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Strategic voting, which was frequently described as 'Nader trading,' emerged during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election as a way for voters to redefine their participation in the American electoral process. As a movement that emerged online, strategic voting not only presents potential political ramifications, but raises important issues for social movement scholars. In particular, movements that emerge online, which we refer to as 'e-movements,' may challenge movement theories based on offline, pre-Internet forms of activism. In this paper, we use detailed data on the forms of strategic voting and the creators of the movement to address the literature on social movement leadership. We find that biography plays a strong role in the generation of strategic voting leaders, but in ways that differ from previous expectations about movement leadership processes. Further, we find that specific characteristics of leaders' backgrounds also shape the forms of strategic voting implemented by leaders. We suggest a new institutionalist interpretation of this finding, arguing that scripts for appropriate forms of action generate diverse approaches to strategic voting.

This is a response to the article by Ethan Zuckerman 'New Media, New Civics?' published in this issue of Policy & Internet (2014: vol. 6, issue 2). Dissatisfaction with existing governments, a broad shift to 'post-representative democracy' and the rise of participatory media are leading toward the visibility of different forms of civic participation. Zuckerman's article offers a framework to describe participatory civics in terms of theories of change used and demands places on the participant, and examines some of the implications of the rise of participatory civics, including the challenges of deliberation in a diverse and competitive digital public sphere. Jennifer Earl responds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze reactions to the U.S. government-led repression of WikiLeaks in late 2010 by actors such as Anonymous and the Pirate Parties to argue that the potential for backlash, which has been so prominent offline, is also a potential repercussion of repression online. In doing so, we use existing research to identify different ways in which bystanders might be pulled into conflicts, and examine our case for evidence of any of these forms of backlash. We also hypothesize that the net observed effect of repression is really the result of competing and/or amplifying backlash and deterrence effects; when this net effect is in favor of backlash, we call it a "net backlash effect" to indicate that there was more backlash than deterrence. We argue that net backlash occurs when repression recruits more bystanders into a conflict than it is able to deter in terms of already active participants. We also argue that backlash is a very likely outcome when Internet activism is repressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two historically distinct understandings of privacy and their relationship to online protest. Using a contemporary view of privacy, which focuses on information secrecy and disclosure, the author examined the development of ‘private protest’ in which both the identities of protesters and even the number of participants are concealed. Empirically, she traced this by tracking both the percentage of protest-related websites that include privacy policies and the percentage of online protest actions that report or estimate participation figures. Using a much older view of privacy, which focuses on controlled access to private property, she examined the implications of online protest occurring on private servers (e.g. Facebook, YouTube). Offline protesters have increasingly had to choose between protesting in venues that enjoy substantial free speech protections or protesting in venues where large numbers of people gather; she argued that online protesters face a similar dilemma but with less recourse to protesting in legally protected spaces. By examining both definitions of privacy, this article offers a rich understanding of the privacy dilemmas facing online protest organizers and participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on several larger literatures on diffusion processes, including literatures on the diffusion of innovations, disease spread, and the diffusion of information, this paper examines the classes of diffusion processes that may be relevant to understanding online protest and social movements. The author also argues that one commonly studied type of online, protest-related diffusion process - the online diffusion of information - has only minor theoretical implications for social movement theory. Two other diffusion processes - the diffusion of online, protest-related innovations and the diffusion of protest in its many forms as a problem-solving heuristic to new populations - are likely to qualitatively alter other (non-diffusion) social movement processes, creating important second-order, theoretical effects from these types of diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major debate has erupted in recent work on social movements about the role of the state in protest, with some advocating alternative approaches to the study of social movements, such as a focus on institutional authorities. Using data on four types of online protest (petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and email campaigns), acquired using an innovative new methodology that produces a generalizable sample of online protest actions, this paper addresses this debate. While the state is a frequent target of online protest, a significant portion of protest activity targets other institutional authorities. The authors' analyses disaggregate the state and distinguish between types of institutional authorities, further deepening the understanding of both state and non-state actors. Their data also suggest an association between tactical forms and their targets. Finally, by using Internet data, this paper contributes to an under-studied area of social movement research: online protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online political activism has rapidly increased over the past decade, forcing state authorities to adapt repressive strategies to handle this change. Few researchers, however, have explored hostile state reactions to unconventional online political activity and fewer still have tried to analyze the impacts of state repression on Internet-based activism. In this article, we use data on strategic voting, which occurred during the 2000 US. presidential election, to examine two core concerns of social movements scholars: (1) the effects of repression on movement mobilization; and (2) the effects of repression on tactical choices. Our findings suggest that researchers must account for core technological and social features of the Internet as an activist environment in explaining repression's effects in the twenty-first century. We argue that this is particularly true when researchers study activism that emerges and thrives online, as compared to activism that begins offline and migrates online at a later point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various kinds of on-line activism being incorporated by social movements. The authors show in their study of the on-line strategic voting movement that emerged during the 2000 Presidential election, on-line activism has important consequences for how movements are organized, including how they make decisions. They show, for instance, that traditional movement organizations had little to do with this initiative, and that individual movement entrepreneurs were instead largely responsible. The strategic voting movement was essentially built around and facilitated by the websites of these movement entrepreneurs. Further, the authors show that this decentralized infrastructure moved decision making away from networks or organizations and their leaders to the on-line movement entrepreneurs who were less constrained by funding concerns, membership recruitment and maintenance, and organization-building. In this way, they argue, leadership decreased in importance even while discretion increased.