Triggered by Defeat or Victory? Assessing the Impact of Presidential Election Results on Extreme Right-Wing Mobilization Online

ABSTRACT

The theoretical literature from criminology, social movements, and political sociology, among others, includes diverging views about how political outcomes could affect movements. Many theories argue that political defeats motivate the losing side to increase their mobilization while other established models claim the winning side may feel encouraged and thus increase their mobilization. We examine these diverging perspectives in the context of the extreme right online and recent presidential elections by measuring the effect of the 2008 and 2016 election victories of Obama and Trump on the volume of postings on the largest white supremacy web-forum. ARIMA time series using intervention modeling showed a significant and sizable increase in the total number of posts and right-wing extremist posts but no significant change for firearm posts in either election year. However, the volume of postings for all impact measures was highest for the 2008 election.

Statement

This paper has not been published elsewhere and it has not been submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere.

Notes

¹ Following Berger (2018a), we are guided by the view that RWEs – like all extremists – structure their beliefs on the basis that the success and survival of the in-group is inseparable from the negative acts of an out-group and, in turn, they are willing to assume both an offensive and defensive stance in the name of the success and survival of the in-group (Berger 2018a). Right-wing extremism is thus defined as a racially, ethnically, and/or sexually defined nationalism, which is typically framed in terms of white power and/or white identity (i.e., the in-group) that is grounded in xenophobic and exclusionary understandings of the perceived threats posed by some combination of non-whites, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, members of the LGBTQ community, and feminists (i.e., the out-group(s)) (Conway, Scrivens, and Macnair 2019). Right-wing extremism and similar terms, such as ‘extreme right-wing’, the ‘extreme right’, and ‘extreme rightists’ are used interchangeably throughout the paper.

² The full list of RWE terms that made up this impact measure can be found by visiting the ADL Hate Symbol Database at: https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols. Terms for this measure consisted of all 328 keywords found in the Database.

³ For the RWE and firearm posting measures, each keyword was unique to each list and there were no overlapping words across lists.

⁴ The full list of firearm terms that made up this impact measure can be found by visiting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_firearms_terms. Terms for this measure consisted of all 202 keywords found in the glossary of firearms terms.

⁵ The various tests for a unit root have different limits and can report conflicting results. For example, the ADF (augmented Dickey-Fuller) tends to have low statistical power while the KPSS test tends toward type II errors. When the tests provided conflicting evidence of a unit root, we differenced the series based on whether the number of tests indicated a unit root as well as an examination of the ACF plot. We also ran all models with differencing and without, and the significance and direction of the impact coefficient remained the same, though the effect size was typically diminished.

⁶ Because we examined election results on three outcomes per election, we adjusted the significance test alpha to 0.016 using the Bonferroni correction (or 0.05/3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Scrivens

Ryan Scrivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is also a Research Fellow at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence and a Research Associate at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University. He conducts problem-oriented interdisciplinary research, with a focus on terrorists’ and extremists’ use of the Internet, right-wing terrorism and extremism, combating violent extremism, hate crime, and computational social science. His research has been funded by Public Safety Canada, the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and VOX-Pol.

George W. Burruss

George W. Burruss is an Associate Professor in and Associate Department Chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. He is also affiliated with Cyber Florida, the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida. He also serves as editor-in-chief for the Journal of Crime & Justice. His main research interests focus on criminal justice organizations and cybercrime. He received his doctorate in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri St. Louis.

Thomas J. Holt

Thomas J. Holt is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University whose research focuses on cybercrime and technology-related deviance. His work has been published in a range of journals, including Crime & Delinquency, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Terrorism & Political Violence. He is also a fellow in the cybercrime cluster at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR).

Steven M. Chermak

Steven M. Chermak is Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the Michigan State University, and an investigator for the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center and the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE). He is also Creator and co-Director of the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), School Shooting Database (SSDB), and the Cybercrime Database (CCDB). Recent publications have appeared in Terrorism and Political Violence, Crime and Delinquency, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

Joshua D. Freilich

Joshua D. Freilich is a member of the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College, and a Creator and co-Director of the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), the U.S School Shooting Database and the Cyber-ECDB. He is a member of two DHS Centers of Excellence, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center and the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE). Freilich’s research has been funded by DHS and NIJ and has recently appeared in Criminology & Public Policy, the Annual Review of Criminology, Terrorism & Political Violence, and Justice Quarterly.

Richard Frank

Richard Frank is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Director of the International CyberCrime Research Centre (ICCRC). He is also Associate Editor-in-Chief of Security Informatics. Dr. Frank completed a PhD in Computing Science (2010) and another PhD in Criminology (2013) at SFU. His main research interest is Cybercrime. Specifically, he’s interested in hackers and security issues, such as online terrorism and warfare.