Overview
"Astroturf" is a charge about origins rather than sincerity: the claim that what presents itself as a spontaneous popular movement was in fact assembled, funded and steered from above. It was made against the Tea Party from 2009 and against Occupy Wall Street from 2011, in each case largely by the other side.
The two cases are not symmetrical, and the evidence available for each is of a different kind.
What the documents show about the Tea Party
The strongest evidence is archival, and it emerged from an unlikely place. Researchers working through the tobacco industry document collections — millions of pages released under litigation settlements — published a study in the journal Tobacco Control in 2013 tracing the organisational lineage of the movement's national infrastructure.
What they found was that Citizens for a Sound Economy, co-founded in 1984 with backing that included David Koch, had worked with tobacco interests on anti-tax and anti-regulation campaigning, and that it split in 2004 into two organisations — Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks — which became central to the Tea Party's national coordination five years later.
The study's contention is that the apparatus existed first and the movement was fitted to it: that groups built for one purpose were available, funded and experienced when an opportunity arrived. Americans for Prosperity's reported spending in the 2010 cycle ran to tens of millions of dollars.
What the same research found on the ground
The fieldwork complicates the picture, and it comes from researchers who are not sympathetic to the movement's politics.
Political scientists who interviewed local Tea Party affiliates found chapters that volunteered their own time, raised their own small sums and received nothing from any national body. Several volunteered, unprompted, that they took no outside funding. Harvard research on the movement described it as a genuine popular mobilisation that was also promoted by wealthy backers and amplified by cable television — all three things at once.
That is the crux. A movement can have a manufactured national infrastructure and an authentic local membership simultaneously, and most of the argument consists of each side pointing at the layer that suits it.
Occupy
The accusation ran the other way and had less to work with. Occupy had no equivalent national organisation, no comparable funding vehicle and, famously, no formal leadership or list of demands — which was itself the basis of a different criticism.
The astroturf charge against it usually pointed to union support for particular marches and to foundation-funded organisers present in some encampments. Those are documented but modest, and there is no archival equivalent to the tobacco documents. The more common critique of Occupy was the opposite: not that it was too organised, but that it was not organised enough to survive.
Why the label does so little work
The difficulty with astroturf as an analytical category is that almost no large movement is pure at either end. Sustained political activity generally requires money, and money generally comes with people who have their own reasons for providing it. Establishing that a funder existed does not establish that the participants were insincere, and establishing that participants were sincere does not establish that the agenda was theirs.
What the tobacco archive does show, and what is not really contested, is that the infrastructure predated the movement and had been built for adjacent purposes. What the interview research shows, and what is also not contested, is that a great many people turned up who had never heard of the organisations involved.
Which of those facts is the important one is the actual disagreement, and it is not a factual disagreement at all.