From Creation to Amplification: Occupy Wall Street’s Transition into an Online Populist Movement

Abstract

Within recent years, an array of public protests has swept across the globe with remarkable force, from the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados to Occupy Wall Street and the recent uprisings in Ukraine and Thailand. Besides constituting convenient platforms for citizens to express frustration and discontent with the established system, these movements seem to signal a shift in the way we conceive of public participation in politics. Instead of participating through conventional means, these protest movements allow citizens to bypass traditional institutions of liberal democracy, and influence political processes through extra-institutional activities (West, 2013). As a consequence, several scholars have suggested that we broaden our conception of democracy to encompass this novel type of political participation (e.g. Angus, 2001; della Porta, 2013; Maeckelbergh, 2009; Zukin et al., 2006). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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