Understanding Elite Level Republican Support for Insurrection at the Capitol

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Public Opinion

Abstract

This paper considers the effects of surrogate organizations (Ziblatt 2017) on the U.S. Republican Party. A principal theoretical contribution made by the paper is the application of recent political communication and social movements research to the study of democratic stabilization. Specifically, we consider the role of “communication as organization” (Bennett and Segerberg 2013) on democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Communication as organization refers to mostly or entirely online coordinated actions that constitute a new organizational morphology. Coordinated online collective action, or what Bennett and Segerberg call connective action, has many of the characteristics of a formal hierarchical or bureaucratic organization. We add a consideration of virtual surrogate organizations to the consideration of the conditions that lead to democratic backsliding.

What is a conventional surrogate organization? Single-issue groups such as the NRA, media outlets such as Fox News, and religious confessional groups such as Christian nationalists offer examples. They are often more effective in mobilizing supporters than is the GOP. “These organizations can focus on building strong emotional bonds with citizens and tapping shared identities. Crucially, these organizations may feel much less need to moderate and equivocate” (Hacker and Pierson, p. 23). In this way, party surrogate organizations are Janus-faced. While they are needed to mobilize supporters, they can also pose a danger to the party. When surrogates are better resourced and more ideologically committed than the party, they can undermine party cohesion and ideological coherence. It is said they have been “captured” by its own surrogates. Ziblatt (2017), for example, argues that center-right parties are “captured” when party leadership is no longer able to “dominate their interest groups and activists” (See also Gidron and Ziblatt 2020). In the same vein, Hacker and Pierson (2020) argue that the GOP has been captured by an array of GOP-aligned surrogate organizations, including the NRA, neoliberal donor networks, and right-wing media. According to their analysis, these surrogate organization have pulled the GOP into more extreme positions. In this light, the January 6th insurrection represents the culmination of this drift towards illiberalism.

Virtual organizations (Bennett and Segerberg 2013) such as QAnon can also now be counted among GOP surrogates. Surrogate organizations undermine the GOP’s ability to maintain distinct ideological and organizational boundaries. The weakening of GOP control of its own coherence and relations with powerful surrogate organizations – including virtual ones -- warrants further study.

To do this we rely on social media data from Twitter and Facebook to map the right-wing information ecosystem in the time period around the certification of the 2020 election. Analyzing network maps of conservative social media profiles will provide a better understanding of the role virtual surrogate organizations played in inciting an armed takeover of Congress. Additionally, we utilize Federal Election Commission data and investigations by government watchdog groups to gauge the extent to which more conventional Republican surrogates helped fund and facilitate the “Stop the Steal” rallies. Initial indications suggest that major GOP surrogate organizations, including the Republican Attorneys General Association, ALEC, and the Club for Growth, were involved in organizing the Capitol siege (Kotch 2021; Salcedo 2021). Both the network mapping data and the “conventional” surrogate organization funding data will provide a glimpse into the role of GOP surrogates play in pulling the party further into illiberal terrain.




References
Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, (Cambridge University Press).
Gidron, Noam, and Daniel Ziblatt (2019). “Center-Right Political Parties in Advanced Democracies.” Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1:(17-35).
Haggard, Stephen, and Robert Kaufman (2021). Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World, (Cambridge University Press).
Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson (2020). Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Liveright Publishing Corporation).
Kotch, Alex (Jan. 14, 2021). “ALEC Lawmakers Traveled to D.C. For Rally and March That Led to Fatal Insurrection.” Exposed by CMD. https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/01/13/alec-lawmakers-traveled-d-c-rally-march-that-led-fatal-insurrection/
Salcedo, Andrea (Jan. 11, 2021). “Republican AGs group sent robocalls urging protestors to the Capitol. GOP officials now insist they didn’t know about it.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/11/gop-robocalls-trump-rally-capitol/
Ziblatt, Daniel (2017). Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press).

Authors

• Lorcan Neill, George Washington University

• Steven L. Livingston, George Washington University

• Yunkang Yang