How is the digital age affecting democratic practices within social movement organizations (SMOs)? The "iron law" of oligarchy (Michels) poses that all organizations eventually become more centralized and hierarchical. In contrast, scholars of online activism have argued that the Internet allows for less hierarchical, and implicitly more democratic, organizations to emerge. This dissertation compares existing SMOs which all target the same issue but have varying levels of online engagement. The project is grounded in literature on social movements, organizations, and new media. The methodology includes interviews, observations, and digital content analysis. The central hypotheses are that (1) digital engagement both overcomes and exacerbates iron law dynamics at the organizational level, and (2) this effect is moderated by the social class and political ideology of the SMOs.
Broader Impact Findings from this research are intended to deepen our understanding of the relationship between democracy and technology. Especially given the increasingly visible role of new media in shaping political movements around the world, findings from this study may be of interest to the general public, as well as policy makers and governments. Findings may also inform policy efforts that regulate Internet access around the world.
Using both statistical methods and qualitative fieldwork, I examine how digital technology practices vary among different types of social movement organizations. My findings challenge many digital democracy arguments. My dissertation takes Michels’ 100 year-old "Iron Law" theory as a point of departure and puts it in dialogue with recent scholarship on the Internet and social movements. Michels suggests that all political and social movement organizations eventually become oligarchic and hierarchical. However, many scholars today contend that the Internet enables more participatory, egalitarian, and horizontally organized social movements. Most of this scholarship, though, selects on the dependent variable of digital activism, often focusing on emergent, ephemeral, progressive online movements, so we have known little about offline practices nor how structural differences across different types of organizations shape digital activism. Rather than place the Internet as the independent variable and social movements as the dependent variable, I ask the reverse: how does variation in social movement organizations shape Internet use? My research avoids the biases of previous research by analyzing the 34 existing organizations on opposing sides of a single political issue: whether public employees should have collective bargaining rights in North Carolina. Because these groups range widely, from Tea Party organizations to rank-and-file unions, I am able to analyze variation in the groups’ social classes, political ideologies, hierarchical structures, and – critically – how, and to what extent, these groups use the Internet. I travelled to a dozen cities in North Carolina for 65 interviews with key informants and conducted ethnographic observations of meetings, events and protests. I also used data scraping techniques on social media to create an original data set of Tweets, Facebook posts and Web site data to compare quantitative differences in the groups’ Internet use. I triangulated these findings with qualitative content analysis of the postings, printed materials, and fieldwork data. Overall, my findings align with Michels: the digital age does not spur organizations to be more democratic nor to overcome the Iron Law. Contrary to the claims of prior scholars, I first demonstrate that more hierarchical, conservative and reformist groups have higher levels of Internet engagement and online participation than their counterparts. Second, rather than an egalitarian and horizontal digital space, working class organizations in my study have very low levels of Internet use and participation, compared to more middle and upper class groups, creating a digital activism gap. Because of these inequalities, my findings run counter to claims of the increasing irrelevancy of organizations in the digital age. In short, groups with members from different social classes require more, not less, structural organization to ensure all members and potential members can participate in online activities. Third, I find that everyday practices in digital spaces are not as participatory as the literature claims. Many online interactions are traditional top-down bureaucratic communication, sometimes more so than in offline discussions. Overall, the most active organizations offline are the least active online. Groups motivated by egalitarian participation tend to view the Internet as just one of many organizing tools, and I show that the Internet matters least to organizations in which democracy matters most. Michels has been criticized for being overly deterministic with organizations and oligarchy, yet digital democracy may also be a form of determinism (technological). My findings go beyond these simplistic concepts by using a comparative approach and by examining a range of organizations to reassess Michel’s iron law of oligarchy in the digital age. My findings not only advance a sociological understanding of democracy within social movement organizations but also contribute to a societal understanding of democracy for future policies on open Internet access in our networked society.
