Discursive Opportunities Research Articles

Platform affordances, discursive opportunities, and social media activism: A cross-platform analysis of #MeToo on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, 2017–2020

This study proposes affordances for discursive opportunities (ADO) as a theoretical framework that leverages the concept of technological affordances and the theory of discursive opportunities to understand platform potential in shaping social media activism. Specifically, ADO underscores how social media platform affordances (e.g., algorithmic curation, shared group identity and culture, connectivity) shape movement visibility, resonance, and legitimacy, all of which can mobilize activism efforts. We further situate our discussion in the cross-platform context to explore both differences and interconnections between different platforms in facilitating digital activism. By analyzing 20,363,128 English posts related to the #MeToo movement from 2017 to 2020 on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit using supervised machine learning and time series analysis, we reveal platform variations in affording discursive opportunities for visibility, resonance, and legitimacy, which shape activism efforts differently across platforms. We also find a unidirectional relationship from activism on Twitter and Reddit to activism on Facebook.

Contesting patents on COVID-19 vaccines in the EU: the no profit on pandemic campaign

ABSTRACT This article presents and analyses the campaign behind the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘No Profit on Pandemic’ which challenged patents for COVID-19 vaccines. Albeit unsuccessful, we argue that the campaign offers a unique opportunity to study the transnationalisation of European contention during the ‘emergency critical juncture’ of the pandemic. We situate the campaign within (1) the broader Europeanisation of health governance and (2) the wider ‘Access to Medicines’ movement to point to the political obstacles and discursive opportunities for anti-patent mobilisation over the period. We conclude that, despite the discursive opportunities offered, the campaign failed to break through the political push-back and the industry opposition. The article, thus, contributes to the literature on health activism, in general, and progressive social movements during the pandemic, in particular, and hopes to shed some light on the global politics of public health.

Engaging with discursive complexities in mental health accessibility: Implications for acquired brain injury.

The psychosocial needs of people with acquired brain injury (ABI) have been neglected based on ableist assumptions of incapability to participate in mental health treatment. Although people without disabilities benefit from evidence-based mental health supports, these treatments remain inaccessible for those with disabilities after ABI. Discursive simplifications used in dominant conceptualisations of health and disability may maintain this inaccessibility. This paper examines the role of discursive constraints in concealing the complexities of ABI recovery, undermining the gradients of mental health exclusion among different ABI subpopulations, and muddying possibilities for enhancing mental health accessibility. An alternate discourse that challenges disabling societies in service of centring the whole person is proposed. Discursive opportunities are thus created by conceptualising the objective and subjective dimensions of disability as intermeshed, providing both the motivation to incentivise mental health inclusion, as well as a method to achieve it. By recognising the unavoidable impact of bodily impairments on social participation, participatory ideals can be actualised by accommodating ABI-related disabilities in mental health treatments. The possibilities for transformative research and practice are illuminated through examples of mental health treatments that have been preliminarily adapted using accommodations, and a research agenda for realising these possibilities is proposed.

Beyond the backyard: Scaling up of resistance to wind power in Sweden

Since 2009, when a municipal veto right was established, wind power in Sweden has become intensely politicised and questioned. Having been considered the key technology to drive the energy system transition by all parliamentary parties before 2010, the 2022 elections brought into power a government that promised an end to the “steel forests of wind turbines”. Based on a comprehensive analysis of media coverage of wind power conflicts on national and local levels, the study explains these developments as a discursive struggle. It shows how localised and fragmented resistance groups evolved into generalised opposition to wind power per se. These shifts are explained as enabled by political, legal and discursive opportunity structures.The study shows how political, legal and discursive opportunities allow for the scaling up of localised resistance to wind power. It explains wind power resistance as embedded in socio-political structures by analysing the relationship between resistance claims on different institutional and geographic scales. While previous research has identified a need to look beyond formal planning processes and at wider sociopolitical contexts to understand the formation of wind power resistance, there is a lack of comprehensive, longitudinal studies of how local resistance shift scales into national resistance. We provide a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of a national case of growing wind power resistance. By showing the speed with which a counter discourse was able to shift scales and gain an entrenched position in Swedish energy politics, the paper enables an understanding of similar developments around Europe.

Colonial Redress and the Unintended Consequences of Global Opportunities

Abstract Research shows that the rise of political and discursive opportunities enabled by the diffusion of progressive global norms has empowered many aggrieved local actors. Drawing on colonial victims’ transnational redress movements, I add to this literature in two ways. First, rejecting the common association between global opportunities and local movement facilitation and success, I make a counterintuitive argument that the early availability of opportunities can inadvertently hamper a movement’s efficacy in achieving its goals in the long run. Second, contrary to the implicit assumption that large-scale, high-profile transnational movements should fare better than smaller, little-known ones, I demonstrate that the latter can sometimes achieve their goals more easily than the former. In making these arguments, I show that an increasing focus in the norm literature on backlash in target states against norm promotion risks neglecting the flip side of the same coin: Global normative support inadvertently undermining the efficacy of local causes it otherwise helps publicize. Empirically, I look at three Korean colonial victim groups and their divergent paths to transnational redress.

A dilemma of visibility: discursive opportunities, audiences, and anti-migrant protest strategy

ABSTRACT Why do collective actors sometimes choose not to expand their audiences, despite opportunities to do so? Combining Erving Goffman’s micro-sociological concept of audience segregation with social movement theory’s discussions of discursive opportunity, the article suggests that collective actors face a persistent dilemma between the benefits of growing audience reach and the difficulties of maintaining a coherent and credible front vis-à-vis an increasingly diverse audience. The argument is applied to a qualitative analysis of three different cases of anti-migrant protest from Sweden and from the wider EU. The cases consider how local protest campaigns respond to opportunities to reach national audiences, how the right-wing populist party Sweden Democrats (SD) chooses to engage or not engage with local campaigns, and how the pan-European Generation Identity (GI) decides to temporarily expand its communication toward a transnational audience. The analysis shows how actors’ responses to the dilemma generate very different effects out of similar and supposedly favorable discursive opportunities. The results contribute to the literature on anti-migrant protest specifically, and to the discussion of discursive opportunities generally.

Political opportunities and mobilisation on the far-right in Ukraine

ABSTRACT The Ukrainian far right has attracted massive media interest, from Russian media condemning Ukraine’s alleged Nazi takeover to international media warning of it becoming a transnational far-right hotspot. Countering these misconceptions, this article empirically studies the Ukrainian far-right movement to explain its mobilisation dynamics 2004–2020. Why did mobilisation peak in 2010–2014, and decline after? I argue that a combination of political and discursive opportunities offers an answer. However, these opportunities played out differently in Ukraine – a hybrid regime at war – than conventional social movement theory suggests. The Ukrainian case thus furthers our understanding of far-right movements beyond consolidated democracies.

Domesticating the Global Discourse of Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Iran: A Sociological Institutionalist Account

This article explores how nationhood was discursively constructed in early twentieth-century Iran. While most studies concentrate on micro-national causes, this study complements this literature by drawing on domestication theory to show how globally diffused nationalist discourse was localized and tailored to the Iranian context at the turn of the twentieth century. It employs the methods of critical discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis to investigate politics in the construction of nationhood in Iran. The data include all editorials and articles in three highly influential Iranian periodicals: Qanun, Tarbiyat, and Kaveh. By analyzing the shared premises in this data, the study highlights the transnational nature of the discourse to indicate how Iranian nationhood was embedded in world society yet adapted locally. The analysis then identifies three variations of Iranian nationhood, each woven into a particular national narrative at the time. These findings attest to the meso-level approach that addresses the discursive side of diffusion mechanisms and calls attention to the discursive politics in localization processes of nationhood. They point to new directions to understand contemporary Iran, not as an outlier or exception, but rather as discursively connected to world society. Given the discursive opportunities arising from these contentious notions of nationhood, the study calls for further critical investigations of identity-based appeals, often by authoritarian actors, in Iran’s modern politics.

DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITIES AND THE MOTIVATIONAL FRAMING OF HUMAN-RIGHTS ACTIVISM FOR EAST TIMOR: A CROSSNATIONAL ANALYSIS

Drawing from previously untapped archival data, our research undertakes a crossnational analysis to understand how critical organizations within the global solidarity movement for East Timor in Canada, the United States, and Australia adapted their human-rights claims and rhetorical interventions to their specific national contexts to produce politically and culturally resonant motivational frames aligned with their states’ discourses of national identity and foreign policy to support humanitarian intervention in East Timor. We identify crossnational differences in the framing of their political discourse: (1) Canadian groups mobilized a humanitarian-peacekeeping frame, (2) U.S. solidarity groups tapped into a democratic-exceptionalist frame, and (3) Australian activists drew from a remembrance-moral debt frame. We conclude by underscoring the importance of discursive opportunities and national historical contexts for studying the mobilization of human rights and crossnational variations in motivational framing.

Police, Violence, and the “Logic of Damage”: Comparing U.S. and Chilean Media Portrayals of Protests

ABSTRACT Drawing from the protest paradigm and the mediation opportunity structure, this study textually analyzes mainstream and alternative media coverage of the 2019 inequality protests in Chile and the 2020 racial justice protests in the United States. In both cases, violence and forceful policing were linked to the protests, allowing this study to explore mediated violence and compare the discursive construction of the demonstrations, protesters, and police as articulated through 1) violence/damage, 2) repression, 3) oppression, and 4) blame. Findings revealed Chilean and U.S. mainstream media emphasized protester violence in juxtaposition with police trying to maintain order, peacefulness was portrayed as a novelty, and violence was disengaged from historical context. In contrast, alternative media treated protester violence as a response to structural violence, and police repression of protesters was criticized. This study shows the continued pervasiveness of the protest paradigm in mainstream news, and the way alternative media can offer discursive opportunities to counterframe police and protester violence and challenge mainstream media’s hostile portrayals of protesters’ use of the logic of damage. Ultimately, we suggest media and discursive opportunity structures are key to understanding mainstream and alternative media portrayals of protests.

United we stood, divided we transform? Exploring coalition transformation divergence in the EU trade policy field

ABSTRACT During the EU-US (TTIP) and EU–Canada (CETA) free trade negotiations, large coalitions of civil society organisations were active not only across borders but also within European member states. In several countries, coalitions saw the opportunity to transform their issue-specific group into a general coalition on EU trade policy in order to achieve more sustained engagement. However, in hindsight, only some of the transformed coalitions remained active and visible with the same organisations, while others experienced a decline in visibility, activities, and membership. This study aims to explore the factors contributing to this divergence in coalition transformation, drawing on the literature from social movement and interest group studies. Based on interviews with trade activists in Belgium and the Netherlands, the analysis points to differences in perception of political and discursive opportunities, resource mobilisation, the degree of ideological and cultural overlap between the coalition’s actors, and organisational structure as important factors.

Making their Mark? How protest sparks, surfs, and sustains media issue attention

ABSTRACT Media attention is both an important outcome and a resource for protest groups. This paper examines media-movement dynamics using television news coverage of 1,277 protests in Belgium (2003–2019). We situate protest coverage in media issue attention cycles and scrutinize whether features of protest or rather media issue attention fluctuations are key for protest’s agenda-setting effect. Our results show that while most protests fail to alter the attention cycle, a considerable share of protests is followed by a significant increase in media issue attention, especially when surfing issue attention already on the rise. Overall, media issue attention cycles rather than protest features affect protest’s agenda-setting effect, suggesting that protest agenda-setting is more a matter of exploiting discursive opportunities than of forcing one’s issue on the media agenda by signaling newsworthiness. These findings have serious implications for our understanding of protest group agency in news making and agenda-setting.

Discursive strategies and activist framing in anti-mining campaigns

ABSTRACT A rich body of literature has established the importance of activist framing in environmental controversies. This research suggests that framing and framing contests are nested within broader discursive opportunity structures, which have significant implications for frame resonance and success. While significant research on environmental activism has investigated how activists can fight against new industrial projects, comparatively less is known about how activists can fight against these initiatives in areas that have been historically dependent on extractive industries. We utilise the case of a proposed gold mining project in Western Romania to investigate how environmental activists were able to successfully tap into broader national and international discursive opportunities to forestall the mining efforts in the region. Our data come from in-depth interviews and document analysis. We contribute to this body of research by shedding light on the dynamics surrounding activists’ shifts in framing strategies to reflect changes in discursive opportunity availability.

Eppur si Muove! Young People, Issue Salience and Volatility in Nine European Countries

AbstractPolitical participation and party attachment in Western democracies have become more and more volatile. In turn, political campaigns seem increasingly dependent on short-term discursive windows of opportunity opened by dynamic debates on issues such as migration, climate, employment and economic policies. Based on panel data from nine European countries, we investigate how patterns and changes in the materialist and postmaterialist concerns of respondents affect electoral turnout and party switching. By relating these variables, we aim to uncover whether and to what extent underlying concerns – and thus short-term politicization – account for short-term patterns of electoral volatility. We pay special attention to young respondents, who are often framed as being particularly dynamic and less bound to traditional political loyalties. Our findings offer insights into short-term change in discursive opportunities for political mobilization and broader democratic engagement.

Populist radical right parties and discursive opportunities during Covid-19. Blame attribution in times of crisis

This study examines how populist radical right parties (PRRP) adapt to the discursive opportunities delivered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Conducting manual content analyses of discourses on Twitter in six Western European countries between February and October 2020 we show that PRRP frame the pandemic as a domestic political crisis attacking primarily national political elites. While PRRP occasionally link their initial support for measures against the pandemic to blame attribution towards immigrants accusing them of spreading the virus, nativist messages almost disappear when PRRP became less supportive of restrictions. Instead, in countries less affected by the pandemic (Austria, Germany) as well as in Spain, PRRP compensate the lack of nativist messages by using anti-elitist demonizing discourses against the national government accusing it of abolishing democracy and undermining freedom. The study shows how PRRP electorally “survive” periods with scarce nativist discursive opportunities by emphasizing on anti-elitist discourses.

Ethnocentrism or universal human rights norms? A comparative analysis of debate on the children of temporary immigrant workers in Israel and Taiwan

This article applies discursive institutionalism to compare the debates on the children of temporary immigrant workers in Israel and Taiwan. Policymakers in both countries adopted a guestworker program that prevents the long-term settlement of foreign laborers, let alone that of their children. Over time, the increasing number of children born to these laborers triggered the debate on the proper treatment of these children. The debates in these two countries demonstrated varying discursive themes and led to different policy outcomes. Though primarily built on a particularistic, ethnocentric discourse, the discursive interactions around Israel’s Jewish identity resulted in two ad hoc, temporary decisions that legalized the status of hundreds of such children. In contrast, while the dominant narrative in Taiwan has been the supposedly more liberal idea of universal human rights norms, these children have been granted only temporary social service and education support, with no prospect of long-term legal settlement. To understand the seeming paradox in why the more ethnocentric discourse resulted in a degree of policy liberalization while a more universalistic discourse has not, this article shows how agents in the debate responded to the discursive opportunities, with each largely shaped by their respective national identity public philosophies.

A tale of two campaigns: understanding the role of short-term political context in Czech and Slovak counter/mobilizing on migration

ABSTRACT This paper explores protest mobilizations related to the 2015 migrant crisis in the post-communist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite dominating anti-refugee sentiments and similar historical and political background in the two countries, the mobilization patterns were fairly different in both scale and organization of migration-related mobilizations. To systematically explore and account for these variances, we investigate the short-term political conditions, focusing on 1) key features of the national political environment – discursive opportunities and political space, and 2) movement/countermovement dynamics. We build on the original protest event data during the most intense protests over migration in 2015. We show how a different political space and a different extent of openness of discursive opportunities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and interactions between the anti-refugee movement and the solidarity countermovement played an important role in the timing and scale of protests and their organizers.

Occupy Wall Street ten years on: How its disruptive institutional entrepreneurship spread and why it fizzled

How does media impact institutional entrepreneurs and their ability to create change? We draw from research on social movements and media frames to examine the paradox that media-informed discursive opportunities pose for institutional entrepreneurs engaged in efforts to transform or create social institutions. Through content analysis of 8473 newspaper articles covering the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, we highlight the paradox of discursive opportunities: the same types of media frames that initially encourage more disruptive tactics also subsequently increase the perceived threat of such disruption, thereby encouraging swifter counteraction. Our findings hold implications for the importance of media as a potential catalyst for entrepreneurial activity in the realm of social movements hoping to engage in reform.

Contestation and norm change in whale and elephant conservation: Non-use or sustainable use?

Elephants and whales took center stage in the environmental movements of the 1980s. As flagship species, they were the poster children of global initiatives: international ivory trading and commercial whaling were banned in the 1980s in the context of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the International Whaling Commission (IWC), respectively. While the conservation of both species is contested, we observe a change of existing norms in one case but not in the other: A moratorium on commercial whaling remains in place. Meanwhile, a limited shift to sustainable use regarding ivory was passed in 1997/2000. We ask why norm change occurred in one case but not the other, given their similarities. We argue that the difference can be explained by the perceived legitimacy of the claims of norm challengers using arguments of “affectedness” and the breadth of issues covered by CITES. In contrast, other factors commonly discussed in norms research do not explain this puzzle: the relative power and strategies of norm advocates and challengers, and the degree of legalization. This shows the interplay of discursive aspects and concrete institutional opportunities for norm change, even in the face of otherwise inopportune conditions.

Policy Change in Times of Politicization: The Case of Corporate Taxation in the European Union*

AbstractEU corporate tax policy has long consisted solely in eliminating fiscal barriers. This changed after the financial and Eurozone crises when the European Commission proposed ‘market‐correcting’ provisions to increase tax transparency and ‘fairness’, which were partially adopted by the Council. Analyses of EU responses to the crisis have largely ignored taxation issues. This article fills this gap and explains the substantive re‐orientation of EU corporate tax policy through the concept of politicization. Based on 19 expert interviews, it details the politicization process of corporate taxation resulting from changes in global governance, media tax scandals, and the work of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). Through the politicization dynamic, new institutional and discursive opportunities were exploited by the European Commission, Parliament and NGOs to induce policy change. We explore this reciprocal interaction between social forces and supranational actors to demonstrate that ‘politicization at the top’ can facilitate a more progressive deepening of European integration.