From Mobilization to Organization: The Afterlives of Protest in the Digital Age

Abstract

Digital tools now enable crowds to assemble without formal organization, but their long-term impact is understudied. Drawing on 397 events and 15 months of fieldwork, this study compares the two poles of an organizational continuum during Brazil's 2013--2016 protest cycle: leaderless online-to-offline protests, and those convoked by unions and other formal movement associations. I code the main challenger groups on organizational vitality, leadership trajectories, electoral articulation, and policy durability (OLEP) five and ten years past the peak, a longitudinal complement to WUNC, Tilly's contemporaneous measures of protest strength. The two poles scored similarly on worthiness and numbers, differed on commitment and unity, and digital origins shaped but did not determine outcomes. Across left- and right-wing formations, protest groups that invested in membership structures converted mobilization into political influence. The labor federations atrophied, and many once-prominent groups dissolved. I explain these dissolutions as a consequence of means--ends decoupling---activity that proceeds without producing the outcomes it is meant to serve. Digital decoupling specifies the mechanism under technological mediation: action multiplies, while the capacities that produce intended outcomes do not. Mistaking protest activity for the movements it once indexed helps explain a decade of mass mobilization that produced little durable change.