Cease and Desist: Repression, Strategic Voting and the 2000 Presidential Election

Online political activism has rapidly increased over the past decade, forcing state authorities to adapt repressive strategies to handle this change. Few researchers, however, have explored hostile state reactions to online, unconventional political activity and fewer still have tried to analyze the impacts of state repression on internet-based activism. In this article, we use data on strategic voting, which occurred during the 2000 U.S. presidential election, to examine two core concerns of social movements scholars: (1) the effects of repression on subsequent movement mobilization; and (2) the effects of repression on subsequent tactical choices. Our findings suggest that researchers must account for core technological and social features of the internet as an activist environment in explaining repression’s effects in the 21st century. We argue that this is particularly true when researchers study activism that emerges and thrives online, as compared to activism that begins offline and migrates online at a later point.