Action Organization Analysis: A New, online-based Approach extending Protest Event Analysis through Hubs-based website Analysis

The comprehensive and systematic study of alternative action and transnational solidarity organizations during hard economic times in the recent period requires new methodological approaches that take into account the rise of online sources as well as the new ways in which people interact and participate in politics. This paper aims to present and situate in the related literature a new methodological approach, currently applied to two ongoing cross-national EC projects, which is inspired by protest event, protest case and political claims analysis. Moving beyond recent studies using online sources the LIVEWHAT project applies the hubs-based approach to study Alternative Action Organizations (AAO), whereas the TransSOL consortium applies the same approach with an adjusted codebook to study Transnational Solidarity Organizations (TSOs). The hubs/subhubs selected for each country provide large numbers of links on websites of social movement organizations that are retrieved by search engine experts. Given the techniques applied, they offer an advanced coverage of the repertoire of solidarity actions. These nodal-websites comprise the resources from which the ‘population’ of AAOs is composed and from which a random sample of AAOs and TSOs is drawn for coding purposes. Thus, nodal-websites are used as sources, similarly to the way in which newspapers are treated in protest event analysis. The paper discusses the merits of this new approach compared to related content analysis approaches and points to the ways in which it can be a foundation of a mixed-methods approach. * Maria Kousis is Work Package Leader in WP6 (LIVEWHAT) and WP2 (TransSOL), Marco Giugni is Coordinator of LIVEWHAT (EC FP7), and Christian Lahusen is Coordinator of TransSOL (EC HORIZON 2020). See http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/ and http://transsol.eu/