This paper examines Twitter's role during Iran's 2009 election crisis using a comparative analysis of Twitter investors, US State Department diplomats, citizen activists and Iranian protestors and paramilitary forces.

As a political tool the internet is neither top down nor bottom up, argues Mark Bahnisch in this review of Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy. Although there are many other interesting questions scholars and commentators could be asking about the impact of the internet on society and culture, a lot of the debate...

For three decades new social movements have undergone scrutiny from political scientists with much written about why social movements exist and how they attract members. However little has been done on the influence of these mass mobilisations. In this paper I investigate normative and empirical statements about social movements in order to develop a way...