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The logic of connective faction: How digitally networked elites and hyper-partisan media radicalize politics

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The logic of connective faction: How digitally networked elites and hyper-partisan media radicalize politics

Summary

This paper introduces a “logic of connective faction” framework to explain how ideologically extreme subgroups within political parties forge dense ties to hyper-partisan media ecosystems, using those connections to amplify their factional position and pull party politics rightward. Extending Bennett and Segerberg’s connective action theory from social movements into formal party organizations, Knüpfer, Yang, and Cowburn use the rapid 2020–2021 rise of “Critical Race Theory” as a Republican talking point to compare adopting and non-adopting members of Congress. They argue that hyper-partisan outlets function as “digital surrogates” that co-produce factional agendas with aligned elites, and that engagement metrics and partisan media attention provide measurable incentives rewarding radicalization.

Key Contributions

  • A new theoretical framework — the logic of connective faction — extending connective action theory to intra-party factional dynamics.
  • The concept of network pings: discursive triggers (like CRT) that activate latent ties between factional elites and digital surrogate networks.
  • An original mixed dataset (~1.94M items) integrating mainstream and right-wing news, congressional newsletters, and tweets across 2019–2022.
  • Empirical demonstration that ideological extremity, digital connectivity, and adoption of factional issues co-vary and reinforce one another within a single party.
  • A framework explicitly positioned as portable to other democracies facing far-right radicalization and fragmented media systems.

Methods

The authors combine NewsWhip-sourced articles from mainstream (NYT, CBS, CNN) and right-wing (Fox, Breitbart, Daily Caller) outlets with congressional newsletters from DC Inbox and tweets from the 116th and 117th Congresses. CRT mentions are identified via dictionary methods with manual validation. “CRT Republicans” are compared to “Non-CRT Republicans” on ideological extremity (DW-NOMINATE, CFscores, anti-McCarthy speaker vote, Freedom/Liberty Caucus membership) and on connectivity measures (frequency of references to right-wing outlets, hyperlink-based ideological scaling, MBFC-based link ratios, links to questionable sources, and links from official sites to alt-tech platforms). Inferential work uses two-tailed t-tests and negative binomial regression with member fixed effects to estimate within-member engagement effects.

Findings

  • CRT first surged on right-wing sites (notably Breitbart) before reaching mainstream outlets or elite discourse, peaking around the 2021 Youngkin campaign.
  • Over 100 Republican members used CRT in newsletters in 2021; only three Democrats ever did.
  • CRT Republicans scored significantly higher on all four ideological extremity measures.
  • CRT Republicans engaged more with right-wing media on every connectivity indicator and linked disproportionately to alt-tech platforms (Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr), while mainstream platform use was similar across groups.
  • Within-member, CRT tweets received significantly more retweets, replies, likes, and quotes than the same legislator’s other tweets.
  • CRT-themed articles got more Facebook engagement when published by right-wing outlets but less when published by mainstream outlets.
  • Right-wing outlets disproportionately covered CRT Republicans; mainstream outlets did the opposite — an attention asymmetry that materially rewards factional behavior.

Connections

This paper sits squarely in the conversation on hyper-partisan information ecologies and elite radicalization, building most directly on work mapping right-wing media networks and elite-media coupling like Bennett2025-xs and the longer lineage going back to Bakshy2015-rn. Its emphasis on how partisan media reward and amplify factional signaling resonates with research on hyper-partisan outlets and engagement incentives in Rothut2026-or, Kalsnes2025-zb, and Hartmann2025-px, while its focus on alt-tech migration and platform-level radicalization connects to Copland2025-em and Efstratiou2025-gs. The “network pings” mechanism — issue diffusion from fringe to elite via digital surrogates — also speaks to work on coordinated narrative cascades such as Starbird2025-jj and elite-driven partisan messaging in Green2025-ap.

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