Decentralizing electoral campaigns? New-old parties, grassroots and digital activism

ABSTRACT

Recent studies suggest that new parties display new patterns of digital mobilization. We shed light on this debate: do new party supporters engage in online political activities to a greater extent during electoral campaigns? Do they share political images or quotes on social media, participate in political forums, or exchange political messages with their friends more often than supporters of traditional parties? No. Drawing on a post-electoral survey dataset in Spain, we find that offline extra-institutional political activities are key predictors of the level of online political engagement. Even in the context of a polarized electoral campaign and the emergence of new electoral forces such as Podemos, extra-institutional political participation drives digital activism to the detriment of institutional variables, such as turnout or partisan preferences. Thus, all parties depend on extra-institutional activists to boost their online campaigns. Since grassroots activists increasingly influence the communicative strategy of all political parties, we interpret this process within a long-term digital-based post-material transformation of the political culture, with major implications for partisan organization, mobilization, and polarization in many democracies. We contend that the overrepresentation of grassroots activists in producing and disseminating political content in social media may have favored an increase of the visibility and public support of political outsiders in several countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Political polarization
• activism
• post-material political culture
• election campaign
• digital public sphere

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this article was presented at the ‘Social Movements and Parties in a Fractured Media Landscape' symposium, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence on 1–2 July 2019. We would like to thank all the participants, Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca and Lorenzo Zamponi for their feedback, help, and support throughout the process. We would also like to offer special thanks to Víctor Sampedro, who has inspired this research and has secured funding for the fieldwork on which this work is based. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for their constructive comments on our work.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This established polling agency counts ‘with more than 1,300,000 panelists in over 23 countries around the world’ (see Netquest, 2019). Specifically, for Spain they have a large enough sample of 157,916 panelists, with an average response rate of 50-55% (Netquest, 2019). Panel members are recruited from a host of different sources, including standard advertising, strategic partnerships with websites, and so on. When a new panel member is recruited, Netquest records a host of socio-demographic information. For nationally representative samples, it draws a sub-sample of the panel that is representative in terms of a number of socio-demographic features, inviting this sub-sample to complete the survey.

2 We have built three alternative indices. First, instead of a cumulative index, we calculate a weighted average of the nine indicators. Second, we have created a simple additive scale based on the individual 1–6 scales (potential range: 6-54). Third, depending on the degree of online activist participation, we have distinguished between three groups within the simple additive scale (low, medium and high, which correspond to 39.5%, 35.5% and 25% of the observations, respectively). We have reproduced our statistical models with these three alternative dependent variables, and the overall findings are robust.

3 The histogram in the Appendix I shows the dependent variable is not normally distributed (Figure A1). The data are strongly skewed to the right. Further evidence confirms overdispersion. The latter happens provided the conditional variance exceeds the conditional mean. We run a test of the overdispersion parameter alpha. As alpha is significantly different from zero, we conclude that the Poisson distribution is not the most suitable modeling strategy. Although our measures are not discrete, the structure of our dependent variable is similar to event counts, hence we replicate all models with negative binomial specifications in the Appendix I (Table A1).

4 We have excluded the ideological self-identification variable in Models 3 and 5 due to multicollinearity concerns.

5 If using negative binomial regressions instead of OLS specifications with robust standard errors, these results remain unchanged (see Appendix I, Table A1; Figures A1 and A2).

6 In addition to the analyses reported here, we ran preliminary statistical analyses inverting the relationship of dependency between the key variables. While digital activism seems to be positively associated with electoral turnout, it vanishes when controlling for institutional trust and campaign attention. Similarly, while the effect of activism seems to be positively associated with voting for Podemos and allies— relative to voting for any other party—, it vanishes when controlling for extra-institutional participation. Consistent with the normalization approach, the effects from online political activism on offline political participation are far from robust, thus going against the reverse causality hypothesis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Secretaría de Estado de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion [grant number CSO2013-48612-C2-1-P].

Notes on contributors

Josep Lobera

Josep Lobera is a professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Madrid and Tufts University. He is Editor of the Spanish Journal of Sociology (RES) and the Scientific Editor of the Biennial National Report on Social Perception of Science and Technology in Spain. His research interests are focused on the analysis of public opinion, the political attitudes, and the social representations of science and technology. His research appeared in Social Science & Medicine; International Migration; Health Communication; Social Science Information; and Communication Studies, among others [email: [email protected]].

Martín Portos

Martín Portos is Research Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence (Italy). He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. Winner of the Juan Linz Best Dissertation Award in Political Science and the ISA's Worldwide Competition for Junior Sociologists in 2018, he studies political participation, social movements, inequalities and nationalism. His latest publications featured in American Behavioral Scientist; European Societies; International Political Science Review; Regional Studies; Social Movement Studies; Territory, Politics, Governance, and West European Politics, among others [email: [email protected]].