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Abstract
The international tax system is targeted by a diverse range of networked civil society actors, from critical professionals mobilizing their expertise to anti-austerity protestors targeting the consequences of tax dodging. The years following the 2008 financial crisis saw an increase in the range of these actors and their cooperation with one another. This paper argues that a transnational field analysis complements existing expertise-oriented approaches, by identifying the overarching objective of the tax justice agenda as increasing heteronomy in the international taxation field relative to political fields. This objective requires the mobilization of diverse resources across different fields, resulting in network relationships crossing field boundaries to contest inter-field relations, rather than any single bounded field struggle. The findings are supported by an analysis of tax justice advocacy after the 2008 financial crisis in the United Kingdom and Australia, including thirty-seven in-depth interviews with different organizations involved in the network.

To better understand the communication of anti‐elitism in contemporary politics, this study conceptually differentiates between specific anti‐elitism geared toward specific, materially powerful elites ('Angela Merkel') and general anti‐elitism referencing broader discursive constructs ('the elite'). The study analyses the online communications of radical right parties in the 2019 European Parliament elections from six countries (Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Poland and Sweden). This more fine‐grained analysis of anti‐elitism highlights some areas of transnational convergence, such as a tendency to focus on specific political elites, rather than other sectors such as the media or discursive constructs. The findings also reveal stratification according to parties' position in national power structures: opposition parties tend to target national‐level elites while governing parties focus on the European level. The findings highlight that anti‐elitism is used in a highly instrumental way, and help us to better understand the intersection between anti‐elitism and the multilevel politics of EP elections.

Black bears and other wildlife species are impacted by highway systems and associated traffic loads in many ways. There is growing concern among government natural resource agencies, environmental groups and transportation agencies over the effects of roads on wildlife. Roads often cross animal travel corridors. Use of these corridors is difficult to monitor, and various methods have been devised to determine specific crossing points. I am using barbed wire stretched along a section of highway at a proposed expansion site to determine if bears cross the existing roadbed at predictable places at different times of the year. Also, hair samples collected from the wire will be subjected to DNA fingerprinting to determine the number of individuals crossing the road, how many times an individual crosses, and the sex of these individuals. Highway planners may then use these data to place bridges or culverts in places where bears and other species will use them. This study has only recently begun, but initial results are very promising. It may likely prove useful for monitoring travel corridor use of other species besides bears. Funding source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Total budget: $50K/year for two years Project period: June 2000-June 2002

Chapter 1: Why do online crowds matter for contemporary citizen politics? -- Chapter 2: Who signs and shares petitions and donates money online? -- Chapter 3: How do political organisations use online petitioning and crowdfunding? -- Chapter 4: What kinds of issues do citizens successfully raise via online petitions? -- Chapter 5: Why do personal narratives and stories matter for online political engagement? -- Chapter 6: Does online citizen engagement matter for reinvigorating contemporary politics? .

This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. It argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the repertoires of citizens and their organisations. To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Through detailed interviews and online analysis they show how advocacy organisations now use online petitions for strategic interventions and mobilisation. They also analyse the policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, including a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. Contrasting mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day shows there is a disjuncture and lack of responsiveness to crowdsourced citizen expression. Ultimately the book explores the long-term implications of citizen-led change for democracy. Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Public Administration at the Australian National University. Darren Halpin is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. Michael Vaughan is post-doctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Freie University Berlin.

Although the Reddit-led short squeeze of GameStop shares in 2021 drew comparisons with Occupy Wall Street, this article focuses on one key area of difference: where Occupy exemplified the theoretical model of connective action through its discursive and technological openness, mobilisation around the short squeeze followed a different pattern characterised by discursive and technological disconnections, which we argue partly reflects the intervening decade of platformisation. Our case shows how platforms can establish boundaries as well as brokerage points in contentious politics, with particular regard to repertoires of action, collective identities and discourses. We show how in our case, these boundaries impeded discursive and technological connections, instead organising users into relatively disconnected zones and ultimately reducing their power and impact over broader discursive systems. Our argument is explored using three data sets from Reddit, Twitter and legacy news media outlets, using a combination of non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) topic modelling and manual content analysis.

Ideas about what makes a 'good citizen' continue to evolve alongside the digitalisation of political participation. We examine these interrelated trends through an in-depth analysis of the normative basis for contemporary online petitioning. This article uses original survey data in Australia and Germany to confirm the emergence of distinctive 'contribution' citizenship norms which emphasise the importance of sharing content through networked communications infrastructures. We then examine the relationship between these novel citizenship norms and online petitioning, differentiating online petitioning along two dimensions of mode (signing versus sharing) and frequency. First, we find 'contribution' norms are more associated with sharing online petitions than signing them. Second, 'contribution' norms are more associated with high-frequency sharing and signing, as opposed to more casual instances of participation. In combination, these findings show that contribution norms are distinctively associated with more intensive forms of online petitioning (e.g. frequent sharing), while more casual forms (such as casual signing) are supported by a more diverse range of normative orientations. We conclude that the way citizens engage with online petitions reflects, in part, their normative orientation to contributing information towards networked communication infrastructures.