Evolution Patterns of Non-traditional Conservative Movements in the Context of Audience Democracy: Evidence from the US Alt-Right

This work poses the problem of the lack of scientific explanation of the nature of the connection between the popularity of the agenda of the alternative right network movement in the USA and their influence on the agenda of decision-makers. The problem is checked at the final stage of the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. The task is to discover the ways and forms of media influence of alt-rights. To do this, the work is carried out the operationalization of the value concepts of alt-rights and value narratives, then coding the key concepts of the Trump and alternative rights agendas. The content analysis and the comparative analysis of key concepts and motives of the objects are used as a method of analysis. The movement of the alternative right is viewed through the prism of the concept of audience democracy to reveal a “political performance”. It was revealed that the agenda of the alternative right was formed by the information agenda of political opponents (Hillary Clinton’s campaign office ), who were determining the threat for themselves. Also, the results of the work showed that alt-Wrights are not solely a product of audience democracy, but exist in its conditions. The main hypothesis was confirmed: the alternative right managed to join the situational media coalition with Trump, but failed to implement their own set of values to him. It is possible to conduct further scaling of similar studies by broadening the field of study on several social networks and to create media portraits of candidates. An interesting question is the influence of movements without political capital on the usual political actors of the American election process— a further elaboration of the ideas of audience democracy will help answer this.