Gaining an audience on social media is an important goal of contemporary policy advocacy. While previous studies demonstrate that advocacy-dedicated nonprofit organizations—what we refer to as... Show moreGaining an audience on social media is an important goal of contemporary policy advocacy. While previous studies demonstrate that advocacy-dedicated nonprofit organizations—what we refer to as advocacy groups—use different social media tools, we still know little about what specific audiences advocacy groups set out to target on social media, and whether those audiences actually engage with these groups. This study fills this gap, deploying survey and digital trace data from Twitter over a 12-month period for the Australian case. We show that while groups target a variety of audiences online, there are differences between group types in their strategic objectives and the extent to which particular audiences engage with them. Business groups appear to target elite audiences more often compared with citizen and professional groups, whereas citizen groups receive more online engagement from mass and peer audiences. Show less
Communities of civil society organizations are characterized by substantial volatility, as new organizations are continuously established and old ones are regularly disbanded. This article aims to... Show moreCommunities of civil society organizations are characterized by substantial volatility, as new organizations are continuously established and old ones are regularly disbanded. This article aims to improve our understanding of the dynamic nature of civil society by focusing on a particular aspect of organizational maintenance, namely, mortality anxiety. Building upon previous work that assesses actual and perceived survival chances of civil society organizations, we examine how inter-organizational competition, ties with public authorities, and the internal institutionalization of civil society organizations shape how these groups assess their survival chances. Our results demonstrate that high levels of inter-organizational competition and a strong reliance on government funding significantly increase mortality anxiety. Furthermore, they highlight the importance of a professionalized and internally differentiated structure. We rely on survey data and focus on the case of Belgium, in this way providing a first assessment of mortality anxiety in a neo-corporatist political system. Show less
