E-motions and participation in technopopulist movement-parties. Enthusiasm and technopolitical disillusion

Abstract

Social movements (SMs) protesting against the consequences of the austerity produced by the 2008 great recession leveraged collective participation as a paradigmatic way of revamping democratic institutions and processes. In southern Europe, participation was harnessed by technopolitical movement-parties (MPs) such as the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy and Podemos in Spain. These are political forces combining SM characteristics with a technopolitical narrative to induce ‘e-motions’: emotional arousal of the membership produced by idealising the potential of digital technologies to enact unprecedented popular participation to renew democracy. Combining technocracy (popular competence via technopolitics) with populism (people vs elite rhetoric) the M5S and Podemos built a technopopulist discourse able to generate emotional engagement of the membership and high expectations for collective participation. However, the centralism of the leadership and its control over technopolitics produced an individualised model of engagement which led to disillusion. The article firstly elaborates a narrative literature review on participation, technopolitics, movement-parties, populism, and emotions to frame the affective relationship between participation and technopopulism. Secondly it uses qualitative methods to scrutinise the constituent process of M5S and Podemos technopolitics – when the digital process and infrastructures were created within both MPs – outlining the emotions elicited by technopolitical technopopulism.

Keywords:

• Affects
• emotions
• Five Star Movement (M5S)
• Podemos
• political behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The terms emotion and affect are used interchangeably in this text.

2 https://participa.podemos.info/es

3 https://www.reddit.com/r/podemos/

4 https://twitter.com/PODEMOS/status/427516364656357377

Additional information

Funding

This work is financed by portuguese national funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the project UNPOP 'UNpacking POPulism: Comparing the formation of emotion narratives and their effects on political behaviour (PTDC/CPO-CPO/3850/2020) and by FCT Programmatic Funding (UIDP/50012/2020). It was supported by the postdoctoral research program at the University of the Balearic Islands (call 2021) funded by the UIB and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) A Way of Making Europe and the European Commission H2020 MSCA-IF Technopolitics. The Challenge of Digital Media to Democracy in Europe: an engaged approach (GA ID: 897796).

Notes on contributors

Cristiano Gianolla

Cristiano Gianolla is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra (UC), where he integrates the research thematic line on Democracy, Justice and Human Rights. He is the Principal Investigator of the UNPOP project (FCT, 2021-2024) CES-PI and WP leader of PROTEMO (HEU, 2024-2026) and CO3 (HEU, 2024-2027) projects. He is a co-founding and co-coordinating member of the ‘Inter-Thematic group on Migrations’ and co-coordinates the research programme ‘Epistemologies of the South’ at CES. Cristiano co-coordinates the PhD course ‘Democratic Theories and Institutions’ and the MA course ‘Critical Intercultural Dialogue’ at the Faculty of Economics of the UC.

Antoni Aguiló

Antoni Aguiló Graduated in Philosophy and PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences. Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Social Work at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB). His main fields of research include: political philosophy (especially the critical theory of democracy, power, participation and citizenship in the context of neoliberal globalisation), emancipatory social movements, decolonial epistemologies and their relationship with political theory and LGBTIQ + equality.

Jesús Sabariego

Jesús Sabariego Historian. PhD in Human Rights. Former MSCA Researcher and Lecturer of Cyberculture at the Faculty of Communication of the University of Sevilla (Spain). His research lines are: Technopolitics, Human Rights, Social Movements and Democracy.