Dan Mercea

• PhD, University of York
• Professor (Full) at City, University of London

In this article, we contribute to the analysis of protest participation on a gradient from non- to actual participation. Using survey data from six European countries, we take the analysis beyond a binary differentiation between participants and non-participants. We evidence a participation gradient underpinned by a combination of social and politi...

Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous researc...

State of the climate in Romania - 2024

The rise of movement parties in Europe has disrupted traditional notions of party politics, introducing new avenues for citizen engagement and political mobilisation. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the electorate of movement parties, using nationally representative survey data from six European countries. We identify four types of...

Personal safety apps provide new ways for crime data to be utilized by citizens within the context of urban mobilities. Yet, high-profile stories reveal the fear many women continue to experience in their daily lives. Operating as locative media, personal safety apps seem to imply that environments can simply be avoided. This is not always possible...

This paper presents a critical discussion of the processing, reliability and implications of free big data repositories. We argue that big data is not only the starting point of scientific analyses but also the outcome of a long string of invisible or semi-visible tasks, often masked by the fetish of size that supposedly lends validity to big data....

This article considers the use of public social media in transnational expatriate activism. It is an investigation of connections among users of Facebook event pages associated with 122 cities worldwide where demonstrations took place in 2017, in support of the anti-corruption Romanian #rezist protests. An exploration of interconnections between so...

This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently appl...

In many countries, movement parties have gained traction among the electorate. This special issue spotlights the communication of movement parties as an avenue for researching their purchase on democratic politics. Through a combination of empirical studies and commentaries, the issue covers multiple countries where movement parties have establishe...

This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operat...

Pokémon Go is a hybrid reality game (HRG) that research suggests is played by families in the context of joint media engagement. Yet, the game interface itself provides little information about how to approach the game. Given this and the fact that many parents play this HRG with their young children, we examine the process of parent online social...

This article explores the use of narrative theory as an analytical framework to investigate the extent to which popular hashtags and the news can develop into intersecting stories. It juxtaposes the case of hashtag-based reports seen during the Arab Spring to understand the coverage of notorious political episodes in Brazil. Namely, the 2016 impeac...

In 2017, the anticorruption #rezist protests engulfed Romania. In the context of mounting concerns about exposure to and engagement with political information on social media, we examine the use of public Facebook event pages during the #rezist protests. First, we consider the degree to which political information influenced the participation of st...

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of...

In this article, we explore the process of movement social learning on Twitter. Previously described as the diffusion and social validation of innovation pertaining to collective outcomes through the practice of retweeting, movement social learning is unpicked with a combination of trace and interview data. We examine language use in retweets assoc...

This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockd...

In this article, we explore the process of movement social learning on Twitter. Previously described as the diffusion and social validation of innovation pertaining to collective outcomes through the practice of retweeting, movement social learning is unpicked with a combination of trace and interview data. We examine language use in retweets assoc...

In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and t...

This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit campaign. We review the evidence positing that online interactions lead to filter bubbles to test whether echo chambers are restricted to online patterns of interaction or are associated with physical, in-person interaction. We identify the lo...

In this article we review our study of 13,493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted the U.K. European Union membership referendum and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns ab...

In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically-enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constit...

This article considers the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media whilst remaining localized organizationally. It examines a corpus of social media data collected in the course of two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold...

This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit referendum campaign. We review the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization to test five hypotheses positing that echo-chamber communication is associated with homophily in the physical world, chiefly the geographic proxim...

The chapter reports on research into the latitude for coordination and informal civic learning occasioned by the networked communication of protestors on social media. An examination of the 2012 pan-European mobilisation against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement indicated that talk directed at resource coordination represented a significant c...

Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a...

The article examines the U.K. movement People's Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity...

We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relatio...

This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” W...

The articles in this special section strengthen our understanding of the relationship between media, collective action, and participation in social change by exposing how knowledge about it is produced. They add to a body of literature that has scrutinized the social organization of public communication — through broadcasting media, the press, or s...

Special issue on Media, Participation and Social Change. ed. by Dan Mercea and Laura Iannelli Open access at http://sms.sagepub.com/site/Virtual_Special_Issues/Media_Participation_Social_Change.xhtml

The chapter sketches out the broad theoretical outlines of the book and provides an overview of the substantive chapters.

A prominent indictment levelled at the protest wave that transpired at the turn of this decade engulfing many parts of the world has centred on the documented insistence on participatory inclusiveness at the expense of actionable policy goals. According to such accounts, the use of social media compounded this problem. In this final substantive cha...

This chapter introduces the social movement organisations (SMOs) staging the protest events reviewed in the book. The latter ranged from an activist protest festival to protest camps or synchronised demonstrations taking place across Europe on the same day of action. The organisations running them shared many traits discussed comparatively in the c...

In this chapter, I reflect on the priming of participation in protest events through networked communication on various digital platforms including social media. I ask the question of the extent to which such prefiguration of participation occurs and look at some of the ways in which it does in the context of two contrasting environmental protests....

This chapter is dedicated to organisational processes and the influential scholarship of late, which posits a socio-technological and distributed substantiation of activist organisations. Alluding to a multiplication of organisational forms, the theory of connective action networking inspired my analysis of the 2014 pan-European protests against th...

In this chapter, I turn my attention to social movement organisations as I seek to discern how they interpret and manage the communication with their social media following. Reviewing empirical data from two separate case studies, I show that a dominant technological frame encapsulating such interpretations pivoted on an understanding that the Face...

Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique T...

This chapter continues the initial foray into the priming of protest participation through networked communication in order to outline what I designate as a casual mode of participation. The term casual helps to paint the picture of prospective participants with no affiliations to activist organisations who moot their intentions and prepare their a...

I conclude with a return to the main analysis I propose in the book. I reiterate my call for an evidence-based treatment of digital pefigurative participation in contentious politics that measures its scope, reveals its fabric, maps its relative persistence and enquires of its juxtaposition with other forms of civic participation.

The book examines the highly dynamic communication ecology of recent contentious politics and its expanding digital footprint. First, it looks at the attainment of democratic citizenship through practice as street protests attract substantial numbers of followers who narrate their involvement or reflect on the claims and the implications of collect...

Special issue on protest communication ecology, edited by Dan Mercea, Laura Iannelli, and Brian Loader. Access at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rics20/19/3?nav=tocList

The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special is...

Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria. By Dawson James . Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 224p. $119.95. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. By Greenberg Jessica . Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. 248p. $90.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - Volume 13 Issue 3 - Dan Mercea

Communication on social media preceding coordinated street demonstrations is assayed for evidence of practice-based informal civic learning about conventional politics and mainstream media. This is done to offset a mounting interest in activist self-organization and self-reflexivity with a scrutiny of networked communication as a civic literacy eve...

Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying...

Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a...

As the latest instalments of protest from the Arab Spring to Occupy and beyond are digested in scholarly work, they point to a scalable, informal structure that develops as an impermanent framework for performing coordinational tasks formerly associated with collective organizations. Whilst a substitution of this nature appears a distinct possibili...

There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies, which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest...

This article examines the use of Facebook by social movement organizations (SMOs) and the ramifications from that usage for their organizational form. Organizational forms have been viewed to be in flux as networked communication becomes embedded in mobilization repertoires. In what follows, it is shown that the utilization of Facebook by networked...

This book critically investigates the complex interaction between social media and contemporary democratic politics, and provides a grounded analysis of the emerging importance of Social media in civic engagement.

This article reviews the main findings of a three-year empirical study that examined the possible contribution of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to participation in offline social movement protest events. Participation was examined as manifest in mobilization, identity building and organizational transformation. Digital prefigurative partici...

Early conceptions of digital democracy as a virtual public sphere or civic commons have been replaced by a new technological optimism for democratic renewal based upon the open and collaborative networking characteristics of social media. This article provides an introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communicatio...

The Mindbomb project was started by a group of young artists, journalists and writers, rich in creative resources. Together they created the social poster. It became a means to hack into the dominant discourse of mainstream politics, the mass media and the advertising industry. This paper will attempt to give an answer to the question: how to local...