Collective Action Online: Theories and Methods

The 21st century has brought a burst of collective action in which Internet-based activity has figured, from the mobilizations of the Arab Spring, to protests against public sector retrenchment in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, to technology enabled networks creating capacities for reporting social problems normally managed by governments. This workshop will examine the implications of this online collective activity for political science theory and research. The goal is to develop a cross-disciplinary network of scholars, cross-fertilizing the growing body of methodologically innovative research in this area with mainstream political science, identifying the most interesting research questions and the most appropriate methods to answer them. The workshop calls for papers which investigate the mechanics of collective action online, including comparisons of digitally enabled collective action across countries and social media platforms; examinations of the costs, benefits, motivations and organization of digitally enabled collective action and differences with more socially intensive processes; expositions of methods such as ‘big data’ generation and analysis, experiments and advanced social network analysis; and considerations of the policy implications that flow from online civic engagement and organization. Equally, the workshop is aimed at attracting papers that advance theoretical development, considering where political science theory is challenged by online collective action, and bridging the epistemological gaps between technical approaches and those with more traditional social science grounding.