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Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the book’s central argument. It uses the February 2011 labor protests in Wisconsin to examine the role that internet-mediated advocacy groups play in American politics today. It also discusses the prevailing scholarship on internet politics, arguing that it has fallen into two categories—“organizing without organizations/theory 2.0,” which examines new forms of online participation, and “political normalization,” which highlights the resilience of elite political institutions. The chapter also challenges existing arguments regarding “clicktivism” and suggests that researchers have overlooked the “organizational layer” of politics. Sustained, large-scale collective action such as the Wisconsin protests is mediated through a new generation of advocacy groups that have a substantial impact on the practice of politics. The largest effect of the internet on politics is felt not through organizing without organizations, but through organizing with different organizations. The chapter also introduces core terminology, explains the method of analysis, and provides an overview of the book.

Chapter 2 places the new generation of internet-mediated organizations into historical context, emphasizing the substantive importance of the new communications technologies. Building upon the works of Skocpol (2003), Bimber (2003), Bosso (2005), Berry (1999), and others, the chapter draws parallels between the well-studied “interest group explosion” of the 1970s and the rise of “netroots” political associations today. Both are predicated on changes to the technological environment, enabling changes in membership and fundraising regimes. Shifts in these regimes facilitate opportunities for a new set of political actors to experiment with novel structures for collective action. This transition can be properly understood as a “disruptive innovation,” in which longstanding organizations are displaced as the “market” for political mobilization is fundamentally redefined (Christensen 1997). After introducing the historical analogue, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of MoveOn.org, highlighting the innovations in staff structure, membership, fundraising, and strategy that have made it such an important force in American politics today. The chapter concludes by discussing the disruptive fundraising challenges that the MoveOn Effect poses for legacy advocacy groups. Drawing upon data from the Membership Communications Project dataset and new research by the Monitor Institute, it highlights the generational differences in online fundraising between new groups and old.

Not all netroots advocacy groups mimic MoveOn’s organizational structure. Chapter 3 turns attention to a set of large-scale community blogs that function as political associations. Previous blog researchers have chiefly treated bloggers as a single population of “citizen journalists” seeking to transform the media system (Davis 2009, Perlmutter 2008, Pole 2009) or as a new set of political elites, demographically similar to their predecessors (Hindman 2009). This chapter focuses attention on the activity and operation of DailyKos.com to argue that these online advocates are using blogging to act as online organizers rather than online journalists. Using data from the Blogosphere Authority Index (Karpf 2008a, 2008b), this chapter explores the role that community blogs play in the overall ecology of netroots advocacy groups. It also confronts several longstanding mistakes made by blog researchers. Community blogs are the most-hybridized of all the new advocacy organizations, so much so that they are completely ignored by interest group scholars. The chapter emphasizes the participatory volunteer structure built into the DailyKos software platform and also points to key differences in progressive and conservative use of political blogs.

The most common criticism of netroots advocacy associations is that they engage in “clicktivism,” mobilizing large online publics to engage in simple online actions, with little real-world effect. This chapter primarily discusses Democracy for America—a major netroots organization that uses the internet primarily to coordinate offline activities among its federated units. Based on eight months of participant observation with the Philadelphia chapter of Democracy for America, as well as interviews with leaders of the organization, this chapter reveals the often-overlooked benefits of the internet for encouraging face-to-face participation in local communities. It discusses the concept of “sedimentary organizations,” or internet-mediated groups that build their member list and reputation through a social movement- or election-related period of heightened citizen participation. It also discusses the increasing importance of the Mobile Web for such offline engagement, arguing that devices such as the iPhone and Android phones blur the distinction between “online” and “offline,” allowing for expanded location-based solutions to the challenges faced by neo-federated groups. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Organizing for America, the sedimentary organization produced by the Obama for America campaign. OFA provides a limited approximation of the neo-federated ideal type due to its relationship to the Democratic National Committee and to the president himself. The chapter helps us to locate OFA in the broader landscape of American political associations.

Chapter 5 turns our attention beyond membership-based advocacy associations to the expansive set of “netroots infrastructure organizations” populating the landscape today. The chapter begins by evaluating the historical circumstances present during the development of these “netroots” political associations. Consecutive losses in several U.S. elections, along with grassroots partisan frustration over the Iraq War, culminated in the formation of the Democracy Alliance, a collaborative effort among progressive patron donors to better direct their donations and build new “political infrastructure.” The resulting infrastructure supports the new generation of political associations in a variety of ways and helps to flesh out our understanding of how new media has affected the organizational layer of American politics. The chapter includes profiles of five distinct forms of infrastructure: training/ideas (New Organizing Institute), fundraising technical support (ActBlue), for-profit technical support (Blue State Digital/National Field), progressive social networking (Living Liberally), and networked backchannel conversations (semiformal listservs like TownHouse and JournoList). The backchannel lists in particular demonstrate the more porous political networks that now constitute the American advocacy group systems.

The first 5 chapters of the book are primarily concerned with left-wing interest groups. This is for the simple reason that there is no right-wing analogue to MoveOn, Democracy for America, or DailyKos. Chapter 6 turns attention to the surprising dearth of conservative parallel organizations. After discussing ongoing conservative attempts to build an answer to MoveOn, DailyKos, and ActBlue, including the rise of the Tea Party movement, it introduces the theory of “outparty innovation incentives” as an explanation of the partisan adoption of technological innovations. At the interest group, candidate, and party network levels, the party out of power has strong incentives to invest in new technologies and seek to “change the rules of the game.” The chapter details two competing theses—“ideological congruence” and “merry pranksters”—and presents evidence in favor of the outparty model. In so doing, it also challenges technologically deterministic simplified claims that often plague the discourse and suggests a novel insight about the history of partisan technological adoption.

Chapter 7 offers a summary of findings and a series of concluding observations regarding the role of technology in American political advocacy. It offers a broader perspective on the intermediary role that the organizational layer of politics plays between elite political institutions and mass political behavior. The concluding observations discuss topics such as the mechanisms that facilitate continual change within the political system (innovation edges and advocacy inflation), the role of new media tools in facilitating new forms of “activated public opinion,” the disruptive challenges posed by the loss of “beneficial inefficiencies,” and the participatory benefits of the sedimentary character of netroots organizations.

Despite the importance of local civic spaces, political systems operate in larger domains, especially given technological changes that sponsor new media. Chapter Seven, Extensions, describes how a meso-analysis might extend behind the local. In such circumstances, face-to-face interaction is altered, creating new circuits of action. This is particularly true given the prominence of social media and cyber-connection that challenge traditional face-to-face interaction, altering the meaning of co-presence (Campos-Castillo and Hitlin 2013; Zhao 2003). New interaction orders are created as our understanding of what constitutes interaction has expanded. Social media require rethinking what it means to be together. Online communication with its strands of “friends” exposes the significance of affiliative ties, even if these ties do not involve face-to-face interaction, once considered the sine qua non of social psychology. Are tiny publics truly tiny if anyone can join with a mouse click?