Party-Movement-Interaction on the Far-Right from the Perspective of Movement Elites and Supporters: Leveraging Digital Communication Data to Quantify Campaign Activity and Observe Intra-Movement Deliberation

While far-right social movements garnered more scholarly attention over the past decade, the interactions between these movements and far-right political parties remain understudied. Notable exceptions take mostly party-centred perspectives on either movement party strategies to both organise street protest and participate in elections or co-optation strategies to establish strong ties with independent protest movements. The electoral outcomes of these strategies, however, crucially depend a) on movement elites’ lasting willingness and ability to align the movement with party goals and use their resources for campaigning and b) on protest participants and supporters not just constructing barricades but also casting ballots. Therefore, this paper utilises two novel data sets on the German far-right to analyse party-movement-interaction from the perspective of far-right social movements themselves. Based on digital communication from selected public Telegram channels & groups within the vast digital ecosystem of the far-right, the first quantifies the campaign activity of movement elites during national and regional elections 2022-2025, while the second provides qualitative data on the deliberation of (non-)cooperation strategies as well as (strategic) voting rationales among movement supporters. Both shed light on when, how and why different far-right movements support far-right parties in the electoral arena. By opening up the black box of within-movement processes, this analysis follows recent mixed-methods endeavours such as digital protest ethnography and complements classic protest event and survey data analyses. Initial results suggest considerable variation in campaign activity, controversial debate on movement strategies and diverging (non-)voting rationales among movement supporters. Differences in all three are partially rooted in ideological proximity and organisational rivalries, while concerns for movement independence distinguish proponents of non-cooperation and high generalised political distrust distinguishes self-identified non-voters. Taken together, these results set out an explanatory mechanism for electoral gains of far-right parties through successful party-movement interaction. They inform research on far-right mobilisation in general, on differences in institutional and non-institutional participation by far-right supporters and on the organisational element of a general re-alignment of political conflict in Western Europe and beyond.