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Violent Protest and Heterogeneous Diffusion

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Violent Protest and Heterogeneous Diffusion BRITAIN FIRST AND THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY: SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOVEMENT-PARTY DYNAMICS1 Thomas Davidson and Mabel Berezin2 FORTHCOMING IN DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF MOBILIZATION. PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION. Social movement scholars have recently turned their attention to the interactions between political parties and social movements, but little is known about how social media have impacted these relationships, despite widespread adoption of these technologies. We present a case study of the relationship between Britain First, a far-right anti-Muslim social movement, and the U.K. Independence Party, the Eurosceptic political party that spearheaded the Brexit campaign. The movement appeared marginal in the press but it dominated social media, using this presence to support to the party. We examine the dynamics of the relationship between these groups from 2013 until 2017, drawing upon data from social media, newspapers, and other online sources, and focusing on interactions between elites and rank-and-file supporters. Our findings illustrate how far-right groups have used new technologies to generate an unprecedented amount of popular support and to attempt to influence the political mainstream. A number of western democracies have recently experienced a resurgence of right-wing political activity in both the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary sphere (Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn 2016; Mudde 2016; Muis and Immerzeel 2017). In Germany, the unprecedented electoral performance of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been coupled with the rise of the anti-Islam PEGIDA protest movement (Stier, Posch, Bleier, and Strohmaier 2017); in the United States, the right-wing campaign and then presidency of Donald Trump, which have been marked by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, have also been accompanied extreme right protest activity by white nationalists and the “alt-right,” including violent protests such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville (Nagle 2017); and in the United Kingdom, the electoral breakthrough of the radical right U.K. Independence Party, which pressured government to initiate the Brexit referendum (Bale 2018), occurred as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movements have protested across the country and developed large followings on social media (Allen 2011, 2014; Bartlett and Littler 2011; Jackson and Feldman 2011). In parallel to the resurgence of the extreme right, both institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics have increasingly been taking place in online, as political parties and social movements adopt social media technologies. While these technologies were initially lauded for facilitating progressive movements that aimed to deepen democracy (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Mason 2013), they have recently been used to 1 We would like to thank Tim Bale, Kathleen Blee, Michael Macy, John McCarthy, Emily Parker, George Ross, Michael Schwartz, members of the Social Dynamics Lab at Cornell, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We also want to thank Dawit Mekonnen, Jiangjie Man, Jing Xia, Manuel Arturo Abreu, Ryan Enderby, and Weiran Song for their invaluable research assistance. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2016 Annual International Conference of Europeanists in Philadelphia, the 2017 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, and the 2018 Young Scholars in Social Movements Conference at the University of Notre Dame. All errors are our own. 2 Thomas Davidson is a doctoral candidate and Mabel Berezin is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Direct correspondence to: Thomas Davidson, [email protected]. 2 Mobilization mobilize the radical right and other anti-democratic groups (Tucker, Theocharis, Roberts, and Barberá 2017). Scholars of social movements have drawn attention to the need to understand the relationships between movements and parties (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), the study of which has become an important area for contemporary research (Heaney and Rojas 2015; Schlozman 2015; Skocpol and Williamson 2012). In particular, adopting social network theory has enabled social movements scholars to consider how different movements are connected to one another and to other types of organizations (see Diani 2003). These interactions can occur at the elite level, as individuals act as brokers between movements and parties (Schlozman 2015), and at the grassroots level, as rank-and-file activists and partisans interact (Heaney and Rojas 2007, 2011). We aim to build upon this work by examining the interactions between radical right parties, movements, and their supporters in the age of social media technologies. We conduct a case study of the interactions between the far-right anti-Muslim movement, Britain First (BF), and the right-wing Eurosceptic party the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). We combine data collected from newspapers, social media, and other online sources to study their relationship and its dynamics, both at the level of movement and party elites and their rank-and-file supporters. We use these fine-grained data to reconstruct the relationship between BF and UKIP over four years, from late 2013 to mid-2017, a period that included two general elections and the Brexit referendum. Our study aims to address the following questions: To what extent are extreme right movements interacting with mainstream political parties? What can social media data tell us about these interactions? Who is associated with both groups and how do they differ from other movement or party supporters? And how and why did the relationship between UKIP and BF change over time? Our results show how a one-sided relationship at the elite level belied a substantial connection between BF and UKIP’s rank-and-file supporters, including many people who were active in support of the agendas of both groups. From UKIP’s initial electoral breakthrough in 2014 until the Brexit referendum in 2016, we observed frequent interactions between their supporters. Many promoted the cause of leaving the EU and attempted to connect this to grievances towards Islam. Following the success of the Brexit referendum UKIP went into decline, effectively ending their relationship and prompting BF’s leaders to consider turning towards electoral politics. UKIP has since adopted Islam as a key issue, suggesting that BF’s support may have had some influence on the party. Our study makes a contribution towards understanding movement-party relationships in the age of social media and the nature of the relationships between different types of organizations on the radical right. Furthermore, we demonstrate how data collected from social media, in combination with other sources, can provide a valuable resource for scholars of social movements. We conclude by generalizing from our case study to help understand similar developments in other countries and contexts, focusing in particular on the United States and Germany. DYNAMICS OF MOVEMENT-PARTY RELATIONSHIPS In contrast to prior scholarship that considered noninstitutionalized social movements and institutionalized political parties in isolation, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly argued that it is necessary to study political parties and social movements in tandem because “the two sorts of politics interact incessantly and involve similar causal processes” (2001: 6-7). Movements and parties often enter into relationships that are mutually beneficial: social movements can provide mass support for parties during elections, helping to mobilize people to vote (McAdam and Tarrow 2010; Schlozman 2015), and political parties can legitimate movements and help to enact policy in support of their goals (Kriesi 2004, 2015; McAdam and Tarrow 2010; Schlozman 2015). They can also have hostile relationships, including competition and takeovers (Schwartz 2010). These relationships can fluctuate Social3 Media and Movement-Partisan Interaction considerably over time due to changes to the political opportunity structure that can enable and constrain both movement activism and the fortunes of political parties (Kriesi 2004; McAdam 2010; Meyer and Minkoff 2004; Tarrow 1998). Longitudinal studies emphasize how changing environmental conditions affect the ebb and flow of mobilization (Koopmans 1993; McAdam 2010). For example, civil rights protests were most frequent in the presence of Democratic incumbents, while the passage of legislation, one of the central goals of the movement, dampened protest and weakened the movement (Meyer and Minkoff 2004). Similarly, the election of Barack Obama stifled the Democrat-leaning anti-war movement which had thrived under George W. Bush’s presidency (Heaney and Rojas 2011, 2015). Movement activism can also provide new opportunities for political parties by reshaping prevailing narratives (Gaby and Caren 2016) and by putting new issues on the political agenda (Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, and Su 2010). Movements can also directly influence the composition of parties and their agendas. For example, the Tea Party movement was able to engage in collective action to push the Republican Party to adopt its agenda and to elect candidates to office who supported the aims of the movement (Skocpol and Williamson 2012; Vasi, Strang, and van de Rijt 2014). Importantly, movements and parties should not be considered as distinct entities, since the boundaries between them are “fuzzy and permeable” (Goldstone 2003). Drawing upon social network theory,
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