Dark Social and Citizens' political self-perception

Political participation has changed. While today it is common knowledge that political participation goes well beyond the classic involvement in parties and voting, we are still at the beginning of exploring the meaning of web-based technologies for participation. Foci in research dealing with this topic are the broadening of the participation concept to online communication, the adaptation of membership concepts and the exploration of social media platforms for political participation (case studies). Citizen-initiated campaigning (Gibson 2015) is a central example of the intersection of communication and participation. Scarrow (2014) prominently described the fluidity of modern membership concepts with her multi-speed membership. Beyond parties, some civil society organizations acknowledge new and spontaneous membership concepts as well (Fitzpatrick 2018) and therefore differentiate degrees of belonging to an organization. Most of the literature, however, focusses on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or on websites, when it comes to analyzing relations between parties and supporters (Lilleker et al. 2011; Dommett and Temple 2018; Jensen 2017). Dark social (Madigral 2012) have slipped scholarly attention in this field for the most part. Dark social refers to social media that enable encrypted communication between participants. Instant messengers like WhatsApp, Signal, Threema, and to a certain degree Telegram belong to this kind of social media. One of the reasons for the lack of scholarly attention is the difficulty of data availability. Yet, reports of activists and supporters mobilizing others via these platforms have been documented in the (digital) press (e.g., before the Washington riots). So, we have to acknowledge a blind spot with a lot of potential for the support of candidates, parties and causes. In this paper, we examine the meaning of dark social for political support by a systematic review. Additionally, we provide survey-based evidence on the use of (dark) social for political purposes and the self-perception of individuals who use web-based technologies. This research design enables us to link research on communication and participation preferences with research on political identification and belonging. The overall intention is to provide an explorative study including an appropriate questionnaire and results of two surveys conducted in 2021. A previous, very early, version of this paper was presented during the ECPR Joint Sessions 2021 (field work not completed at that point of time). The paper has been developed by strengthening the aspect of the self-perception of respondents in connection to parties/their preferred party.