The Moderation of Digital Democracy Within Trade Unions: Navigating Between Horizontalizing and Verticalizing Logics

ABSTRACT

This article examines how unions moderate online democratic participation. Prior research has underlined the need for unions to actively moderate this participation, either to foster or restrict it. However, we are still largely unaware of how unions concretely perform this emerging democratic function. To address this gap, we conducted an in‐depth case study of a union Facebook group, drawing on rare and extensive empirical material. Our findings reveal that online democratic moderation involves navigating between verticalizing and horizontalizing logics, each in pursuit of different goals in terms of access to participation, the status of members, opinion formation, and perceptions of democraticness. By conceptualising these two logics and their related tensions, the study contributes to the literature by showing how online democracy reinvigorates enduring tensions within union democracy, and by demonstrating how the affordances of digital technology shift moderation from ex‐ante procedural ‘scene‐setting’ to continuous, influence‐based ‘actor‐directing.’