Social Movements and Political Parties: Communication and Participation

Contemporary social movements are pivotal agents whose interaction with institutional politics is essential for understanding modern democratic participation. Historically, scholarly analysis has examined how political structures influence collective action or how movements achieve specific policy and cultural outcomes. However, the emergence of digital media has fundamentally reconfigured these dynamics, facilitating networked mobilisation and the rise of movement parties. These hybrid organisations integrate strategic practices of contentious action into formal party competition, often decentralising communicative processes such as electoral campaigns. Furthermore, the shift from cyberactivism towards technopolitics reflects a transition towards pragmatic orientations aimed at institutional impact rather than merely alternative spaces. In this context, the communicative sphere has become the primary arena where power relations are contested. Consequently, a comprehensive investigation into the multidimensional and complex communicational links between social movements and political parties is now imperative.The primary objective of this Research Topic is to elucidate the complex, multidimensional communicational interrelationships between social movements and political parties within contemporary sociopolitical landscapes. A significant challenge remains in understanding the articulation between instituting collective action and instituted politics, a relationship essential for rethinking democratic participation. Current scholarly debates highlight a tension between traditional structural theories and emergent digital dynamics, where superficial knowledge persists regarding how digital media influences tangible policy outcomes. Furthermore, the transition from collective to connective action has raised concerns regarding the sustainability and effectiveness of digitally networked resistance against established state agencies and partisan structures. There is an urgent need to address the analytical difficulties in assessing the political productivity of movements that often operate outside or in opposition to predetermined representative channels. To address these challenges, this issue seeks innovative, interdisciplinary contributions that examine the mediation of power relationships and the insertion of technopolitical profiles into representative democracy. By integrating diverse methodological proposals and comparative studies—particularly from the Global South—the collection aims to provide a rigorous framework for analysing how communicative practices redefine the boundaries between contentious action and formal party competition.The Research topic is open to innovative approaches from communication, political science, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and related fields. Possible topics of the contributions include, but are not limited to: • The influence of current forms of digital activism in political participation of participants in collective action. • Communicational changes on collective action and their impact in the insertion of social movements into the channels of representative democracy.• Social movements and political change from diverse communicational contexts and backgrounds.• Comparative case studies of social movements that show the tendencies on their communicative participation in institutional politics.• The interrelations between collective action and specifically communicative processes of institutional politics such as electoral campaigns.• The mediation of communicative practices of social movements in their mediation of institutional political power and counter-power relationships.• Methodological proposals for the analysis of the communicational interrelationships between social movements and political parties. Topic editors: Lázaro M. Bacallao-Pino, Rolando Perez-Vela Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87016/social-movements-and-political-parties-communication-and-participation