Paolo Gerbaudo | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (original) (raw)

Papers by Paolo Gerbaudo

Social Media + Society, 2023

The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to expl... more The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger. While scholarship has already examined the emotional dimension of the populist right’s online communication, with some researchers studying specifically the fuelling of anger among social media users, we still lack empirical proof of the mobilizational effectiveness of what we describe as “anger-triggering communication.” To explore this question, in this article, we develop a statistical and topic analysis of right-wing populists’ Facebook pages in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany during the 2019 European Union (EU) election campaign. We find that (a) right-wing populists on Facebook have a significantly higher number of “Angry” Facebook reactions per post compared to their political adversaries; (b) there is a positive and significant effect of the number of Angry reactions on the number of times a post is shared; (c) Angry reactions and Shares are overrepresented in posts on immigration and security, but anger-fuelled mobilization is not limited to these topics. These findings contribute to the scholarship on social media, emotional communication, and populism, adding insights on the mobilizational effectiveness of negative campaigning. The article highlights that stoking public anger, especially around controversial issues such as immigration and security, is a rewarding tactic because it increases motivational strength, and contributes to triggering high-threshold interactions such as sharing, which, in turn, are key for achieving virality in the diffusion of political messages.

New Media and Society, 2025

The rise of TikTok has sparked a debate on the consequences of algorithmic contentcuration for so... more The rise of TikTok has sparked a debate on the consequences of algorithmic contentcuration for social experience. My thesis is that TikTok represents a second generation ofsocial media, which differs from first-generation social media in the way users are exposedto content. While first-generation social media revolved around ‘networked publics’formed by explicit connections, second-generation social media introduces ‘clusteredpublics’. These are statistically constructed ‘neighbourhoods’ of users, in which people arebrought together based on their past online behaviour and their similarity in interest andtaste. Clustering users around shared interests has proven very effective in driving onlineengagement, leading other platforms to mimic TikTok, in what can be described as ‘TikTokification’. However, this transformation of online publics carries a series of problematic implications:the depersonalisation of our online experience; a growing opacity of the structures of onlinecommunication; and the subcultural fragmentation of an already divided public sphere.

Renewal, 2022

The 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are all pushing western s... more The 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are all pushing western states into greater intervention in the economy and society. This neo-statist moment offers an opportunity for social-democratic parties, one that Labour cannot allow to slip through its fingers. The party must lead the debate about how the state, and democratic control, can be used to tackle systemic crises.

New Media and Society

In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social med... more In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social media for activism and social movements. According to Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, digital activism involves a logic of ‘connective action’, in which collective action and collective identity lose importance. To assess the validity of this theory, I focus on personal testimony campaigns that have by now become a familiar digital tactic, especially in online mobilisations around issues of gender and sexuality. Drawing on discourse analysis of some of the most prominent examples, from #MeToo to #GirlsLikeUs, I argue that more than a logic of connection, what is at stake here is a ‘logic of collection’, involved in gathering personal testimonies as specimens of various grievances people are affected by (sexual harassment, discrimination, etc.). Aggregating personal testimonies around shared hashtags provides a means to construct and/or trasform the collective identity of the groups involved in order to raise their self-awareness and place them in a better position to engage in collective action. These practices thus suggest the need to overcome the opposition between personal and collective identity inherent in the theory of ‘connective action’, and refocus research on the forms of online identification that connect these two levels.

Social Media + Society, 2019

Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. B... more Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. But it is not altogether clear how exactly they contributed to the communication battle between Labour and the Conservatives. This article analyses the posts and comments on the official Facebook pages of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party and their respective leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. We look at the relationship between topics, emotions, and user engagement. Labour clearly outperformed the Tories, with Corbyn’s personal page having 10 times the interactions of May’s. We retrieve part of the reason for this success in the “positive posting” strategy adopted by Labour and the way it helped to attract user engagement. While the Conservative Party focused on negative issues such as Brexit, terrorism, and national security, Labour focused on positive issues, such as the promise of higher social spending and appeals to the grassroots, generating far higher levels of engagement. Overall, positive topic tended to fare better than more negative and controversial issues, such as security and Brexit. Our findings thus suggest the need for a more balanced understanding of the relationship between content, emotions, and user engagement on social media, moving beyond simplistic views of social media politics as necessarily biased in favor of aggressive and negative campaigning.

Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has devel... more Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent ‘elective affinity’ between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at the time of a ‘mass web’ involving billions of people worldwide, provide a suitable channel for the mass politics and the appeals to the people typical of populism. But this affinity also needs to be understood in light of the rebellious narrative that has come to be associated with social media at times in which rapid technological development has coincided with a profound economic crisis, shaking the legitimacy of the neoliberal order. This question is explored by examining the role acquired by social media in populist movements as the people’s voice and the people’s rally, providing, on the one hand, with a means for disaffected individuals to express themselves and, on the other hand, with a space in which disgruntled Internet users could gather and form partisan online crowds.

Europe has been an object of constant scrutiny and criticism since the beginning of the economic ... more Europe has been an object of constant scrutiny and criticism since the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008, and more so with the explosion of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010. Recurrent news media expressions such as ‘euro-crisis’ have popularised the idea that there is something irremediably wrong in the project of the European Union (EU), which threatens its very existence as a political entity. The economic crisis — turned by austerity policies into a long and deep depression of Europe’s periphery — has shown the rising power and increasing lack of legitimacy of the current technocratic institutions of the EU, including the European Council, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission. Yet, the protest movements which have developed in the old continent in response to the crisis, and in particular the ‘subterranean politics’ of the Indignados and Occupy groups, have shown little interest in a transformation of European governance structures and policies. Anti-austerity protests have largely developed at a national level with limited transnational coordination and vision. While rightly criticising neo-liberal policies pursued at the European level, protests have mostly ended up seeing Europe only as the culprit and not also as the space where a political alternative to neo-liberalism could be developed.

THE POPULIST ERA The populist era signals the end of the neoliberal era and is formed directly i... more THE POPULIST ERA
The populist era signals the end of the neoliberal era and is formed directly in response to it. Populism is strongly linked to the idea of sovereignty, the idea that a people should be in control of a territory and the way it is governed. This is in contrast to a globalised world with no boundaries and hence no forms of protection against global flows. Globally orientated liberal politics was formed in opposition to what its theorists saw as the statism and authoritarianism of the social democratic era. But liberalism is itself now being superseded. The idea of popular sovereignty has been foundational to the left, and the left today needs to embrace this part of its heritage and forge a left populism that is capable of defending people against global capital. If it does not do so, right-wing populism will prevail – a populism based on nationalism and ethnicity, opposed to the other, as opposed to a left populism based on equality and opposed to global capital.

Keywords: Populism, left populism, sovereignty, popular sovereignty, liberation, globalisation, neoliberalism, nationalism

The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest

From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debou... more From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debout in Paris, contemporary protest bears the mark of citizenism, a libertarian and participatory brand of populism which appeals to ordinary citizens outraged at the arrogance of political and financial elites in the wake of the Great Recession.

This book draws on 140 interviews with activists and participants in occupations and demonstrations to explore the new politics nurtured by the ‘movement of the squares’ of 2011–16 and its reflection of an exceptional phase of crisis and social transformation. Gerbaudo demonstrates how, in waging a unifying struggle against a perceived Oligarchy, today’s movements combine the neo-anarchist ethos of horizontality and leaderlessness inherited from the anti-globalisation movement, and a resurgent populist demand for full popular sovereignty and the reclamation of citizenship rights. He analyses the manifestation of this ideology through the signature tactics of these upheavals, including protest camps in public squares, popular assemblies and social media activism. And he charts its political ramifications from Podemos in Spain to Bernie Sanders in the US, revealing how the central square occupations have been foundational to current movements for radical democracy worldwide.

To advance the study of digital politics it is urgent to complement data analytics with data herm... more To advance the study of digital politics it is urgent to complement data analytics with data hermeneutics to be understood as a methodological approach that focuses on the interpretation of the deep structures of meaning in social media conversations as they develop around various political phenomena, from digital protest movements to online election campaigns. The diffusion of Big Data techniques in recent scholarship on political behavior has led to a quantitative bias in the understanding of online political phenomena and a disregard for issues of content and meaning. To solve this problem it is necessary to adapt the hermeneutic approach to the conditions of social media communication, and shift its object of analysis from texts to datasets. On the one hand, this involves identifying procedures to select samples of social media posts out of datasets, so that they can be analysed in more depth. I describe three sampling strategies – top sampling, random sampling and zoom-in sampling – to attain this goal. On the other hand, “close reading” procedures used in hermeneutic analysis need to be adapted to the different quality of digital objects vis-à-vis traditional texts. This can be achieved by analysing posts not only as data-points in a dataset, but also as interventions in a collective conversation, and as utterances of broader “discourses”. The task of interpretation of social media data also requires an understanding of the political and social contexts in which digital political phenomena unfold, as well as taking into account the subjective viewpoints and motivations of those involved, which can be gained through in-depth interviews, and other qualitative social science methods. Data hermeneutics thus holds promise for a closing of the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of digital politics, allowing for a deeper and more holistic understanding of online political phenomena.

This special issue oﬀers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data.... more This special issue oﬀers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientiﬁc practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more speciﬁcally processes of dataﬁcation1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?

This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Eur... more This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to ‘citizens’, ‘citizenry’ and ‘citizenship’ in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of this ‘citizenism’ and how it reflects the change in economic conditions and popular perceptions in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. The analysis draws from movement documents, and in-depth interviews with 40 protest organisers and participants from the Indignados movement in Spain and the Aganaktismenoi movement in Greece. I argue that within these movements, the idea of citizenship has acted both as a source of popular identity interpellating a diverse set of demographics, and as a central demand, organising calls for greater popular participation in decision-making, freedom of expression and against corruption. Anti-austerity movements put forward an anti-oligarchic view of citizenship, which is different from the liberal, civic-republican and social democratic approaches, in its understanding of citizenship as the power of the dispersed ‘citizenry’ against the concentrated power of economic and political elites. This grassroots re-appropriation of citizenship highlights how anti-austerity movements in southern Europe have departed from the anti-statism of autonomous movements and have developed a more positive view of the state as a basis of social cohesion and a possible means of ‘people power’.

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spa... more Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.

t is my contention that in analysing digital protest we need to go beyond this methodological ind... more t is my contention that in analysing digital
protest we need to go beyond this methodological individualism and this obsession with micro-
operations in technical networks. At the same time, we need to recuperate an appreciation of col-
lective processes, as those processes without which the micro-operations Bennett, Segerberg and
Walker
’
s study appear in the guise of an haphazard and disjointed jumble of minuscule acts,
which despite the lack of a common project and any sense of collective agency, somehow hold
together miraculously. It is time to go beyond purely aggregative visions of social movements,
as the sum of thousands of small acts, and to appreciate instead how the coherence in protest
communications, originates from collective phenomena and in particular the presence of
(a) a common protest identity and protest culture and of (b) forms of collective leadership.

An internet meme using the Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask ‘going viral’ on Facebook; the hashtag #wea... more An internet meme using the Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask ‘going viral’ on Facebook; the hashtag #wearethe99percent launched by the Occupy Wall Street movement being adopted by thousands of internet users; the pictures of the ‘lady in red dress’ pepper-sprayed in Gezi Park in Istanbul being turned into a ‘riot icon’; activists debating on WhatsApp which slogan to use in an upcoming demonstration in the Zocalo square of Mexico City. All these examples are manifestations of collective identity, to be understood as the set of operations by means of which social movements define their collective sense of self, who they are and what they stand for (Melucci, 1996), within contemporary social media activism, as the activism conveyed via social network sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media platforms such as those that dominate the landscape of contemporary web communication have played a central role in the process of identity construction. They have been the sites where new collective names, icons, and slogans have been launched, and where a new iconography and lexicon has been forged which has strongly contributing to the emergence of collective actors as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados. Yet, so far this importance of collective identity building in social media activism has been overly neglected. While most of the literature in the field has examined the organizational and strategic consequences of social media use for protest purposes, comparatively little research has concerned itself with issues of collective identity and connected forms of expressive, rather than instrumental, communication.

The occupation of central public squares, from Tahrir in Cairo to Syntagma in Athens, the definin... more The occupation of central public squares, from Tahrir in Cairo to Syntagma in Athens, the defining characteristic of the protest movements of 2011, was preceded and accompanied by a different type of occupation: the attempt to capture an array of online public spaces that are an increasing part of contemporary social experience, particularly social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter. What is often overlooked in a scholarly body of work that is overly preoccupied with the technical affordances of these platforms (see, for example, Early and Kimport, 2011) and comparatively uninterested in cultural processes is the fact that the use of social networking sites was not just a technical choice geared at maximising efficiency but also a symbolic and cultural shift, informed by the populist spirit of this protest wave (Gerbaudo, 2012, 2016) and the desire to reach out to the atomised “people of the Web” or the “generic Internet user” as a contemporary equivalent to the “common man” of traditional populism (Gerbaudo, 2014).

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been w... more Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.

The activist use of Facebook p ages in the 2011 movements of the Egyptian revolution ... more The activist use of Facebook p ages in the 2011 movements of the Egyptian revolution and the Spanish Indignados saw phases of exponential growth in user engagement in proximity to key protest events, signaled by spikes in likes and comments. This article analyzes these episodes as momen ts of digital enthusiasm facilitated by emotional communication on political Facebook pages. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis of Facebook data, I argue that two elements concurred to build moments of digital enthusiasm: (a) the hopeful narr ative produced by activist admins managing political Facebook pages, and (b) the receptivity and cooperation of ordinary Internet users who overwhelmingly reinforced the message put forward by activist admins. This emotional dialogue between admins and use rs generated a process of emotional contagion that helped establish propitious psychological conditions for mass protest participation. Moments of digital enthusiasm demonstrate the power of social media and emotional communication in mass protest mobiliza tion. However, they also highlight the risk of evanescence of collective action in a digital age.

Social Media + Society, 2023

New Media and Society, 2025

Renewal, 2022

New Media and Society

Social Media + Society, 2019

Keywords: Populism, left populism, sovereignty, popular sovereignty, liberation, globalisation, neoliberalism, nationalism

The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest

Emerging social movements in various regions of the world are producing new forms of digitally-me... more Emerging social movements in various regions of the world are producing new forms of digitally-mediated citizen participation. What are the implications of direct digital democracy? How do these new forms of digitally mediated collective deliberation work?

• Paolo Gerbaudo, King’s College London
• Arnau Monterde, Open University of Catalonia

This video was filmed at Nesta on 14 October at a one day conference looking at collective intelligence and the challenges of social cognition.

Dr Paolo Gerbaudo discusses the use of social media by political activists, including those invol... more Dr Paolo Gerbaudo discusses the use of social media by political activists, including those involved in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. He also examines the ways in which social media can be used by the state as a tool of repression.

Part of Contested Spaces: The Third Quadrennial Global Internet and Politics Conference (18 April... more Part of Contested Spaces: The Third Quadrennial Global Internet and Politics Conference (18 April 2013) at King's College London.
The Policy Institute at King's College London The Policy Institute at King's College London 23 29 views Published on Jun 2, 2014 Part of Contested Spaces: The Third Quadrennial Global Internet and Politics Conference (18 April 2013) at King's College London. Chair: Nick Gowing, Presenter, BBC World News Speakers: Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, Executive Board Member, Organizing for Action and former Deputy Campaign Manager for President Obama's 2012 Re-election Campaign Matt Browne, Visiting Fellow at Center for American Progress Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society, King's College London

In the aftermath of Trump’s election as president of the US in November 2016 there has been an in... more In the aftermath of Trump’s election as president of the US in November 2016 there has been an intense discussion about the role played by social media in his campaign. Is this just hype or there is something more to it? Do social media have a populist bias?

One of the most interesting new genres of communication that have emerged in the context of socia... more One of the most interesting new genres of communication that have emerged in the context of social media activism - to be simply understood as activism channelled via social media - are crowd-sourced social justice blogs. Digital activists in a number post-2008 protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street in the US, and the indignados movement in Spain (Gerbaudo, 2012, Van Gelder, 2011,Castells, 2012, Juris, 2012) have used various platforms, among which features prominently Tumblr and its “social justice Tumblr”, to create multi-author blogs (MABs) that ask internet users to submit their own contributions on a number of issues of concern: economic deprivation, housing problems, unemployment, sexism, health issues and the like.
Despite the difference in content, all these blogs share a common format. First, they follow the logic of crowd-sourcing depend exclusively on user submissions. Second, they display a series of simplified instructions explaining to users how to make their contribution. Third, they mostly entail very little editing on the part of the curators, with the assumption being that all submissions are displayed. Fourth, their ostensible aim is to raise awareness about various social issues, by showing the extent and gravity of the issue at stake, signalled by the number of submissions they receive and in the dramatic content of these very submissions. These blogs are thus an interesting manifestation of the new culture of collaboration of the web and the way in which it is utilised for activist purposes.

Controllare e proteggere: il ritorno dello stato, 2022

Dopo decenni di dominio del neoliberismo e del suo culto del libero mercato, la politica contempo... more Dopo decenni di dominio del neoliberismo e del suo culto del libero mercato, la politica contemporanea è marcata dal ritorno prepotente dello Stato interventista. I piani per la transizione verde, i sussidi per tamponare il crescente malessere sociale, le misure anti-contagio viste durante la pandemia, il ritorno del protezionismo commerciale e la richiesta della destra di chiudere le frontiere agli immigrati sono tutti tentativi di rispondere, in forme diverse, alla pressante domanda di sicurezza. Controllare e proteggere sono i due imperativi che segnano questa fase “neostatalista”. Controllare, perché viviamo in un mondo che appare fuori controllo, dove si è rotta la cinghia di trasmissione tra il popolo e i suoi rappresentanti; proteggere, perché sono molteplici le ragioni per avere paura e sentirsi vulnerabili. In questo libro basato su un’analisi approfondita del discorso politico in Europa e negli Stati Uniti, Paolo Gerbaudo illustra gli elementi fondanti di questo nuovo paradigma e il modo in cui ridefinisce il campo di battaglia politico; mostra infine come solo investendo in un progetto che unisca protezione sociale e ambientale e reale democratizzazione dello Stato la sinistra potrà evitare la deriva verso un futuro autoritario.

Despite its association with immobility and conservatism, the political party is a rather pliable... more Despite its association with immobility and conservatism, the political party is a rather pliable organisational template that integrates the forms of organisation and communication that are prevalent at the time. Whereas in the industrial era, the party styled itself after the Fordist factory, in these times of social media and apps it has come to adopt the quality of Facebook and other digital companies known under the collective acronym of FAANGs. Looking at the doings of formations such as the Pirate Parties, the Five Star Movement and Podemos, it soon becomes apparent that what these organisations propose is a political translation of the operational model that brought to success figures such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, applying the logic of the digital company to the political arena to reap economies of scale in the way they reach out to their supporters and involve them in online discussions and decisions. This tendency has been seen in their enthusiastic adoption of social media of all sorts, with many of these formations rapidly gathering a large following on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, the adoption of the logic of platforms runs much deeper than a change in the party's political communications since it crucially affects the level of internal party organisation. Besides using available commercial platforms, these parties have also developed their own dedicated online participation platforms, which provide a space for members/users to be involved in deliberations and ratifications. This transformation revolves around the attempt of updating the political party to leverage the power of digital technologies. The disin-termediation achieved by FAANGs in several areas of information, culture, knowledge, commerce, entertainment, is being translated by digital parties in the promise of a more direct democracy that would disintermediate between voters and representatives. By tapping into the affordances of digital platforms, these parties aim at doing away with the bureaucratic 'third element', which was considered central to the operation of traditional parties.

Pluto, 2018

From the Five Star Movement to Podemos, from the Pirate Parties to La France Insoumise, from the ... more From the Five Star Movement to Podemos, from the Pirate Parties to La France Insoumise, from the movements behind Bernie Sanders to those backing Jeremy Corbyn, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a new blueprint for political organisation: the digital party.
Paolo Gerbaudo addresses the organisational revolution that is transforming political parties in the time of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Cambridge Analytica. Drawing on interviews with political leaders and organisers, Gerbaudo demonstrates that besides rapidly growing in votes, these formations have also revitalised party democracy, involving hundreds of thousands in discussions carried out on online decision-making platforms.
Participatory, yet plebiscitarian, open and democratic, yet dominated by charismatic 'hyperleaders', digital parties display both great potentials and risks for the development of new forms of mass participation in an era of growing inequality. All political parties will have to reckon with the lessons of the digital party.