Political campaigns on YouTube: trade unions’ mobilisation in Europe

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Katrin Uba,Jenny Jansson
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12181

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         New Technology, Work and Employment. 2021;36:240–260.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12181  

SPECIAL ISSUE

Political campaigns on YouTube: trade unions’

mobilisation in Europe

Katrin Uba

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Jenny Jansson

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs License, which permits 

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non- commercial and no modifications or 

adaptations are made.

© 2020 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Katrin Uba and Jenny Jansson equally contributed to this work. 

Correspondence

Katrin Uba, Uppsala University, Uppsala, 

Sweden.

Email: Katrin.Uba@statsvet.uu.se

Trade unions  are called  to increase  their influence  on 

policy- making by becoming more politically  active and 

use social media, but  only a few studies investigate un-

ions’ online  political activism.  We propose  that indus-

trial  relations  regime  of  a  country  relates  to  unions’ 

perceived  opportunities  for  mobilisation  and  thereby 

also unions’ online political activism. We test this argu-

ment with the help of data about European trade union 

confederations’  political  mobilisation  on  YouTube, 

2007– 2017.  The  results  showed,  expectedly,  that 

resource- rich confederations in the organised corporat-

ist regime (Scandinavia) use YouTube for political activ-

ism to lesser  degree than in other  regimes; when these 

confederations do pursue political activism, such videos 

are  often  related  to  elections  and  reflect  the  political 

party- union relationship.  Unexpectedly,  the  resource- 

poor confederations in the transitional regime (Central 

and Eastern  Europe) mobilised politically on  YouTube 

to the same extent as have the confederations in the  so-

cial partnership, liberal and state- centred regimes.

KEYWORDS

trade unions, election campaign, political activism, YouTube, 

Europe

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Introduction

With the advent  of social media, political activism in  general, as well as  the political mobilisa-

tion of trade unions  in particular, has quickly and thoroughly changed. Social media are cheap, 

fast, and  have the potential to  reach many (Earl  and Kimport, 2011),  so it is  unsurprising that 

social media  platforms have become  popular for election  campaigns and political  engagement 

(Vromen, 2017). Among the  different social media platforms, YouTube has come  to play an in-

creasingly prominent  role in political  activism, especially  during election  campaigns (Rymes, 

2012; Stromer- Galley, 2019).

The new campaigning possibilities offered by social media appeal not only to political parties 

but to anyone trying  to influence politics. For trade unions, social  media have brought new op-

portunities for innovative ways of mobilising, recruiting and communicating with members and 

of conducting  political campaigns. The growing  literature on trade unions’ use  of social media 

has demonstrated that unions are employing a diverse set of social media platforms and that this 

usage varies across countries and trade unions (Panagiotopoulos, 2012; Rego et al., 2014; Geelan, 

2015; Hodder and Houghton,  2015; Scaramuzzino and Scaramuzzino, 2017; Barnes et al.,  2019; 

Jansson and  Uba, 2019; Pasquier et al.,  2020). Researchers have  examined trade unions’ social 

media use  for recruitment (Jansson  and Uba,  2019), mobilisation in  wage negotiations  (Wood 

and Pasquier, 2018)  and  industrial conflict  (Upchurch and  Grassman, 2016),  and it  has  been 

argued that such  varying usage is often  related to the resources and  leadership of trade unions 

(Panagiotopoulos and Barnett,  2015). However, despite the  important role of  political activism 

for the labour movement, little is known of the unions’ use of social media in political campaigns.

After decades of decreasing membership  numbers, weakening bargaining power and declin-

ing political  influence for unions  all across Europe, scholars  of trade union revitalisation have 

proposed that unions should increase their political activism (Hyman and Gumbrell- McCormick, 

2010; Murray, 2017) and return to repertoires of  contention (Ibsen and Tapia, 2017). One could 

even argue that by acting more like a political movement and becoming well incorporated to the 

institutions that govern labour market, unions might compensate for their membership decline 

(Crouch, 2017).  Hence,  for unions,  political campaigns  can  be a  way of  raising awareness  as 

well as demonstrating their broader societal and political relevance to members and the general 

public. Pursuing  political campaigns on  social media is  one of  such options and  the following 

analysis focuses on this issue in the context of European trade unions.

More specifically, we examine cross- national differences in trade unions’ political activism on 

YouTube. Prior research has shown that  trade unions’ willingness to participate in contentious 

actions, such  as demonstrations, varies  significantly across contexts,  particularly across indus-

trial relations regimes (Larsson, 2014). The industrial relations regime of a country reflects such 

variables as the  trade union density and  collective bargaining system (Visser  et al., 2009), vari-

ables that arguably define unions’ opportunities for mobilisation and influencing politics— that 

is, they constitute political opportunity structures (Tarrow, 2011).

We propose that  the same variation also  applies in the  case of  unions’ political activism  on 

YouTube. By combing through  research on social movements,  industrial relations and  interest 

group politics, we  analyse more than 13,000 videos  uploaded by European trade union confed-

erations to YouTube. Our findings demonstrate that there are some differences, although not as 

clear as  expected, between  industrial relations  regimes regarding  the unions’ YouTube videos 

about political activism.

The reminder of  the paper is  organised as follows. In  the next section, we  introduce the lit-

erature on unions’ political activism and use of social media,  as well as propose our hypotheses.