#M5S (Five Star Movement) and the National Political Campaign

In 2009, a new political movement was born in Italy. It is called “Five Star Movement” (M5S) and it was positioned as a new voice of Italian people: alternative, populist, against élites, and against the traditional “way of doing” politic in the First and Second Republic Age. The power of this new political subject is linked with the use of social media platforms to communicate and share information, opinions, and positions with its “base” in a participative democracy perspective. In the last national political campaign, the M5S obtained 32% of the votes with a peak in the South of Italy. The chapter aims at presenting the main results of an empirical research focused on Sicilian voters of the East coast, in order to verify if and how digital communication helped in obtaining this success. Data show evidence about the relevance recognized to social media as first direct sources for collecting political information. The respondents express a large consent for traditional media that maintain in the public opinion a strong reputation in construction and share the public-sphere.

Anything New Under the Sun?

The most recent technologies of production, transmission, and access to information have made it possible, under appropriate conditions, to change the visibility of national and international concerns, as well as the protest movements many helped stimulate. Different countries have been faced with a multiplicity of movements articulated online that surpass virtual world barriers and (re) assume presence on the streets. In this chapter, drawing from several examples with different claim bases, authors discuss virtual social networks' role in political participation. However, as it happens in so many initiatives in this field, this is not affirmed from an underestimation of the role of Traditional Means of Communication or that of the trenches in the access and use of digital means.

Organizing With Self-Organization?

This chapter aims at exploring the ramifications of the strategic usage of Facebook in informal civic activism against the yet-to-be-studied case of an African third wave democratic country. Focusing on the emergence of Sokols up to the unprecedented 2017 street demonstration in Cape Verde, it reviews findings from a multidimensional empiric-holistic method that addresses the associated role of Facebook. The study confirms the existence of a heterarchical and distributed leadership alongside a horizontal and collaborative decision-making arrangement in a Facebook-mediated civic activism movement. While corroborating the tendency of grassroots activism in adopting a hybrid blend of online and offline, it concludes that Facebook was used in support of the largely self-organized Sokols movement and the loosely structured street demonstration held in São Vicente. However, besides not necessarily changing the fundamental structures of the civic activism movement—including organization, leadership, decision-making and protest staging—Facebook only supplemented the offline practices.

Intermediality and Critical Engagement in Nigerian Twitter Memes

The ingenious deployment of the digital media by online users in Nigeria offers opportunities in this chapter to monitor the trajectories of netizens' engagement with public dialogues on Nigerian Twitter. By exploring the dimensions of intermedial exchanges (i.e., intermediality), this study will analyzes how digital users explore innovative digital media tools such as Twitter memes in reinstating their views on critical discourses in the Nigerian polity. The author adopts a mixed methods design, which includes quantitative content analysis, discourse and semiotics analyses. Two prominent Nigerian Twitter accounts—@KraksTV and @I_pissVodka—are purposively selected for this chapter, and the author will evaluate memes posted between April 2018 and May 2018 by paying close attention to the themes and issues propagated. The author concludes that intermediality promotes a dynamism of opinion characterized by technological innovation, in which Twitter meme is categorized, enabling the expression of political agency and furtherance of critical engagement.

Rise and Fall of Digital Activism in Mexico From 2000-2019

Political activism is more alive than ever. After the scandal of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, online social media platforms restricted the distribution of content to privacy laws. But populism disruption in many countries fosters political discontent. Online protests and everyday claims are rising. Add to this context environmental problems and an absence of an ideological framework. All these conditions foster the use of digital activism. But this field of research has studied single cases, losing connections with societies and history. The aim of this chapter is to explain the evolution of digital activism in a long period of time. To achieve such purpose, the author analyzes 11 Mexican events that took place from 2000 to 2019 and provide a classification framework to understand how digital activism transforms over time.

Political Campaign Communication in the Information Age

According to scholars, the use of mediatization could be understood as communicative representation of politicians. From this perspective, the concept of mediatization in politics is not an automatism, it is a functional principle of media, more preferably the social media. To understand this activity of politicians on social media, the online attributes of broadcasting media could be conceptualized as self-mediatization of politics. The chapter will look through some of the most used concepts in political communication that aim to interpret the communicative nature of politicians in online campaigns. The used communication techniques on social media set the focus of analysis on the insufficiency of above-mentioned concepts). Besides presenting the main difficulties of basic concepts, this chapter aims to introduce the phenomenon of attention-based politics as a possible solution to research on political campaign communication in information era.

Preaching to the Choir

A main topic of the 2018 election campaign in Hungary was strategic voting, seen as an opportunity for opposition parties to remove the governing coalition from power. Strategic split-ticket voting was incentivized by the political context and the electoral system and was further facilitated by a limited cooperation between opposition political forces. Nonetheless, demand-side coordination was indispensable in this aspect. While social media was an important channel during the campaign, it was not crucial for strategic voting as it was mostly used to reinforce the positions of candidates among their own supporters, “preaching to the choir”. The influence of strategically split ballots can be measured in seat shares by modeling what would have happened if there was no coordination and cooperation at all. Results indicate that strategic votes transferred a total of 15 seats from the governing parties to the opposition political blocs, however this was not enough to prevent the decisive victory of the Fidesz-KDNP and another two-thirds supermajority in the Hungarian National Assembly.

Political Campaigning by Super PACs in the Computer Age

Video communication during political campaigns is undertaken on television and on the internet. The landscape of videos on television is familiar to all – a sprawling field of brief ads. The differences between television and the Internet mean that different sources of video communication might be favored depending on the medium. In this chapter, the sources of the most popular videos in contemporary political campaigns on the internet will be examined. Specifically, the study examines the sources of the most visible campaign videos on YouTube during the 2018 Senate elections in the United States. Special attention is paid to the relative prominence of Super PACs as a source of campaign videos.

Type-One and Interval Type-Two Fuzzy Logic for Quantitatively Defining Imprecise Linguistic Terms in Politics and Public Policy

During a presidential forum in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the moderator, Pastor Rick Warren, wanted Sen. John McCain and then-Sen. Barack Obama to define rich with a specific number. Warren wanted to know at what specific income level a person goes from being not rich to rich. The problem with this question is that there is no specific income at which a person makes the leap from being not rich to being rich. This is because rich is a fuzzy set, not a crisp set, with different incomes having different degrees of membership in the rich fuzzy set. Similarly, middle class and poor are fuzzy sets. Fuzzy logic is needed to properly ask and answer Warren's question about quantitatively defining rich. Similarly, fuzzy logic is needed to properly ask and answer queries about quantitatively defining imprecise linguistic terms in politics and public policy like middle class, poor, low inflation, medium inflation, and high inflation. Type-one or interval type-two fuzzy logic can be used for quantitatively defining imprecise linguistic terms. This chapter shows how to use type-one fuzzy logic and interval type-two fuzzy logic for this purpose, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. Imprecise terms in natural languages should be considered to have qualitative definitions, quantitative definitions, crisp quantitative definitions, fuzzy quantitative definitions, type-one fuzzy quantitative definitions, and interval type-two fuzzy quantitative definitions.

Digital Campaigning in France, a Wide Wild Web?

In spite of the extensive media coverage of election technologies, the market and its players remain largely unknown. Who are they? What do they do? What are their strategies? This chapter leverages new empirical data to answer these questions, drawing in particular from a series of interviews with providers of political technology in France. We show that the sector is heterogeneous and that its boundaries are fluid, including actors who provide wildly different services and initially embraced different economic and technological strategies. We also show that the nature of the services provided as well as the partisan dimension of each company depends on its target customers. However, due to economic constraints, the sector is undergoing a radical restructuring. The laborious implementation of “elections 2.0” in France is continuing with an increasing professionalization of its players, leading the sector to become more homogeneous and internationalized.