Democracies are experiencing historic disruptions affecting how people engage with core institutions such as the press, civil society organizations, parties, and elections. These processes of citizen interaction with institutions operate as a democratic interface shaping self-government and the quality of public life. The electoral dimension of the interface is important, as its operation can affect all others. This analysis explores a growing left-right imbalance in the electoral connection between citizens, parties, elections, and government. This imbalance is due, in part, to divergent left-right preferences for political engagement, organization, and communication. Support on the right for clearer social rules and simpler moral, racial and nationalist agendas are compatible with hierarchical, leader-centered party organizations that compete more effectively in elections. Parties on the left currently face greater challenges engaging citizens due to the popular meta-ideology of diversity and inclusiveness and demands for direct or deliberative democracy. What we term connective parties are developing technologies to perform core organizational functions, and some have achieved electoral success. However, when connective parties on the left try to develop shared authority processes, online and offline, they face significant challenges competing with more conventionally organized parties on the right.

Networked content flows that focus or fragment public attention are key communication processes in multimedia ecologies. Understandings of events may differ widely, as networked attention and framing processes move from core participants to more distant spectator publics. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests, peripheral social media networks of public figures and media organizations focused public attention on economic inequality. Although inequality was among many issues discussed by the activists, it was far less central to the protest core than problems with banks or democracy. Results showed how public attention to inequality was constructed through pulling and pushing interpretive frames between the core and periphery of dense communication networks. Various indicators of public attention-such as search trends, Wikipedia article edits, and legacy media coverage-all credited the protests with raising public awareness of inequality, even as attention to problems with banks grew at the protest core.

Communication campaigns play a key role in shaping what people think, feel, and do about climate change, and help shape public agendas at the local, national, and international levels. As more people around the world gain regular access to the Internet, online and social media are becoming significant contexts in which they come into contact with—or fail to come into contact with—news, debates, action, and social input related to climate change. This makes it important to understand the campaigning that takes place online. Many actors make concerted efforts to engage publics on climate change and go online to do so. These include businesses; governments and international organizations; scientists and scientific institutions; organizations, groups and individuals in civil society; public intellectuals and political, religious and entertainment leaders. Not all are ultimately concerned with climate change or engaging publics as such. Nevertheless, most campaigns involve at least one of four goals: to inform, raise awareness, and shape public understanding about the science, problems, and politics of climate change; to change consumer and citizen behavior; to network and connect concerned publics; to visibly mobilize consumers or citizens to put pressure on decision-makers. Online climate change campaigns are an emerging phenomenon and field of study. The campaigns appeared on broad front around the turn of the millennium, and have since become increasingly complex. In addition to the elements that produce variance in offline campaigns, scholars examine the role of online and social media in how campaigners render the issues and pursue their campaigns, how publics respond, and what this means for the development of the broader public discourse. Core debates concern the capacity and impact of online campaigning in the areas of informing, activating and including publics, and the ambivalences inherent in leveraging technology to engage publics on climate change.

A comprehensive examination of the European public sphere must consider Europeanization from below, of, and by civil society. As Jürgen Habermas argues, civil society has a key role to play in a democratic public sphere: civil society actors at the periphery of the formal political arena have the potential to bring new groups of citizens into the political debate and to highlight problems that may become central to the agenda (Habermas 1996c). If this potential were undermined, it would seriously exacerbate the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU) (Habermas 2006c). This chapter takes stock of the European public sphere with a focus on organized civil society and civil-society actors’ digital communication beyond the mass media.

Earlier studies have found that civil society is weakly represented in the European public sphere, leading to concerns about the lack of broad public engagement or citizen-level political contention. When the capacity of the (national) mass media to employ Europeanized frames and attend to transnational issues or actors is analyzed, the picture that emerges is an issue-driven European sphere in which a few issues or claim makers may reach different national media using similar frames during common periods. However, there is little civil society in this picture: claims are overwhelmingly made by elites who communicate to largely passive audiences. For example, when the European financial crisis erupted in 2010, national papers across the EU were filled with similar pronouncements from various officials, including national leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU officials such as the head of the European Central Bank. Civil society tends to be sketched in terms of voters in Greece or demonstrators in Spain, with few concrete authoritative claims attached. Beyond demonstrations and elections, there is little in the way of media characterizations of broader public engagement with the crisis and other policy issues that cut across both EU and national-governance processes. The question is whether civil society engagement in European public spheres is weak in itself or whether it is simply not captured in these analyses of mass-media content. We suggest that part of the answer may be the latter possibility. To analyze civil society dimensions of European public spheres, it makes sense to look beyond the mass media to the increasingly common alternative forms of public communication that civil society actors utilize.

How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these production packages' are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011-2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.

Technology-enabled networks of contention differ from physically co-present networks in that communication more saliently structures relations among actors. Technology platforms may even take on some roles of organizations in providing information, distributing resources, and coordinating action. Although many observers claim that online networks tend to concentrate public displays of attention and recognition in power-law hierarchies, we propose that technology-enabled contentious networks may seek or avoid concentrated hierarchies as reflections of the participants' underlying values and technology preferences. The article identifies three ideal type power signatures in technology-enabled networks-highly concentrated, moderately concentrated, and dispersed. Different power signatures can result in similar political outcomes, suggesting that none of them represents a generally more effective way to organize power in networks. However, in particular situations, different power configurations can affect how action is framed, how individuals become engaged, and the degree of fit between mobilizations and political contexts.

From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), large-scale, sustained protests are using digital media in ways that go beyond sending and receiving messages. Some of these action formations contain relatively small roles for formal brick and mortar organizations. Others involve well-established advocacy organizations, in hybrid relations with other organizations, using technologies that enable personalized public engagement. Both stand in contrast to the more familiar organizationally managed and brokered action conventionally associated with social movement and issue advocacy. This article examines the organizational dynamics that emerge when communication becomes a prominent part of organizational structure. It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.