Political Communication of Political Parties and Civil Society Organizations Online - All the Same?

The comparison of political parties and civil society organizations (CSOs) does not have a long tradition. Scholarly debate often focuses on either political parties or CSOs. However, comparative analysis of parties and CSOs is relevant, because political parties themselves started as organizations of civil society and then merged closer to the state. This implies that either CSOs might follow a similar route and lose touch with their grassroots or political parties can learn lessons from CSOs of how to keep the grassroots involved. Today, we count engagement in parties as conventional political participation and engagement in CSOs as unconventional political participation. While political parties seek offices, civil society organizations promote a cause and seek to differ the status quo. Yet, both need to mobilize supporters to pursue their goals. The question is whether they use similar strategies of political communication online to do so. CSOs can still claim to be connected to their grass-roots, while modern political parties have more or less lost touch. Both forms of political organizations have professionalized over the decades. This might justify the assumption that CSOs face similar problems of linkage failure. Michels observed as early as 1911 that this linkage failure is a result of bureaucracy which itself results from the sheer size in members of organizations. This observation invites the thought that CSOs with a certain size struggle to maintain their grass-roots connection, just like parties do. Although this thought seems valid, we do not discuss linkage failure for CSOs (yet). The key difference might be a more effective political communication strategy. Maybe CSOs understand to engage the public better than political parties. For both political parties and CSOs the internet is a major platform for getting in touch with the public. The paper focuses on the differences and similarities of political parties and CSOs in terms of their political communication online using screen capturing techniques and tools for statistical social media analysis. Five political parties and five CSOs are examined. This makes it possible to control the factors size, tradition and ideological background of the organizations.