreover, the presence of broader, state‐led diaspora engagement policies is a mediating factor. This article finds that specific actors like political parties may play the crucial role, highlighting the need for critical examination of their role in the implementation process.     

Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thévenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations.     

Social media use and democratic engagement: a comparative study of Hong Kong,Taiwan, and China

Recent studies in political communication have found a generally positive role of social media in democratic engagement. However, most research on youth’s social media use in relation to their political engagement has been conducted in the context of American and European democracies. This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the effects of the uses and structural features of social media on democratic engagement in three different Asian political systems: Taiwan (young liberal democracy); Hong Kong (partial democracy); and China (one-party state). The findings showed that sharing political information and connections with public actors consistently predicted offline participation (i.e., civic and political participation) and online participation (i.e., online political expression and online activism) in the three political systems. Although social media use for news, network size, and network structure did not consistently predict political outcomes, they played significant roles in influencing different engagement in the three political systems. The comparative approach used in this study helped to demonstrate the role of social media in the democratic engagement of youth in three places with similar cultures but different political contexts.     

The Merit of Party Institutions: Women’s Descriptive Representation and Conservative Parties in Australia and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Generally, right-wing political parties tend to fall behind their left-wing counterparts on women’s representation. Conservative parties emphasize individual merit rather than structural barriers as an explanation for low levels of women succeeding in candidate selection processes. Some right-wing parties have made more progress than others. Comparing parties within the conservative family, we aim to reveal what institutional factors may retard or promote women’s representation. We find that the decentralization of the candidate selection process combined with electoral losses created opportunities for critical actors to act to increase women’s representation to around 20% in Australia, some 15 years earlier than in the United Kingdom.     

MASTERING THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Online communication has become a central part in the communication repertoires of political actors in Western mass democracies. In Switzerland, where broadband, internet use, and media literacy are amongst the highest in the world, all major political parties run their own website and are active on social media. This article seeks to show how Swiss political parties deal with social media, how they implement it and how they use social media. The study builds on empirical data from a structural analysis of party websites, the official Facebook sites, and Twitter feeds. These social media sites were analysed for their resonance, update frequency, and thematic clusters focusing on information, mobilization, and participation. A weekly assessment of the user numbers illustrates the development of user resonance throughout the 2011 election year. While political parties claim to appreciate the dialogue and mobilization potentials of social media, they mainly use social media as an additional channel to spread information and electoral propaganda. The overall resonance is still on a very low level. The data seem to sustain the normalization hypothesis, as larger parties with more resources and voters are better able to generate effective communication and to mobilize online than small and marginal parties.     

Contradictory tendencies in the political culture of Croatian youth: unexpected anomalies or an expected answer to the social crisis?

A successful democratic consolidation of post-socialist societies depends, among other things, on their citizens’ political culture, younger generations included. Moreover, youth civic engagement today and in the future is a guarantee of the continuity and development of democracy, which means that scientists need to gain insight into young people’s political culture. In this paper we look at political values, institutional trust and participation as relevant components of the civic political culture. The analysis is based on quantitative data collected in the empirical studies of Croatian youth, carried out between 1999 and 2013. Based on longitudinal study results, a downward trend is identified regarding selected political culture indicators: acceptance of liberal-democratic values, trust in social and political institutions, interest in politics and party preference. However, there is a simultaneous increase in participation in various types of organizations, especially political parties. The interpretation of established tendencies is placed in a broader context of an inherited democratic deficit, economic recession and social crisis. Current trends are both indicators and consequences of young people’s inadequate political socialization as well as weaknesses of political institutions and various actors during the transition and consolidation period.     

Framing Identity Politics: Right-Wing Women as Strategic Party Actors in the UK and US

ABSTRACT

Women’s political underrepresentation in right-wing parties remains a global phenomenon. Despite their rejection of “identity politics,” the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party and the United States’ Republican Party have launched formal initiatives to recruit women legislative candidates. In this article, we ask: How do right-wing women advocate for increasing women’s representation within parties that explicitly reject group identity politics? More specifically, we examine 1) how party elites frame the UK’s Women2Win and the US’s Project GROW campaigns, and 2) the role that women play in each of these initiatives. Through interviews with party elites and content analyses of news articles and campaign materials, we show that right-wing women in both countries function as strategic party actors, advocating for women’s representation tactically within the specific ideological and electoral context of their party.     

Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 Italian election campaign

ABSTRACT

The paper considers how social media ecologies are affecting partisan engagement around political news and online attention economies by investigating the case of the 2018 Italian general election. By analyzing Twitter and Facebook interactions around political news in the lead-up to the election, we shed light on levels of insularity characterizing sources preferred by different partisan communities and investigate how specific patterns of active attention emerge around different sources and around stories proposing different framing of specific political actors. Our findings indicate that, on Twitter, sources mainly shared by supporters of populist parties (the Five Star Movement and the League) are characterized by higher levels of insularity compared to those shared by supporters of other parties. We also find that, on Facebook, news items published by highly insular sources receive a higher number of shares per comment. Finally, our analyses show that news presenting a positive framing of the Five Star Movement – the unique ‘cyber party’ in the system – receives a higher number of shares per comment compared to items presenting the Movement in a negative light, while the opposite is true for stories on all other political parties.     

Student resistance and the democratic transition: student politics in Senegal 1999–2005

University students participated in the democratic transition in Senegal that, throughout the 1990s, saw student activists across the continent advocate for political change. This paper examines the role students played in the election of the new government in Senegal in 2000 and the years that followed. Many student activists in Senegal argued that they were responsible for the changement politique, that saw the first defeat of the ruling Socialist Party since independence in 1960 and the victory of Abdoulaye Wade – ‘papa sopi’ (‘the father of change’). The paper considers the relationship of students to the new governments. It argues that students in Senegal, and across the continent, have played a vital role in political transformations, though not in circumstances chosen by them.     

Reply to Tomlinson and Bisschop

The notion of the devolution of power from central to regional and local levels is gaining popularity across a wide front as a point of departure ‐ a rudimentary strategy ‐ to conceptualise ways in which South African society can be transformed. The South African government has contributed to this exercise by launching a process of establishing Regional Services Councils, new multi‐racial metropolitan and ‘areawide’ bodies outside South African ‘homelands’. This article identifies and analyses the stances of the most important opposition political actors operating legally on the South African stage to the establishment of these new bodies. These actors range from the right‐wing white parties ‐ the CP and the HNP‐to AZAPO and the UDF. Three general stances to this government‐initiated process are identified, and its chances for success are assessed.