Platform-Based Political Organization: The Emergence of Pseudonymous Leadership

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

This paper discusses the nature of leadership in two recent examples of prominent platform-based political organizations. It complicates the two dominant ideas in this area: first, that contemporary protest-oriented political organizations are driven by the crowd through self-motivated online sharing; second, that such organizations should preferably be directed by strong and visible charismatic personalities. The first idea is supported by recent theories like connective action by Bennett and Segerberg (2013), as well as the popular intention of many social movement organizations to build more leaderless and decentralised structures. This view is contested by those authors who view leaderless as a rhetorical construction - a self-description of many digitally-enabled organizations rather than a reality (Flesher Fominaya, 2015; Poell et al., 2016).
In repressive environments of authoritarian countries, the state often surveils and persecutes leadership of opposition organizations, which reduces their capacities and could lead to total suppression. To avoid suppression, platform-based political organization adapt by strategically using platform affordances. The research question is: What key leadership-related adaptations could be observed in platform-based opposition organization acting in a repressive environment?
The approach of the research is informed by political communication and social movement studies. It compares two cases of prominent and partly successful platform-based political organizations that emerged in challenging repressive environments in 2017: the Anti-tax campaign in Belarus and the organization of Alexei Navalny in Russia. The methods of the study are in-depth interviews with activists and content analysis of their external and internal communication on platforms: Telegram, VK, OK and Facebook. In particular, the analysis is based on the 36 interviews with the activists of the studied campaigns and on content analysis of 21 Telegram pages as well as 93 VK, OK and Facebook pages that constituted the digital infrastructure of the studied groups.
The research provides both practical and theoretical contributions. First, it analyses internal organizational communication on a messaging platform, Telegram. The research contributes with the approaches to access and analyze such communication. Second, it demonstrates that platform affordances can enable differential leadership modes. These modes allow leaders to manage their visibility and to stay public as well as to cover their identities by adopting pseudonyms. The latter visibility mode helps to avoid persecution but still retain the ability to coordinate collective action. These two types of leadership are not mutually exclusive and could co-exist in the same organizational cell. Thus, the paper contributes to the literature on platform-based political organizations by demonstrating the emergence of a novel type of leadership defined as a pseudonymous leader.

Author

• Aliaksandr Herasimenka, University of Westminster