Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy

This volume introduces a “connection action” framework for explaining democratic backsliding. We bring together a mostly political science comparativist literature on the role of institutions and organizations in democratic stability and decline with a political communication literature that emphasizes the role of digital technology, especially social media platforms. According to the political science institutionalist literature, political parties aligned with economic elites face what Ziblatt (2017) calls a “conservative dilemma,” especially during times of expanded suffrage and great wealth and income inequality. They must find ways to remain competitive in fair elections while preserving the status and privileges of their core constituency. They do so by emphasizing non-economic “cleavage issues” to mobilize a cross-class coalition. Cleavage issues are hot-button cultural concerns that prime elections on non-economic anxieties. Conservative parties are assisted in this effort by “surrogate organizations,” groups and organizations that are affiliated with but not an official part of a conservative party. An example would be the U.S. Republican party’s association with the National Rifle Association and various Evangelical organizations. While surrogate organizations can help mobilize winning coalitions by helping to promote cleavage issues, they also pose a threat to their allied party. Should a surrogate organization become too powerful and too extreme in their positions, they can pull the party into illiberalism. Drawing on Bennett and Segerberg’s “connective action” model (2013), we argue that a new threat to democratic stability is present in “digital surrogate organizations.” Routinized forms of online communication, such as Facebook groups, subreddits, and hashtags, can be thought of as organizations. Hitherto scattered persons and ideas cohere and mobilize on these platforms in common purpose. Even possibly more than conventional organizations, digital surrogate organizations constitute a clear threat to the ideological coherence of a conservative party, as several of the contributors to this volume note with #Qanon and #StoptheSteal and the Republican party.