E-motions and participation in technopopulist movement-parties. Enthusiasm and technopolitical disillusion

Abstract

Social movements (SMs) protesting against the consequences of the austerity produced by the 2008 great recession leveraged collective participation as a paradigmatic way of revamping democratic institutions and processes. In southern Europe, participation was harnessed by technopolitical movement-parties (MPs) such as the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy and Podemos in Spain. These are political forces combining SM characteristics with a technopolitical narrative to induce ‘e-motions’: emotional arousal of the membership produced by idealising the potential of digital technologies to enact unprecedented popular participation to renew democracy. Combining technocracy (popular competence via technopolitics) with populism (people vs elite rhetoric) the M5S and Podemos built a technopopulist discourse able to generate emotional engagement of the membership and high expectations for collective participation. However, the centralism of the leadership and its control over technopolitics produced an individualised model of engagement which led to disillusion. The article firstly elaborates a narrative literature review on participation, technopolitics, movement-parties, populism, and emotions to frame the affective relationship between participation and technopopulism. Secondly it uses qualitative methods to scrutinise the constituent process of M5S and Podemos technopolitics – when the digital process and infrastructures were created within both MPs – outlining the emotions elicited by technopolitical technopopulism.