Affective Action in Organizations: Social Media, Personalized Communication and Advocacy in the European Union

Abstract

Civil society organizations such as citizen groups and NGOs are the cornerstone of democratic pluralism but face a significant engagement problem: people are more interested in unconventional forms of participation than in participating in formal groups. The literature on digital media and collective action argues that social media should partially solve the problem by allowing the public to participate in organizations in a more personalized way. However, we still know little about which groups are more likely to use social media for public engagement, and which types of frames are more likely to engage the current individualized public. I aim to fill this gap in the literature by presenting and testing a theory of Affective Action in Organizations. I portray social media engagement with civil society groups as a function of their public dependence, the types of messages they promote, and the emotions these messages evoke. I build on existing political psychology models to argue that two emotions related to people’s dispositional system (enthusiasm and anger) and one emotion related to the surveillance system (anxiety) explain in part why people decide to engage with civil society groups online. I empirically test the argument by studying how Twitter users interact with hundreds of civil society organizations advocating in the European Union.