Digital Activism in Left-wing Parties: The Micro-Influencer and the Community-Organiser: A Gramscian Analysis

The paper takes a Gramscian perspective to conceptualise the evolutions of (digital) left-wing activism as a consequence of party elites' strategies on the hegemony of platform societies (Gramsci 2014). Hegemony refers to how specific fractions of ruling classes and political allies assume leadership over other social groups (Gilbert & Williams 2022). Platform societies refer to a socio-technical paradigm whereby power relations stem from control over digital infrastructures and algorithms (Van Dijck, Poell & de Waal 2018). Recent literature on digital party politics either focused on how online activism is different from offline one (Gibson, Greffet & Cantijoch 2017; Scarrow 2015) or on the emergence of new hybrid modes of organising parties (Chadwick & Stromer-Galley 2016; Nunes 2021). While this literature has merit in conceptualising the changing nature of activism, we still know too little about what forms digital activism has taken and why. The paper addresses these questions in three steps. First, it proposes an analytical framework to analyse forms of activism as a result of party elites’ strategies. Second, it presents the findings of empirical qualitative research, including 37 elite interviews and content analysis of parties’ websites, on the digitalisation of six left-wing parties in three West European countries: France, Italy and Spain. The analysis considers both Social Democratic and Radical Left parties. The findings indicate the emergence of two opposite models of left-wing digital activism: the ‘micro-influencer’, whose main function is to replicate leaders’ messages on social media and gather support for parties’ leadership; the ‘community-organiser’, whose main function is to connect instances of protest and social movements. Finally, the analysis traces these types of activism to left-wing party elites’ strategic projects: hegemonic leaders seek to forge a base of ‘micro-influencers’ as a replacement of the mass-party model, by incorporating micro-targeting practices from mainstream social media. Conversely, counter-hegemonic leaders aim to overcome traditional modes of party organisation and draw on practices from protest movements and peer-to-peer online communities to reconfigure radical left politics.