New forms of networked action and informal collaboration are challenging traditional notions of civil society. Based on the proliferation of new technologies, and spurred by the spread of trans-border delocalized communities and the increasing disillusionment with traditional forms of political organization, civic action is becoming increasingly flexible, temporary, and elusive. This type of nontraditionally organized collective action often stays below the radar of public discourse, unless it is propelled to the spotlight because of international political developments such as the WikiLeaks case (and the related actions by the cyberactivist network Anonymous) and the mass protests in Northern Africa and the Middle East (and the role of social networking tools in these uprisings). In this article, we investigate the interactions and (in)compatibilities of Internet-based networked collective action with institutionalized spaces of policy debate. We begin by characterizing online networked action as an emerging form of organized civil society, focusing on the realm of cyberactivists who are building and using cyber-infrastructure (“grassroots tech groups”). In particular, we examine their values, identity features, and organizational forms. Based on this analysis, we explore two dimensions in which cyberactivism challenges established forms of institutionalized policy debate: the structural dimension and the realm of action repertoires. We ask whether these new forms of civil society are structurally compatible with current multistakeholder governance, and we discuss their repertoires of action with regard to policy advocacy and policy interventions, and thus the level and type of their engagement with governance processes and institutions.

In the past decade, parliaments in industrialized countries have been pressured to adopt more restrictive legislation to prevent unauthorized file-sharing and enforce higher standards of digital copyright enforcement over entertainment media and computer software. A complex process of supranational and national lawmaking has resulted in several legislatures adopting such measures, with wide variations in content and implementation. These policy developments offer an interesting research puzzle, given their high political salience and the amount of controversy they have generated. Specifically, the introduction of harsher intellectual property regulations has resulted in intense “online” and “offline” collective action by skilled activists who have significantly altered the digital copyright policy field over the years. In France, grassroots movements have turned the passing of digital copyright infringement laws through Parliament into highly controversial episodes. Similarly, at the European level, the Telecoms Package Reform has given rise to an intense protest effort, carried by an ad hoc coalition of European activists. In both cases, online mobilization was an essential element of political contention against these legislative initiatives. In both cases, our analysis shows that online mobilization and contention can substantially affect policymaking by disrupting the course of parliamentary lawmaking at both the national and European levels. We provide an analytical framework to study these processes, as well as an analysis of the frames and digital network repertoires involved in the two cases under scrutiny, with reference to the nascent research agenda formed by the politics of intellectual property.

The annual United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences provides a transnational mediation opportunity structure for activist networks to contest policies that favor market-based models for solving the climate crisis. Online technologies, including commercial social media, have arguably increased possibilities for being involved in protests on a transnational level. However, this article shows how online modes of action privilege lobbying tactics over civil disobedience tactics, arguing that the former is often incommensurate with an anticapitalist climate approach to climate change activism. This impedes possibilities for using online media to protest at the radical end of the climate justice movement spectrum. This article explores this interrelationship between activist demands and (online) modes of action through a focus on the mobilization efforts of London-based activists for the 17th UN climate conference in 2011.

There has been an international growth in online campaigning organizations that engage in public policy debate and mobilize citizens. This paper analyzes how political action undertaken by these organizations promotes an innovative approach to storytelling and discursive politics. The main question addressed here is: how do storytelling tactics underpin the multi-issue oriented, online strategies of campaigning organizations? GetUp! is an Australian online political campaigning organization with over 600,000 members, that has conducted high-profile public policy campaigns on issues as diverse as mental health, electoral law, same-sex marriage, and climate change. This qualitative case study demonstrates how GetUp!'s communications strategy tries to use storytelling to reorient political debate—and the nature of politics itself—in an affective way. The construction of online campaign stories underpins their political tactics. Stories are used to help citizens, and to a lesser extent, decision makers, identify with an issue, build community, and act in recognition of the moral urgency for political change.

Since the early 2000s, the European Commission has put online e-participation and e-government platforms related to various institutional strategies. These participative mechanisms, which are both policy instruments and communication tools for the Commission, are used by activists as political opportunities to make their voices heard by the European institutions. In this paper, we describe how these activists use Web technical resources, and foremost hyperlinks, to mobilize individuals and run online collective actions in order to make their causes public on European scenes. We show that hyperlinks can be considered as aggregative mechanisms which allow individuals to gather around a common project, and that these mobilization practices lead to the constitution of strategic public spheres on the Web.

The article adopts a neo-Gramscian analytical framework developed in the field of International Political Economy in order to analyze the relationship between an online collective of civil society actors and U.K. government policymakers in the case of the UK's Open Government Data (OGD) initiative. The aim of the article is to consider the neo-Gramscian notion of trasformismo as a useful conceptual tool for exploring the relations between the OGD advocates and policymakers within the U.K. state. Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the notion of trasformismo is able to illuminate some of the political processes of absorption, adaptation, and distortion which have emerged during the development of the UK's OGD initiative, and which have functioned to restrict the counterhegemonic potential of OGD in order to shape the initiative toward a distinctly neoliberal framework for action.