Crossing Political Divides: Internet Use and Political
Identifications in Transnational Anti-War and Social
Justice Activists in Eight Nations
W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Seattle
Terri E. Givens, University of Texas, Austin
Lars Willnat, George Washington University
Paper for the European Consortium for Political Research workshop:
“Emerging Repertoires of Political Action.” Uppsala, Sweden, April 14-18, 2004. 1
Preliminary report of findings. Do not site without permission.
Comments welcome: [email protected]
Recent analyses suggest that political identity patterns in late modern societies continue
to shift away from ideologically-based identifications anchored in mass social
organizations (party, class, church) toward more self-directed political affiliations driven
by lifestyle values (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 2000; Inglehart, 1997; Bennett, 1998). One
result, as Putnam finds in the United States, is that relatively thin political ties (e.g.,
voluntary associations) seem to be growing while stronger civil society relations (e.g.,
group memberships) continue to decline. This trend is pronounced among younger
citizens who are least engaged by conventional group membership and political
participation patterns (Putnam, 2000).
In many respects these trends were presaged by the pioneering cross national
studies by Barnes, Kaase and colleagues (1979) at the dawn of this era of social and
psychological change that continues to reshape citizen action in Western democracies.
Their findings pointed toward many of the patterns that have come to characterize late
1
The authors would like to thank the team of students and colleagues who helped get this questionnaire
into the field in three U.S. cities. They include: Victor Pickard, Lisa Horan, Sean Aday, and David Iozzi.
We are also indebted to Christian Breunig whose help with the data analysis has been invaluable.
2
modern politics: a) the psychological integration of conventional and unconventional
political forms, with the result that activities such as boycotts and buycotts are now part
of the everyday action repertoires of large numbers of citizens; b) the diffusion of
common action repertoires -- consumer politics, culture jamming, protest themes,
coordinated targets and actions --across national political cultures that remain different in
terms of constitutions, institutions and rules; and c) the gradual replacement of grand
coalition movements for systemic change with more flexible issue-driven direct action
politics. Kaase and Marsh, for example, proposed a generalization about “the newly
emerging participatory culture of advanced industrial societies” as “a culture
characterized by the waning of broad socio-political movements for system change and
an increase in limited, issue-based, and frequently regional ad hoc group actions that may
well dissolve after the issue has receded.” (Kaase and Marsh, 1979, p. 49) These trends
have continued to evolve in both national and transnational protest movements (Tarrow,
1999, 2003).
The rise of a global social justice movement in recent years offers a window on
the continuing evolution of these trends, with some new wrinkles concerning the
sustainability of multi-issue movements and the capacities of individuals to engage in
long term multi-issue politics. This movement had produced an impressive array of large
scale, transnational protest activities aimed at diverse targets and political goals.
Movement calendars of coordinated protests and intellectual gatherings have generally
been organized under the banner of inclusiveness and diversity – which I describe
elsewhere as both an organizational code and a meta-ideology (Bennett 2004
forthcoming). This movement has drawn activists concerned about many different issues
3
including: environment, health, human and labor rights, fair trade, debt relief, and global
economic justice, to name a few. Organizational affiliations are equally diverse, ranging
from traditional NGOs to direct action anarchist networks. Many of these activists are
committed to multiple issues and causes, and they maintain affiliations across dense yet
flexible political action networks. Amidst the dizzying and shifting network connections
that often seem too fine grained to analyze meaningfully, there are also substantial hubs
of communication convergence that produce social contact, information exchange, and
action coordination. For example, the annual meetings of the World Social Forum have
resulted in a broad issue and action agenda, from the rights of indigenous people and
agrarian reform, to the promotion of environmental and labor standards regimes. (The
2004 program is available at http://www.wsfindia.org/).
This organizational code of diversity and inclusiveness that has come to
characterize this movement does not simply apply to the global social justice movement
as a grand coalition, a movement of movements, or a network of networks. Political
diversity also seems to be inscribed as a principle of consciousness at the individual level
as well – with activists often joining a broad variety of causes. This can result in each
activist becoming something of a node in multiple cause networks, moving the processes
of social movement brokerage and mobilization below the group level to dense networks
of individual-to-individual connections. Such personal relationship building has probably
always characterized social movements, as McAdam (1988) found in the U.S. civil rights
movement. However, most conventional movements have been dominated by single
issues or a cluster of related issues, with organizationally brokered coalitions primarily
crossing issue divides to achieve strategic ends (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The global
4
social justice movement ethos of diversity and inclusiveness as individual-level principles
of conscience raises the question of how the resulting multi-issue activist networks are
sustained, given their ideational complexity and high volumes of personalized
information exchange. Individual level reliance on diversity and inclusiveness as guides
to action also raises questions of how (and whether) individuals manage and sustain
engagement across issue divides without suffering fragmented identities or political
ineffectiveness.
These aspects of complex issue and identity management also raise a series of
questions about the relationship between individual level consciousness and social
organization among these post-conventional activists. How do multi-issue activists -particularly those operating in transnational movements --manage complex political
identities on their own with less cueing and leadership from conventional groups, leaders,
and institutions? Of equal interest is the question of how these relatively autonomous
activists engage in sustainable collective action with others. We propose that a place to
start answering these questions is to explore whether, and how, these more complex
activists differ in their communication behaviors from citizens with more conventional
political profiles. The central questions in this paper are: How do complex, multi –issue
activists acquire and exchange information, maintain commitments and identifications,
and sustain contacts with diverse social networks?
An obvious but perilous answer is that electronic digital media (e-media) such as
the Internet and the Web offer highly personalized and hyperlinked channels that enable
activists to stay in touch with large numbers of others across various cause and action
networks. E-media networks may help to account for the great reach of the global social
5
justice movement. The distributed design of many activist networks -- referred to by
Coopman (2003) as dissentworks -- also helps to explain the capacity of this movement to
recombine and reconfigure around different issues, producing a steady stream of large
scale coordinated protests that have overcome impressive obstacles of geography, time,
culture, and ideology -- digital divides notwithstanding.
Much has been written on how digital communication technologies – both
hardware and software applications -- facilitate activist network bridging in ways that go
beyond the usual claims that the internet mainly reduces the speed and costs of
communication, or amplifies the capacity of existing organizations (see Center for
Communication and Civic Engagement, 2004 --Democracy and Internet Technology
Section). In addition to reducing costs and accelerating the speed of mobilization,
electronic networks in the global social justice (GSJ) movement also constitute
organizational structures (such as decentralized campaign networks, interactive protest
calendars and planning sites, and social forums) joining diverse and often widely
dispersed activists (Bennett, 2003, 2004 forthcoming). Applications of digital social
technologies create network structures that are accessible to activists with complex or
“flexible identities” (Della Porta, 2004 forthcoming). These fluid, interactive, and
individually calibrated communication networks may explain a good deal about the scale
and sustainability of recent transnational protest politics (Bennett, 2004 forthcoming;
Tarrow, 2003).
A particularly rich opportunity to study activists with varying political
identification profiles occurred with the large scale transnational protests against an
impending war in Iraq on Feb 15, 2003. The scale of the demonstrations was
6
unprecedented, estimated at as many as 10 million people by the BBC (2003), and higher
by various activist sources. The demonstrations drew a broad range of activists of varying
political identifications, from the global social justice movement, to national peace,
religious, and labor groups. Many first time demonstrators also took to the streets with
specific objections to a war against a country dubiously linked to terrorism by
government officials in the US and Britain. (For a glimpse of the scope of this
demonstration and subsequent ones, see http://www.stopwar.org.uk/. For look at the
networks a year later, see http://www.stopwar.org.uk/march20/index.asp, and the list of
protest coordination sites in the conclusion of this paper).
Scholars from eight nations (Belgium, Germany, United States, Spain, Italy,
Switzerland, Netherlands, and two United Kingdom teams in England and Scotland)
mobilized to put surveys into the field at each of the largest national demonstration sites
to learn about the demonstrators in detail. In this report, we examine the communication
and information styles of the global social justice activists who were instrumental in
coordinating the transnational aspects of the antiwar protests, contributing heavily to such
aspects as: selection of a common time, diffusion of protest themes, publicity and
communication strategies, creation of information sites, and networking automated
calendars for organizing future protests (Walgrave and Verhulst, 2003; Bennett 2004
forthcoming). In particular, we are interested in whether these global social justice (GSJ)
activists are more likely than other demonstrators to have complex, multi-issue political
identifications, and whether they use e-media disproportionately to manage those
identifications. These protests also offer an interesting comparison group with which to
contrast the GSJ activists: large numbers of first time demonstrators who were mobilized
7
primarily out of specific concerns about the Iraq war itself – a group that is likely to be
far more conventional in both political identification and information styles. Before
presenting our empirical findings, we would like to identify several broad hypotheses that
guided our data analysis.
Background & Hypotheses:
Given the size and the diversity of the mobilization, we anticipated that demonstrators
would vary in terms of their political profiles – from experienced activists with histories
of numerous past demonstrations, to concerned citizens who had not participated in
previous demonstrations. The more experienced activists were also expected to vary in
terms of the diversity of the causes around which they had demonstrated previously, and
the degree to which they identified with the GSJ movement. The presence of substantial
numbers of high diversity GSJ activists was anticipated in part because the broad
coordination of the antiwar demonstrations was initiated by GSJ activists who attended
social forum meetings in Europe and Brazil (see Walgrave and Verhulst, 2003). The
presence of these social justice factions promised an interesting mix of issues, political
affiliations, and political perspectives among the demonstrators.
Complexity of Activist Political Identities
We anticipated finding related measures of complex political identity in the strength of
identification with the global social justice movement and the diversity of issues or
causes embraced by individuals in past demonstrations. Finding such a relationship
would lend support to the idea that diversity and inclusiveness are inscribed at the
individual level as a basic organizational and ideological code of the GSJ movement.
8
First hypothesis: activists with greater identification with the global social justice
movement will also have more diverse protest backgrounds (measured by the number of
different issues embraced in past demonstrations).
Moving beyond this initial assessment of complex activist identity, the core
question is how do people with relatively more complex political identities (in this case,
global social justice identifications and histories of diverse demonstration types) manage
the routine flow of information and social contacts required to sustain such different
activities and issue engagements?
Information & identity management
In recent years, activists -- particularly globalization activists -- have created impressive
networks of digital communication, enabling complex network organization and
information exchange. It is useful to distinguish between different levels of these digital
networks, and to consider how they link to conventional mass media channels. We adopt
Peretti’s model of micro, middle, and mass media (Peretti, 2004). Micro media include
email, lists, and personal weblogs that enable individual level relationship maintenance,
often resulting in large scale transmission of viral communication (that is, widespread
diffusion through individual level contacts). Middle media include: webzines;
organization sites containing mixes of research, news, and action information; and
community blogs that employ new technologies for both on-and-off line social
participation. Emerging middle media technologies include software for: citizen-driven
journalism (open publishing, collective editing, rating, source reputation assessment, and
distribution); large scale referral systems for political relationship-building; and various
democratic online coordination and decision systems (Jordan, Hauser, and Foster, 2003).
Various applications of these social technologies can be found on the websites of
9
Indymedia, OneWorldTV, Infoshop, Slashdot, Plastic, Moveon, Meetup, E-Bay,
Amazon, and in the democracy and internet technology section of the Center for
Communication and Civic Engagement (2004).
These communication networks have created some (debatable) degree of relief
from previous social movement dilemmas of negative framing and exclusion from mass
media news. Direct activists who are often separated by large distances have been able to
create their own imagined media communities and, to some extent, have succeeded in
reaching bystander publics with messages of their choosing. All of this said, the framing
of protest activities by mass media outlets clearly remains an important concern in the
strategic calculus of these activists, and thus we do not expect electronic media use to
entirely displace reliance on mass media for information and communication. However,
we do expect that more issue-diverse GSJ activists will rely disproportionately on emedia both for general information and for advancing specific action repertoires.
Second hypothesis cluster: Activists with more complex political identities will
disproportionately use electronic channels for their routine political communication –
both to achieve political goals and to receive daily political information. We also predict
that activists with more complex political identities (in this case, stronger identification
with the global social justice movement) are likely to be significantly less reliant on mass
media communication and information channels than less complex political types. In the
immediate case of the antiwar demonstrators, strong GSJ identifiers will display the
highest levels of e-media use.
It is also useful to compare the GSJ identifiers to other activists to gain a more
complete understanding of the variety of information and communication repertoires that
may be operating among large protest populations such as vast antiwar demonstrations.
How do less complex activist types manage their information and communication needs?
A unique opportunity to assess less complex activist identity types came in the form of
10
large numbers of “first timers” (our short-hand term for those who had not participated in
a demonstration in the last five years) who were sufficiently moved by their opposition to
the impending Iraq War to take to the streets alongside more experienced protesters.
Third hypothesis cluster: because they have turned out to protest a specific issue, and
have not engaged in other recent protests, we expect the first timers to be: a) significantly
less identified with the global social justice movement, b) significantly less likely to use emedia, and c) significantly more oriented to mass media for their political information
and communication than the more experienced demonstrators – particularly compared to
the GSJ identifiers.
The Study:
The overall design of the eight-nation antiwar demonstrator study is described in a
preliminary report by Stefaan Walgrave and Joris Verhulst:
Starting in December 2002, war was still far away, a group of social
movement scholars began forging a network in order to survey the expected
antiwar-demonstrations to be staged in the next few months. They agreed on a
common questionnaire and a field work method elaborated before by Walgrave &
Van Aelst (1999; Norris, Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2003). The surveys cover a
random sample of demonstrators engaged in eleven different events in eight
countries involving 5,182 respondents in total. With the exception of the United
States (New York), the demonstrations covered all took place in the country’s
capital, that is Madrid for Spain, Berlin for Germany, London for the UK,
Amsterdam for the Netherlands, Bern for Switzerland, Rome for Italy, and
Brussels for Belgium. In the UK a demonstration in Glasgow (Scotland) was
covered too. And in the US, apart from New York, demonstrations in Seattle and
11
San Francisco were surveyed too. …In all eight countries but Italy the actual
survey process to establish a random survey of demonstration participants was
twofold. First, fieldwork supervisors counted the rows of participants, selecting
every Nth row, to ensure that the same number of rows was skipped throughout.
Then a dozen interviewers selected every Nth person in that row and distributed
questionnaires to these individuals during the actual protest march. The selected
participants were asked to complete the questionnaire at home and to mail it back.
The questionnaire maintained a large common core, including the participants’
profile, the mobilisation context, and the political attitudes and values of the
demonstrator, with only a few specific items adapted slightly for each country. ….
The overall response rate for the postal survey was more than 51%, with no
country’s response rate lower than 32%, which is more than satisfactory for an
anonymous survey without any reminders, which also increases confidence in the
procedure. (Walgrave & Verhulst, 2003 p. 8, with corrections by Bennett).
There were a few variations on this sampling procedure. For example, in the U.S.
cases, we anticipated that the lines of march would be disorganized and possibly
disrupted by police (as turned out to be the case, particularly in New York). Survey teams
were alerted in advance to this possibility, and were instructed to go to the main rally
point where speeches were given, and to circle the crowd from the edges and walk toward
the center in as straight a line as possible, giving questionnaires to every 10th person until
they had been distributed. The Italian team distributed questionnaires on trains carrying
demonstrators to Rome. They also distributed another set at the main rally, and compared
the two batches for consistency of demographic variables before pooling the two
12
samples. A more complete discussion of the study, its design, the leadership of the
national teams, and the questionnaires used in each country can be found at
http://www.uia.ac.be/u/wwwm2p//IPPS/. The numbers of questionnaires distributed and
returned in each country are displayed in Table 1.
USA
UK
Italy
Spain
Netherlands
Germany
Belgium
Switzerland
Total
Distributed
2,200(3 cities)
1,400
1,025
1,200
1,000
1,500
1,100
1,200
9,925
Completed
705
547
1,025
443
542
781
510
637
5,182
Response rate
32%
39%
100%
37%
54%
52%
46%
53%
51%
TABLE 1: Response rate of postal survey in eight covered countries
Source: Walgrave & Verhulst (2003), p. 8 (with corrections by Bennett)
Findings
Globalization Movement Identification and Protest Diversity
As predicted in the first hypothesis, those who hold strong identifications with the global
social justice movement also had participated in significantly higher numbers of different
types of demonstrations. Identification with the GSJ movement was measured by a
question that asked “Do you sympathize with the movement against neo-liberal
globalization?” If they answered “yes,” respondents were then asked to how much they
identified with the movement along a five point scale: not at all, little, somewhat, a lot,
very much. We created two measures: a binary, yes/no sympathy or support measure with
a range of 0-1 based on the sympathy question, and a three point strength of identification
13
scale where 1= no identification (either no on the sympathy question or not at all on the
identity question), 2=a little or somewhat, 3= a lot or very much. The resulting
identification patterns for the different countries are presented in Table 2.
Mean values
Globalization movement
sympathy (binary)
% missing
BEL
.86
NL
.72
CH
.87
ESP
.82
GER
.75
US
.63
UK/L
.86
IT
.93
UK/G
.87
28.5
17.3
24.6
2.2
6.0
12.5
33.2
5.8
58.2
Globalization movement
identification (scale)
% missing
2.38
1.97
2.29
2.37
2.1
1.93
2.24
2.60
2.20
28.9
17.1
25.2
2.0
6.3
15.5
31.5
6.4
57.4
Table 2: Two measures of identification with the globalization movement.
As indicated in Table 2, overall levels of identification with the globalization
movement were fairly high, but there are substantial differences across the nations in the
study. For the reader’s benefit, Table 2 also reports the varying levels of missing values
across the cases. Some of the missing values may reflect the difficulty of finding a name
for the global social justice movement that translated well across all nations, leaving
participants who were less familiar with the movement less clear about the term
neoliberal globalization. (The movement frame global social justice had not diffused as
widely at the time of the study as it has now). However, we are confident that the
activists most closely identified with the movement – i.e., the respondents most important
for testing our hypotheses -- are likely to have encountered the term neo-liberal
globalization, since it appears frequently in speeches and papers from various movement
organizations and conferences such as the World Social Forum meetings. A Google
search on the term neoliberal globalization produced over 19,000 hits, with the majority
14
coming from activist organizations such as Global Exchange, Indymedia, Jubilee South,
and so on. The best evidence that the globalization movement measures were reliable is
that our core hypotheses were all strongly supported.
In order to test the prediction that identification with the globalization movement
is associated with more diverse protest activities, we asked the respondents who had
participated in other demonstrations in the last five years to indicate what different types
of demonstrations they had participated in by checking as many as applied from the
following list: peace demonstrations, anti-racism, human rights, third world, social
issues (including labor), environmental, anti-globalization, women’s rights, regionalist,
and other. These responses were then averaged for each country. Table 3 reports the
levels of demonstration diversity across our cases.
Protest Diversity
Participated in one or more
demonstration type in 5
years
BEL
3.2
NL
2.4
CH
3.2
ESP
2.6
GER
2.8
US
3.0
UK/L
2.2
IT
3.7
UK/G
2.2
N
441
1.9
330
1.2
462
1.8
362
2.1
669
2.4
544
2.3
363
1.2
915
3.4
308
0.7
All cases, including no demo
participation in 5 yrs
706
642
818
452
781
705
657
1016
976
Note: Scores are mean numbers of different demonstration types checked. Top figures are for those who
reported demonstrating in the last five years. Bottom figures are for the entire sample of demonstrators. Ns
are shown below scores.
N
______________________________________________________________________
Table 3: Levels of Protest Diversity measured as the number of different types of
demonstrations in the last five years.
As predicted, there is a strong association in all countries between identification
with the GSJ movement and participation in diverse demonstrations, indicating that
identification with the GSJ movement is associated with complex political identifications
15
and actions that cross diverse issue areas. The summary results for all countries are
reported in Table 4. These results (and those in the other preliminary analyses reported
below) were based on cross-tabulations, and tested for significance and direction of
relationships.2 (A series of regression models for the United States case is also reported
below to offer a more integrated picture of the findings.) The specific analyses in Table 4
were based on rescaling respondents’ protest diversity scores as 0 (indicating no
demonstration type checked in last five years), 1 (one demonstration type checked), 2 (2–
5) demonstration types checked), and 3 (6 or more demonstration types checked). The
Somer’s d statistics in Table 4 show that there is a strong association between protest
diversity and both measures of anti-globalization identification for all the national
samples. The positive Somer’s d confirms the direction of the hypothesis: the higher the
identification with the GSJ movement, the more diverse types of protests the respondent
is likely to have attended. The Mann-Whitney test statistics (for the binary antiglobalization sympathy measure) and Kruskal-Wallis test statistics (for the scaled antiglobalization sympathy measure) are also highly significant.
2
Since the levels of measurement of the investigated variables in this preliminary analysis are either
nominal or ordinal, we rely on the Spearman rank order correlation (rho) as well as Somer’s d as measures
of associations. Both are commonly utilized when assessing two ordinal variables. Spearman rho is a
measure of association for ordinal variables based on the differences between ranks. Somer’s d is an
asymmetric measure of association for ordinal variables that distinguishes between independent and
dependent variables. The coefficient phi and the accompanied Pearson’s chi-square test is the appropriate
the measure of association for nominal data (2x2 tables). Since almost all dependent variables are ordinal in
nature, the Mann-Whitney-U-tests (for dichotomous independent variables) and Kruskal-Wallis-tests (for
independent variables with more than two values) were also computed in order to assess differences
between two groups. Following the convention in statistics, having a significance level < 10 % are labeled
as °, < 5 % are labeled as *, values having a significance level < 1 % as ** and values having a significance
level < 0.1 % with ***.
16
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
Globalization
+**
+***
+***
+**
+***
+***
+**
+***
+***
movement
sympathy
(binary)
Globalization
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
movement
identification
(scale)
Note: Somer’s d significance: * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001 and + or – indicates the direction of the association.
Table 4: Relationship between protest diversity and two measures of identification
with the globalization movement.
Managing Complex Identities: Information and Communication Channels
We are now ready to assess the second cluster of hypotheses. Our major prediction is that
activists with more complex political identities are more likely to use e–media to manage
their political actions and communications. For the theoretical reasons explained
previously, the high globalization movement identifiers are the most likely candidates for
this e-media political information and action management strategy. The inclusion of
multiple information, communication, and media variables in the questionnaire enabled
us to develop multiple indicators of e-media and mass media use. Table 5 shows
relationships between both measures of identification with the GSJ movement and a
yes/no answer to a question about whether the respondent had used the internet in various
activities aimed at promoting societal change in the past 12 months. The list of changeoriented activities included: contacting a politician, organization, local or national
official; displaying a pin, poster, flyer, sticker; signing or gathering signatures for a
petition, initiative, or referendum; strike; boycott; boycott; fundraising; donation;
17
contacting media; sit in; occupation, squatting; violent action; and abstaining from an
election as a protest.
Indep. Var.
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
+**
+***
+**
+°
+***
.+*
+**
+
+**
Globalization
movement
sympathy
(binary)
Globalization
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+***
+**
+**
+**
movement
identification
(scale)
Note: Chi-square level of significance: ° <.1, * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001 and + or – indicates the direction of
the association as shown by Somer’s d
Table 5. Relationship between GSJ movement identification and use of the internet
for political change.
Once again, both measurements of globalization movement identification are
employed, and the strength and direction of these relationships were assessed via crosstabulation. The chi-square tests for both the 2X2 (binary globalization sympathy measure,
binary internet use measure) tables and the 3X2 tables (3 point globalization
identification strength scale) show that there is a significant relationship between
globalization movement identification and use of the internet for political action. Only
Italy did not display significant results on the binary anti-globalization sympathy
measure, although the direction was consistent with the prediction. The Italian case has
restricted variance on the independent variable due to such high levels of globalization
identification. The positive and significant Somer’s d establishes the directionality of the
18
relationship, and the Mann-Whitney test statistics (for the binary anti-globalization
sympathy measure) and Kruskal-Wallis test statistics (for the scaled anti-globalization
sympathy measure) also confirm these finding as highly significant in all but the Spanish
and Italian cases.
As noted above, we also measured media use more broadly to see how different
activists receive general political information. We asked about a range of information
sources: television, newspaper, magazines, radio, other people such as family or friends
(reported as social networks in Table 6), websites, email lists, and other sources, and
asked how often each source was utilized ( based on a four point scale: never, monthly,
weekly, or daily). These sources are displayed in the top half of Table 6, with the results
based on 3X4 cross tabs assessing the relationship between the 3 point strength of
movement identification scale and the 4 point media use scale. The bottom half of table
analyzed summary measures of mass media and e-media by combining TV, radio,
newspaper, magazine into a mass media category variable, and combining websites and
email lists into an e-media variable. All of the summary variables in the bottom half of
the table were scored for simple presence or absence of reliance on any of the component
media sources. For example, daily use of an information type (mass, electronic, or social
networks) is based on respondents indicating daily reliance on at least one of the
component information sources that make up the type. The summary e-media use
measure detects whether respondents indicated any use of either websites or e-mail as
sources of political information. Mass media dominant means weekly or daily reliance on
any combination of mass media sources combined with only monthly or no e-media use.
E-media dominant means weekly or daily reliance on any combination of e-media
19
sources with only monthly or no use of mass media sources, resulting in a binary yes/no
measure, producing 2X3 crosstabs with the 3 point globalization identification scale.
Table 6 shows that activist reliance on websites and e-mail lists is significantly
associated with the strength of globalization movement identification in all countries with
the exception of the UK cases (which also contained the highest numbers of missing
values, but a final diagnosis will require further analysis). Similarly, the summary
measures of media source indicate that general e-media use and daily e-media use are
significantly associated with strength of identification with the globalization movement in
nearly all countries. (The test statistic for both the direction and significance of these
associations is Somer’s d.) The general information type measures in the bottom of the
table also show that dominant mass media users (with the exception of the German and
Belgian samples) display significantly lower levels of identification with the
globalization movement. This finding is also consistent with the general hypothesis,
indicating that less complex activists are more likely to manage their information and
communication needs through more conventional communication channels such as the
mass media.
20
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
TV
-**
-*
Newspaper
-**
+**
Magazine
+**
+°
Radio
-°
+*
+**
Social network
Websites
+**
+***
+*
+*
+**
+*
+**
E-mail lists
+*** +***
+**
+**
+***
+**
+*
+*
Social Networks daily
+°
-°
Mass media daily
-***
-***
Mass media dominant
-*
-***
-°
-*
-**
-***
-**
-***
E-media use
+***
+**
+**
+***
+**
+**
+*
E-media daily
+°
+*
+*
+**
+*** +***
+**
E-media dominant
+**
+*
+*
+***
+°
Note: Level of significance: ° <.1, * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001 and + or – specifies the direction of the
association as indicated by Somer’s d. Top of chart based on 4X3 crosstabs between globalization
identification scale and 4 point media use scale in which 0= never, 1=monthly, 2=weekly, 3=daily. Bottom
half based on 2X3 crosstabs based on binary summary media variables indicating reliance or no reliance on
indicated media source type.
Table 6: Relationship between the strength of globalization movement identification
(3 point identification scale) and general political information habits.
These relationships can be examined in more coherent theoretical terms by
constructing logistic regression models in which variables are inserted step-wise to assess
their independent and combined effects. Our first set of models was run on the U.S. data
(others are currently being constructed). Model 1 in Table 7 is based on the binary
measure of globalization movement sympathy as the sole independent variable, and
dominant e-media use as the dependent variable. Model 2 adds demonstration diversity
and diversity of organizational affiliations to the equation to assess whether these other
measures of complex identifications have independent main effects on the activists’ use
of e-media information networks. The third model included various demographic controls
(age, sex, education, and income), of which we expected only age (younger activists) to
be significantly more reliant on e-media networks.
21
Model 1
Exp(B)
Model 2
S.E.
Demonstration
diversity
Organizational
diversity
Globalization
Movement.
Sympathy (binary)
Male
Age
Income
Education
Constant
N
-2 Log likelihood
Chi-square (df)
Percent predicted
correctly
1.992***
.314***
.187
.155
Model 3
Exp(B)
S.E.
Exp(B)
S.E.
1.279*
.099
1.301*
.104
1.252*
.092
1.328**
.098
1.872**
.191
1.619*
.203
.240
1.430
.689**
.958
1.057
.307
.188
.125
.656
.407
.607
.160***
617
768.879
14.249
(1)
617
753.193
29.934
(3)
567
684.497
41.398
(7)
52.5
61.8
63.3
Note: Level of Significance: * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001. Dominant e-media use defined as daily or weekly
reliance on any combination of websites or lists, and monthly or no use of mass media sources for political
information. Dependent variables entered: Model 1: globalization movement sympathy only. Model 2: add
diversity of past demonstration types, diversity of organizational affiliations. Model 3 add: age, sex,
income, education.
________________________________________________________________________
Table 7. Three regression models explaining dominant e-media use for general
political information.
Looking at the progression of these three models reveals that identification with
the GSJ movement remains the best predictor of dominant e-media use in an activist’s
22
communication repertoire. However, we also find strong independent effects with
demonstration diversity and organizational diversity, suggesting that there is also a
tendency for activists with other kinds of complex political affiliations to rely more on emedia to manage their networks of political relationships. Since both protest diversity and
organizational diversity operate independently of GSJ identification, these findings open
a new line of research on media and communication strategies among different types of
complex activists. For example, we expect that some of the organizational affiliation
patterns are more likely to be of the conventional sort (e.g., union or party), while others
are more likely to be post-conventional (e.g., global social justice, third world), while
others may straddle both types of networks (e.g., human rights, environmental,
neighborhood groups). Further refinement of the data set should yield insights about how
these more and less conventional political identity types follow their issue concerns and
communicate with their political associates.
Before turning to our comparison group of first time demonstrators, we can step
back and take a different look at the relationship between complex political identities and
communication patterns by pooling the country data and displaying two striking trends
across the entire set of demonstrators. Figure 1 shows the distribution of responses across
the entire 8 nation sample for a question about the activist’s most important source of
information on the Iraq crisis. As common sense might lead us to think, mass media
sources are far and away the most important for the demonstrators as a whole. Indeed, it
may seem unlikely to find any substantial reliance on non-mass media information
sources among citizens following a breaking news event. However, when we look at
globalization movement identification (ratio of sympathetic to non sympathetic activists
23
for each information source), only newspapers remain important, while e-media sources
jump from relatively unimportant to highly important. This suggests that while these
more complex globalization activists do not turn away from the mass media, they have
created alternative information networks that complement their political action
repertoires to the extent that they even become important for receiving news information
about breaking events.
Most important source of political information in following the Iraq crisis?
(Across all countries)
2000
1800
1728
Number of mentions
1600
1281
1400
1200
1000
851
800
600
323
400
200
168
126
89
social
networks
magazines
mailinglists
0
newspaper
tv
radio
websites
Media source
Figure 1: Most important sources of information in following the Iraq Crisis for all
demonstrators in all 8 nations.
24
Levels of globalization movement sympathy associated with
most important demonstrator information sources on Iraq War (across all countries)
Ratio of globalization movement sympathy (yes vs.
no) for each info source designated most important
7.00
6.00
6.00
4.93
5.00
4.77
4.48
4.10
4.09
4.00
3.00
2.68
2.00
newspaper
mailinglists
websites
magazines
radio
social networks
Media Source
Figure 2: Ratio of globalization movement sympathy among demonstrators who
designated each information source as most important for following the Iraq Crisis.
First Timers’ Information and Communication Practices
Our third set of hypotheses concerned the information and communication strategies of a
group that we suspected to have relatively simpler, and more conventional political
identification profiles: first timers. The questionnaire asked respondents to estimate how
often in the past five years they had participated in a local, national, or international
demonstration or public protest. We characterize first time protestors as those for whom
this was the first demonstration in the last five years. (This group also included a few
respondents who had come out of activist retirement, so to speak, having demonstrated at
some point earlier in their lives.) As Table 8 shows, the range of first timers varied across
the countries in the study, ranging from 9.3% in Italy to 54.4% in the Netherlands.
tv
25
First timers
(%)
N (total)
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
22.8
54.4
27.0
20.7
22.0
29.5
23.1
9.3
37.3
706
642
818
452
781
705
657
1016
976
Table 8: Percentage of demonstrators for whom this was the first demonstration
attended in the last five years. Ns are shown below scores.
Table 9 displays the association between first timers and the two previously
defined measures of anti-globalization sympathy. (Relationships are based on 2x2 and
2x3 crosstabulations derived from binary yes/no measure of prior demonstration
attendance, and binary and 3 point globalization movement identification measures). As
predicted, there was a strong negative association between identification with the GSJ
movement and being a first timer. The Pearson’s chi-square (for the nominal levels of
associations) and Somer’s d statistics (for the ordinal levels of association) strikingly
show that there is a strong negative association between being a first timer and both
measures of anti-globalization sympathy. This suggests that first timers were mobilized
primarily in response to the particular issue of the Iraq crisis, and that they have relatively
simpler, less active political styles that involve less bridging of different issue divides.
DependentVariable
BEL
-**
NL
-***
CH
-**
ESP
GER
-***
US
-**
UK/L
-***
IT
-***
UK/G
-***
Globalization movement
sympathy (binary)
Globalization Movement
-***
-*** -***
-*
-**
-***
-***
-***
-***
Identification (scale)
Note: Level of significance: ° <.1, * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001. + or – specifies the direction of the
association as indicated by phi (nominal) and Somer’s d (ordinal). The level of significance was determined
by the Pearson’s chi-square statistic (nominal) and Somer’s d (ordinal).
Table 9. Association between being a first time demonstrator and the two antiglobalization sympathy measures.
26
Since, by definition, being a first timer means low demonstration diversity, we
have now established two indicators of relatively less complex political identity in this
category of activists. The next question is how do these less complex activists manage
their information and communication needs? Table 10 shows the relationship between
being a first time demonstrator and the binary (yes/no) question about whether the
respondent had used the internet in any of the earlier list political activities aimed at
promoting societal change. The 2x2 cross-tabulation of these two variables produced
highly significant Pearson’s chi-square and Mann-Whitney test statistics indicating that
first timers are far less likely than all the other more experienced demonstrators
(globalization movement identifiers and others combined) to have used the internet for
political action (with the exception of the London sample).
Dependent Variable
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
Using the internet for
-**
-***
-**
-*
-**
-***
-**
-**
political change
Note: Chi-square level of significance: ° <.1, * <.05, **<.01, ***<.001 and + or – indicates the direction of
the association as shown by the coefficient phi.
Table 10: Relationship between first time demonstrators and use of the internet for
political actions aimed at change.
The first timers were also different from the rest of the demonstrators in terms of
their general information and communication preferences. Recall that respondents were
asked how often (never, monthly, weekly, or daily) they utilized a range of information
sources (television, newspaper, magazines, radio, other people such as family or friends,
websites, email lists, and other sources). These individual sources are shown in the top
half of Table 11. The bottom half of the table groups the individual media into source
categories (TV, radio, newspaper, magazine were all combined in the mass media
27
category; websites and email lists were combined in the e-media category). The analyses
of the general (mass media, e-media, social network) source categories employed the
same measures and procedures described above in the anti-globalization sympathy
section.
Based on 4x2 (top half) and 2x2 (bottom half) cross-tabulations, Table XX
indicates that first timers are generally less likely to employ e-media sources for their
political information purposes, while they are significantly more reliant on mass media
use than the general population of demonstrators. The statistics for both the direction and
significance level of these associations is Somer’s d (for ordinal levels of measurement)
and the Pearson’s chi square test statistic (for the 2x2 matrixes).
BEL
NL
CH
ESP
GER
US
UK/L
IT
UK/G
TV
+**
+°
+*
+°
Newspaper
-**
-**
Magazine
-°
-**
-**
Radio
-**
Social network
-*
-°
Websites
-*
-***
-*
-**
-***
E-mail lists
-*
-***
-***
-*
-***
-***
-***
-***
Social Networks daily
-°
-*
+***
+***
Mass media daily
+*
+***
-*
+***
Mass media exclusive
+***
+***
+**
+***
+***
E-media use
-*
-**
-*
-***
-*
-***
E-media daily
-**
-***
+**
-***
E-media exclusive
-*
-***
+*
-*
Note: Level of significance: °<.1, *<.05, **<.01, ***<.001. + or – specifies the direction of the association
as indicated by phi (nominal) and Somer’s d (ordinal). The level of significance was determined by the
Pearson’s chi-square statistic (nominal) and Somer’s d (ordinal).
Table 11: Relationship between first time demonstrators and general political
information habits.
28
CONCLUSION
Our analysis indicates that a defining property of post-conventional transnational
activism is the tendency to bridge issue divides as a core element of political
consciousness. This may be due in part to the perception among many younger
generation activists that issues in a globalizing world are increasingly interrelated, not to
mention complicated by their removal from national governmental agendas through what
Beck (2000) terms subpolitics. This refers to the means by which powerful corporate
interests escape formal governmental regulation by moving manufacturing and labor
operations offshore, while compromising attention to a host of related issues on national
institutional agendas through a combination of direct subvention of parties and pressures
from transnational rule-making bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Activists
have responded by creating transnational subpolitics of their own, with multi-issue
agendas and diverse action repertoires as defining elements. Not surprisingly, this
complex issue-and-action bridging is most pronounced in our data set in the diversity of
past demonstration behavior among those activists most sympathetic to the GSJ
movement.
The political communication styles observed among these activists are important
for understanding both the diversity of their political action repertoires and the capacities
of their networks. This means that e-media applications are not just more convenient than
conventional communication channels, or that e-media use merely reduces the cost of
communicating across diverse networks or great distances. These social communication
technologies are also important because they enable activists to constitute new
29
organizational forms that reflect -- at the collective level -- the principles of political
consciousness inscribed at the individual level: inclusiveness, diversity, and commitment
to radical democracy with few leaders, binding group memberships, or obligation to share
specific ideological collective identity frames. (The principles of inclusiveness and
diversity may represent something of a meta-ideology.)
If rethinking the nature of communication among these activists (i.e., as
organizational, not just informational) will help to explain the coherence of postconventional forms of complex, multi-issue activism, some conventional understandings
about social movements and political action may have to be adjusted. For example, in his
sweeping historical analysis of social movements, Charles Tilly (2004) has raised
compelling concerns that these activist networks may be less sustainable or effective
because of their thin organizational ties and seemingly weak activist commitment levels.
These concerns may eventually prove well-founded as the story of the GSJ movement
unfolds. However, there is also a possibility that such concerns about sustainability and
effectiveness also reflect perspectives on social movement organization that have been
forged through observation of more conventional social protests focused within national
cultural and institutional contexts. To the extent that observers view the GSJ movement
(and its seeming detours into antiwar protests) through the lenses of conventional
organizational and collective identity frameworks, they may miss the point that there is
considerable intentionality in the design of flexible communication networks that nest
loosely within larger, dense, multi-issue networks in which individual activists may
frequently shift commitments and action repertoires.
30
As the oft-cited case of the Jubilee debt relief network illustrates, most
participants, both North and South, resisted initiatives to become more formally
organized, with the result that the network structure eventually transformed into more
fragmentary satellite networks. Despite the fragmentation of the network, Jubilee activists
managed to place debt relief on the agendas of target organizations (World Bank, IMF),
as well as inscribing the issue within the larger GSJ movement in which the fragmentary
former Jubilee network nodes still remain connected. (Bennett, 2004 forthcoming;
Surman and Reilly, 2003). Such organizational dynamics do not rest easily within a
perspective that regards organizational growth, stability, and collective identity framing
as necessary conditions for political effectiveness. Rather, the networked activism at the
base of recent large scale transnational protests suggests a different organizational model
in which inclusiveness and inter-organizational permeability are regarded as essential
elements of overall movement sustainability and effectiveness.
In short, recognizing the potential for effective action in such fluid organizations
requires thinking differently about how activists build individual level relationships and
network organizations. As noted previously, many GSJ movement activists subscribe to
principles of radical democracy – heterarchy is the rising term for it. Many also rely on
continuously evolving social communication technologies to keep them connected and to
tune those connections to evolving action repertoires. In this networked world,
amorphous new organizational networks emerge as previous ones fall away. Swarms of
activists at demonstrations may promote multiple goals without suffering the disorder
often attributed to them by mass media news accounts. Those protest goals may include:
making their collective presence felt and their diverse voices heard; disabling their protest
31
targets (e.g., disrupting trade conferences); publicizing permanent campaigns against
diverse corporate and political targets (from Nike to the WTO); joining forces with other
activist networks to protest wars; and disrupting life-as-usual in branded urban
environments with theater, art, music, and other forms of culture jamming (Bennett,
2003).
A core organizational principle running through these repertoires of protest is the
creation of self-organizing networks based on personal relationships that are sustained at
least partly by online information exchanges and interactions (Jordan, Houser, and Foster,
2003). The idea of self-organizing networks in which each new technology release
reflects the political learning from the last release puts communication in a constitutive
relationship to social movement organization. To cite just one example, what we
conventionally think of as news (e.g., about the Iraq crisis) is now commonly produced,
edited, rated, and distributed by activists themselves. The movement meme for this kind
of information relationship was coined by Indymedia: Be the media.
While monitoring mass media sources remains important, as indicated in Figure
2, new communication repertoires enable the integration of information and action,
marking a departure from the idea of a two stage mass communication model in which
information comes, first, from distant sources to passive individual receivers, who may
then use that information in developing action plans at a subsequent stage of the political
process. It is now common for information to become integrated with the action process
in real time, as activists report on events as they are happening, and incorporate those
reports in the evolving coordination of the event itself. For example, demonstrators
commonly report on their own actions via mobile phones, PDAs, or video cameras linked
32
to streaming technologies, with the information interpreted and fed back to participants
to guide strategic decisions that can shape the course of a protest action in the moment.
Rheingold has described these collective intelligence capacities in somewhat hyperbolic
form as smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002).
Whether these distributed intelligence networks are as decisive as often portrayed,
the (interactive, multicast, hyperlinked, open network) communication models pioneered
by GSJ activists have enabled multi-issue activism to operate smoothly at many levels of
protest politics, crossing issue divides without apparent loss of organizational coherence
or individual commitment. A case in point returns us to return to the main focus of our
study -- the transnational antiwar protests. It is interesting to note that at the time of the
buildup to the Iraq war, many observers expressed concern that mobilizing protests
against the war might sap the energy or even disrupt the young and seemingly fragile
global social justice movement. What seems to have happened, instead, is that flexible
activist networks and the comparably flexible identities of many of the organizers of the
war protests became rather easily integrated within the open structures of the GSJ
movement. For example, a newsletter on sent out from the World Social Forum on the
eve of the March 20, 2004 demonstrations marking the first anniversary of the beginning
of the war offered the GSJ network a broad overview of the protest mobilization
scheduled for the next day (World Social Forum, 2004). Here is the item on the antiwar
demonstrations as it appeared in the middle (item 5) of a list of diverse items sent through
movement networks:
33
5. Global Day of Action on the one-year anniversary of the Iraq War
On March 20, there will be many worldwide demonstrations of the Global Day of Action on the one-year anniversary of the Iraq War.
The date is the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the attack of the United States to this country - has been chosen at the Global
Anti-War Assembly that was held on January 19, 2004, during the IV World Social Forum in Mumbai, India.
Read here the March 20 call to action in English e Spanish
See also the list of cities where mobilizations will take place:
Algeria (Argel); Argentina (Buenos Aires); Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and all the capitals);
Austria (Vienna); Bangladesh (Daca); Belgium (Brussels); Brazil (Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre, Presidente
Prudente, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Luís, São Paulo), Canada (Brampton, Halifax, Midland, Montreal, Peterborough,
Kelowna, Salt Spring Island, Toronto, Vancouver); Chile (Santiago); Czech Republic (Prague); Denmark (Copenhagen); Egypt (Cairo);
England (London); Finland (Helsinki); France: in the main cities; Greece (Athens); The Netherlands (Amsterdam); Germany (Berlin Potsdamer Platz, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Rostock). Hungary (Budapest); India (Mumbai); Iran (Teheran); Iraq (Baghdad); Ireland (Dublin);
Iceland (Reykjavik); Italy (Rome); Indonesia (Jakarta); Japan (Tokyo); Jordan (Aman); Lebanon (Beirut); Morocco (Casablanca);
Mexico (Mexico City); New Zealand (Wellington); Norway (Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen,Tromsa e Stavanger); Palestine (Ramallah, Gaza);
Pakistan (in all the districts and cities); Paraguay (Assunção); Poland (Varsovia); Portugal (Lisbon); Scotland (Glasgow); Senegal
(Dakar); Syria (Damask, Alepo); Spain (Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Tarragona, Valencia); South Africa (Johannesburg), Sudan
(Cartum); Sweden (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Uppsala); Thailand (Bangkok); Turkey (Adana, Ancara, Istanbul, Izmir and Trabzon);
The United States (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nova York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington); Yemen (Sanaa);
For more information on the demonstrations that are to be held, check the following websites:
www.march20th.org
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/march20
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/m20/m20transp.html
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/m20/index.html#event
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/m20/m20transp.html
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/m20/m20transp.html
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?caltype=17
www.stopwar.ca
www.acp-cpa.ca
www.kloakas.com/aire
http://kloakas.com/aire/guerraNO/
www.320act.or.kr
http://www.worldpeacenow.jp/
http://www.scn-net.ne.jp/~takagi/
http://www.anpo-osk.jp/
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/m20/m20transp.html
http://www.socialforum.at/sf/antikrieg/
http://www.friedensnews.at/stories/storyReader$1925
www.stopusa.be
www.geenoorlog.be
http://www.stopterrorkrigen.dk/
http://www.ippnw.de/Ramstein/index.html
http://www.friedenskooperative.de/ter20-03.htm
http://www.friedenskooperative.de/ter20-03.htm
www.stop-the-war.org
www.fridur.is
http://notendur.centrum.is/~einarol/
http://www.irishantiwar.org
http://www.wereldcrisis.nl
www.irak.pl
www.stopwojnie.w.pl
http://www.banthebomb.org/peace/index.shtml
http://www.fundacioperlapau.org/iraq/
http://www.nodo50.org/paremoslaguerra
http://www.stoppakriget.nu/
http://www.motkrig.org/
This list of antiwar sites was followed by item 6, a list of a dozen forthcoming regional
social forum gatherings, with no indication that the two large scale mobilizations were in
any way conflicting or competing for the energies of the same activists.
34
It may also be time to think differently about movement organization and
effectiveness. And the place to start is with individual level consciousness, action
repertoires, and communication preferences. Activists such as the GSJ identifiers at the
center of this study can sustain multiple commitments precisely because of the flexible,
interactive communication systems that enable them to create durable (yet fluid)
organizational networks. Even if access to technologies is neither widely nor well
distributed, there seems to be a) enough communication capacity b) to reach enough
people c) in enough different places d) with minimal cues about times, locations, themes,
and practices, to e) make a difference in how protests are organized and how activists
themselves think about their places in them. With political organization and identification
codes in embedded in communication technologies, globalization activists can maintain
self organizing networks advancing diverse causes, while planning sustainable antiwar
demonstrations in their spare time, all with little apparent conflict of commitment or
organizational coherence.
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