Social Activism and Citizen Engagement: Toward an Integrated Theory of Digitally Mediated Democratization in Divided Societies.

Abstract

Existing theoretical accounts of digital activism have been developed substantially with reference to authoritarian or semi-authoritarian contexts in which the state actively suppresses civic space, most notably the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, while existing accounts of civic culture predate digital mediation entirely, having been developed to explain political attitudes and participation in comparatively stable, industrialized democracies. Neither tradition, taken alone, adequately theorizes citizen engagement informally democratic but ethnically, religiously, or regionally plural developing states, where digital mobilization operates neither against outright authoritarian closure nor within a settled civic culture. This article addresses that gap conceptually and theoretically by integrating political science and mass communication literatures, rather than collecting primary data. It presents and critically examines the Theory of Social Activism and Citizen Engagement, an eclectic framework situating citizen engagement at the interaction of legitimate political action, state transgression, and the resources and identities citizens bring to that interaction. The article traces the theory's antecedents in Weingast's (1997) account of self- enforcing democratic constitutions, Howard's (2011) and Karpf's (2010) accounts of digital activism as resource mobilization, and Almond and Verba's (1963) civic culture tradition; specifies the causal mechanisms linking these lineages; presents four constitutive tenets and an integrated causal model running from social mobilization through critical citizenry to democratization; and examines internally identified boundary conditions, coordination dilemmas, the digital divide, and unresolved debates over civic capacity. The article's central argument is that the theory's distinctive contribution lies in explicitly incorporating these divided-society constraints, which much of the mainstream digital activism literature under-specifies, allowing it to explain how digital mobilization can simultaneously reinforce and be constrained by societal division. It is proposed as a candidate framework for comparative application to other plural, developing- democracy contexts beyond its originating case of Nigeria.