Network Alliances among Fridays for Future Local Groups in Italy: An Homophily mechanism investigation

At the end of November 2018, school strikes started diffusing in Italy. The issue raised by the strikers was the lack of political attention and intervention on the climate issue. The origins of the new wave of climate mobilization reside in the pioneer action of Greta Thumber, a 16-year-old Swedish student who performed the first climate strike in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018. Between November 2018 and March 2019, different local groups had been created to coordinate the local protest events in Italy. A peculiarity characterizes this diffusion process: the organization of two National Assemblies. No other country saw such an effort to formalize a national coordination level. The national assemblies have been moments of participatory democracy and moments of face-to-face interaction. Thus, they were the most favourable situation for establishing, consolidating, and even breaking inter-organizational relations. The assemblies are conceptualized as critical events part of the collective identity construction process during which the local groups had the chance to elaborate and share their collective action frames. The paper aims at investigating the interplay of alliance and ideological congruence adopting a relational approach to the study of collective action, and a mixed-method research design. I hypothesize that the alliance construction process has been influenced by the collective action frames through the activation of an homophily mechanism. The data were gathered combining the survey instrument for the relational data and the participant observation technique to observe the “speech-in-action”, namely the process of negotiation and creation of collective action frames behind the public statements. Minimally defined, the alliance tie entails the presence of two local groups pooling their resources (material and information). While the typology of collective action frames has been elaborated following two lines of differentiation: the territorial focus (global, glocal, local, and national); and the character of the solution elaborated (individual, collective). The collective solutions have been further differentiated between reformist and rejectionist type of solutions. Through the implementation of social selection exponential random graph models, the effect of the collective action frames (nodal attributes) on the alliance network (social structure) have been tested. It emerged that on average FFF local groups have a propensity to build alliance ties with nodes adopting their same CAF. Moreover, a further analysis regarding the reformist-rejectionist line of division reported that rejectionist type of FFF local groups appeared to have more chances to build ties with similar others than reformist. This evidence can be interpreted as an increased polarization among FFF local groups which has been also observed in the solutions elaborated. The reformist FFF local groups, in general, proposed a set of demands regarding the ecological transition, while the rejectionist FFF local groups proposed the adoption of radical tactics and of an anticapitalistic ideological position. This research contributes to the existing literature by advancing the integration between the fragmented collective action literature, the structural and symbolic approaches by employing each characteristic concepts and tools. Moreover, the implementation of advanced social network analysis technique enriches the empirical social movement studies literature.