Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy, the contributors explain democratic backsliding in the 21st century through what it terms a cross-disciplinary engagement between democracy scholars and data scientists. The former describe the necessary social and economic conditions for a healthy democracy, while the latter tell us something about the role of digital platforms in the realization (or not) of these same conditions. In turn, volume editors Steven Livingston and Michael Miller bring these two broad research traditions together to define a new analytical framework for understanding the potential demise of contemporary democracy. The chapters argue that the current threat to democracy comes from the organization of illiberal movements, both on and offline. Put differently, democratic backsliding is the consequence of far-right connective action. In this process, "digital surrogate organizations" or networks mix with more conventional organizations aligned with conservative parties, themselves facing a uniquely precarious position in today's democracies. Democracy scholars, or what the editors of this book call "institutionalists," emphasize the critical role of economics, elites, and organized interests and look outward into society when searching for an explanation of backsliding. The technocentric model of democratic backsliding looks to digital networks and their effects on individual-level cognitive processes. To date, despite their shared intellectual focus on democracy, there has been little overlap between these two fields of study. The chapters in the book collectively assess the effects of digitized public communication on democracy without losing sight of social and economic power structures.