Networks of institutions and protests: A cross-country analysis of social media linkages between movement parties and social movements

Political contention has reached several peaks in recent decades in Europe, from anti-austerity protests, the “Summer of Migration”, financial crises, up to the recent protests around counter-measures against the COVID pandemic. This has even led scholars to speak of a Social Movement Society, in which political interest articulation through means of protest has become a routine form of engagement. At the same time, so-called Movement Parties are a (re-)emerging phenomenon in the European party landscape that has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. They are characterized by either emerging from or aligning themselves with street protests and hence bridging the arenas of institutionalized politics and protest. Examples include the much-discussed Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement) in Italy, or lesser-known cases like the Uniunea Salvați România (Save Romania Union), or the Danish Alternativet (The Alternative). Movement parties not only differ in their political ideology and their stance on populism but also in their electoral success and failure within and across countries. Unfortunately, much scholarship has focused on single cases or relied on anecdotal evidence and political manifestos to characterize movement parties as distinct from other, more traditional forms of party organization. Thus, much reasoning on movement parties and their position at the intersection of the institutional arena and the protest arena still lacks systematic empirical investigation, especially from a cross-country perspective. Our paper closes that research gap by analyzing ties between movement parties and contentious collective actors in six countries. We argue that social media platforms are a key venue for parties' interaction with civil society organizations and hence provide a good proxy of the communication strategies of political parties, particularly in reference to contentious non-electoral politics. Therefore, we employ a multi-step strategy of data collection and analysis. First, we collect all available Facebook posts and Tweets from two ideologically different movement parties' official channels for each country between 2015 and 2021. Second, we use quantitative content analysis to identify protest-related content in the movement parties' official Twitter and Facebook communication. Third, we inspect these messages and identify accounts and hashtags related to these protests. Fourth, we add these to our data collection. Finally, we conduct a social network analysis of movement parties' and civil society organizations' digital ties (e.g. @mentions, linking patters, use of hashtags, or free-text references). This analysis allows us to explore the (mutual) connections of contentious actors and political parties, hence answering what networks emerge from the digital interaction of movement parties and civil society, what position movement parties hold in these networks, and what variations appear across countries, time, and political ideology.