This paper analyses participation in multiple protest episodes to explore the potential for people to broker relations between same-issue and different-issue episodes. Through an analysis of original survey data from six European countries, we map two-mode networks of individuals and protest episodes in each country to identify protesters in two brokerage positions: coordinators that can broker relations via same-issue contentious episodes and boundary spanners, that can broker relations via different-issue episodes. Combining network and regression analysis, we identify the individuals occupying such positions and characterize their protest participation. We find that embeddedness in different types of activist networks is the most important predictor of brokerage positions. However, the two brokerage positions are associated with different types of embeddedness. By fleshing out the importance of individuals in shaping contentious fields, we offer a unique insight into protest networks, thus advancing the sociological understanding of collective action with an innovative mixed-methods design.

Engaging with long-standing debates on the crisis of democracy, manifested as a downturn in civic involvement, this paper scrutinises the evolving landscape of protest participation. First delineating three distinct protest participation styles - in-person, online and what we conceive of as a pivoting style - we identify individual characteristics among protesters that are associated with each style and consider how different obstacles to participation are linked to these individual styles. Using novel survey data from six European countries, we show that online support can be a viable alternative for individuals unable to join protests due to obstacles they face. The online participation style is more common among people who lack connections with social contacts that can facilitate their participation. The in-person style is prevalent among older participants who are less frequent social media users while the pivoting style is more often realised among young, more biographically available people who are media omnivores. Participants who do not embrace the in-person style lack consensus mobilisation whereas those exhibiting a preference for the online or the pivoting styles face obstacles relating to action mobilisation. We conclude the article with a call for a more nuanced understanding of protest participation, as symptomatic of a transformation of democracy.

In many contemporary democracies, digital networks on the far-right have established themselves as "alternatives" to liberal institutions. Within this nexus of parties, hyper-partisan news, and social media channels, opposition to climate change mitigation has emerged as a central cross-cutting issue. Despite the prominence of these trends, we still know relatively little about the hierarchies that govern these communicative ties. This study draws on the concept of cascading frame activation to trace communication flows between four distinct actor types within the German far right. We apply a mixed-methods approach across social media and websites over a period of 19 months. First, we conduct a time series analysis via a vector autoregression model, to assess potential causal relationships between the issue agendas of far-right actor types. Automated text analysis then inductively generates a lexicon exclusive to far-right posts about climate change, which we qualitatively assess and manually cluster into distinct frame categories. We conclude by tracing framing cascade sequences across the various actor types. Our results reveal significant associations between the issue agenda of far-right actors, especially among right-wing news sites (RNS) and hyperactive accounts. Within this network, the most dominant frames demarcate out-groups, such as the Green Party or climate activists. Notably, RNS play a central role in shaping this discourse, initiating 42% of the identified frames before they find wider dissemination. These findings expand our understanding of hierarchies and new communication pathways among partisan media, political parties, and their extended digital networks on the far right.

In this special issue, the authors theoretically, methodologically, and empirically address challenges and opportunities associated with comparative social media analysis in political contention. Actors from civil society, media, and institutional politics use social media to coordinate, mobilise, and communicate, turning public online communication into an arena of conflict that offers researchers valuable windows of observation. In this introduction to the special issue, we systematise comparative perspectives on social media and political contention. We outline the traditional comparative dimensions of space, time, platform, and case; and suggest an approach for comparison within dimensions that are less dependent on the rapidly changing social media environment and more attuned to the interconnection between social media and political contention.

In this article, we contribute to the analysis of protest participation on a gradient from non- to actual participation. Using survey data from six European countries, we take the analysis beyond a binary differentiation between participants and non-participants. We evidence a participation gradient underpinned by a combination of social and political variables and separate patterns that allow for distinctions between non-, potential, and actual protesters. We establish that some factors have a gradual, linear, relation to protest participation, increasing the likelihood of moving from non-participation to potential participation and from potential to actual participation. Second, we find evidence of a punctuated rather than a linear participation gradient in as far as a range of variables distinguish protesters and potential protesters from non-participants but do not differentiate them from each other. Our findings provide practical insights into mobilization pathways while also inviting further research into intervening factors influencing protest behavior.

This research investigates the strategic use of protest imagery on social media by movement parties, bridging the gap between protest and institutional politics. We apply a mixed-methods analysis of 9584 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram image posts by seven movement parties between 2015 and 2021. We find that protest images frequently serve to amplify movement grievances. Yet, parties’ involvement with contentious protest forms undergoes temporal shifts, influenced mainly by their evolving positions within the polity. Moreover, parties’ engagement with protest images differs by country and ideological leaning. Movement parties on the Right express a conflictual position between supporting and delegitimizing different protests. Conversely, Left-leaning counterparts tend to support protest, yet veer toward deradicalization and emphasizing symbolism over disruptive tactics, once they become more institutionalized. This research highlights the intricate relationship between movement parties, protest, and visual narratives on social media, in light of the interplay between movements and institutional politics.

This research explores interactions between traditional parties and movement parties on social media. The longitudinal analysis (2010-2021) is based on data from eighteen parties' official social media accounts in six European countries. Conceptually bridging cycles of contention, social movement lifecycles, and party lifespans, this research identifies regularities in referencing patterns between traditional party families; and by adding a temporal layer, outlines three trajectories of movement parties in the polity arena. The results contribute to conceptualizing movement parties as hybrid organizations and suggest a common logic of movement in positioning in the polity arena as drivers of party-to-party interactions moderated by country-specific contextual factors.

By adopting a theory-oriented case study approach, this article complements recent debates in political sociology on movement-party interactions, parties and protest, and 'movement parties' by proposing a relational perspective to the study of fields of contention. We explore how organizational type, as a political party or civil society organization, and political orientation on the left-to-right spectrum affect actors' roles in local fields of contention. We draw from network analyses conducted on an original qualitatively coded data set of co- and countermobilization. Our analysis corroborates findings that political parties are indeed highly engaged in protest activity. Yet, our relational approach reveals a more nuanced differentiation of the role of (movement) parties and the interaction of political orientation and actor type.

This paper presents a case study of a digitally enabled mode of transnationally networked framing by far-right actors. We analyze the reach and strategic aims of the '120 decibels' campaign, launched by members of the Austrian Identitarian Movement via social media in early 2018 in an attempt to latch onto the prominence of the MeToo hashtag (#MeToo). We argue that this constituted a form of discursive 'hijacking,' marked by a narrowing of the scope of the problem definition and a reformulation of the political demands. We draw on user-generated Twitter data and focus on geolocation markers and language clusters in order to investigate the transnational scope of these coordinated efforts. We employ content analysis to investigate the campaign's strategic use of #MeToo. Our findings show distinct clusters of German-Austrian - and UK-US-based user groups, from which we infer directionalities in the transnational spread of the campaign. We demonstrate how the initial dissemination of the hashtag was driven by influential individual nodes within their respective networks and tied to #MeToo. The results point toward transnational networking activities among the far right and illustrate emerging dynamics between progressive and reactionary forms of digitally enabled networked framing.

This paper presents a critical discussion of the processing, reliability and implications of free big data repositories. We argue that big data is not only the starting point of scientific analyses but also the outcome of a long string of invisible or semi-visible tasks, often masked by the fetish of size that supposedly lends validity to big data. We unpack these notions by illustrating the process of extracting protest event data from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) in six European countries over a period of seven years. To stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny, we collected additional data by computational means and undertook large-scale neural-network translation tasks, dictionary-based content analyses, machine-learning classification tasks, and human coding. In a documentation and critical discussion of this process, we render visible opaque procedures that inevitably shape any dataset and show how this type of freely available datasets require significant additional resources of knowledge, labor, money, and computational power. We conclude that while these processes can ultimately yield more valid datasets, the supposedly free and ready-to-use big news data repositories should not be taken at face value.

Current research on visual media and the far right creates two expectations: that memes play an increasingly salient role in the far right's digital visual culture, and that the visual and participatory dimensions of internet culture facilitate greater transnationality. We explore these expectations with a comparative research design, situating memes in relation to other genres of visual content and across different country contexts. Taking a mixed methods approach, this article examines the digital visual culture of 25 far-right alternative media and other non-party organisations in Australia, Italy, Germany, and the United States. We assess the salience of memes and other visual genres, as well as three forms of transnationality: the circulation of images, direct communicative references, and transnational similarities. Unexpectedly, we find that memes play only a limited role in the digital visual culture of far-right non-party organisations, with their uneven concentration in Anglophone alt-media suggesting the potential pitfalls of assumptions about 'global' internet culture. We also find little evidence of transnationality through the circulation of the same visuals across countries, whether memes or other genres. Instead, transnationality works through transnational references within the images themselves and through more parallel practices of reproducing visuals in similar ways with similar themes, but with elements specific to an organisation's national and political context. Within this, we identify three distinct visual discourses – fascist continuity, western civilisational identity, and pop cultural appropriation – which highlight different practices of transnationality and collective identity construction within the far right online.

This paper provides an overview of possibilities to localize acts of communication and their agents based on digital traces and scrutinizes their advantages and disadvantages. It shows, (i) what types of geographic information exist in social media data and to what extent they are available to researchers, (ii) which approaches exist to classify locations and (iii) what the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches are. Introducing an approach to automatically classify location information based on the location information in users' profiles and a multi-step cross-validation with time zone information, we show that the less resource-intensive approach yields high precision comparable to the "gold standard" of human coding while recall is comparatively low. The discussion of advantages and limitations of all approaches shows that - depending on the research question - the specific research context and its presumed effect, the aspired granularity of location classification and resource considerations can guide a researchers' decision.