essay on digital democracy social media and political participation

Digital Democracy: Social Media and Political Participation Essay

I. introduction.

Digital democracy refers to the use of digital technologies and platforms to enhance democratic participation and representation. It contains various practices such as online voting , e-petitions , and political deliberation on social media. Social media has become an integral part of political participation in recent years. It has revolutionized the way citizens access information, engage in political discussion and mobilize for social and political causes. The purpose of this essay is to examine the impact of social media on political participation. It will highlight both the benefits and challenges of digital democracy. It will also explore the role of social media in shaping public opinion and the need for further research and regulation in this area.

II. The Impact of Social Media on Political Participation

A. increased access to information and political discussion:.

Social media has greatly increased access to information and political discussion for citizens. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook provide a space for individuals to share news, express their views, and participate in political discussions. This allows citizens to stay informed about current events and access different perspectives on political issues.

For example , during the 2016 US Presidential elections , Twitter became a major platform for political discussion. Both candidates used it to communicate with their supporters and the general public.

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B. Increased Citizen Engagement and Mobilization:

Social media has also been used as a tool for mobilization during political campaigns and social movements. The Arab Spring , which began in 2010 , saw widespread protests organized and coordinated through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement , which began in 2013 , saw widespread mobilization through social media. It saw individuals using platforms such as Instagram and Twitter to share information, organize protests, and raise awareness about racial inequality. This demonstrates the potential of social media to mobilize citizens and bring about political change.

C. Increased Political Polarization and Echo Chambers:

However, social media can also contribute to increased political polarization. The formation of “ echo chambers ” are also created by it. Echo chambers are where individuals are only exposed to information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs. This can lead to a lack of diversity in opinions and a lack of exposure to differing perspectives. Social media algorithms, which are designed to personalize content, can contribute to this phenomenon by only showing users information that aligns with their beliefs and interests.

For example , in India’s recent general elections in 2019 , social media platforms played a significant role in shaping public opinion and political participation. The ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ), effectively used social media platforms to mobilize support, spread their message, and influence public opinion. They used platforms like WhatsApp to spread false and misleading information. This helped them to secure a landslide victory.

D. Facilitation of Direct Democracy:

Social media platforms have also enabled direct democracy by allowing citizens to participate in online voting, e-petitions, and other forms of direct engagement with government and political representatives.

For example , some countries have implemented online voting systems for elections. This allowed citizens to cast their ballots from their computers or mobile devices. Estonia is one of those countries. Here, online voting has been implemented for all national and local elections since 2005 . E-petitions also have become a popular way for citizens to express their views and demand change on specific issues.

Similarly, in Canada , online voting has been introduced in some municipalities, including the City of Markham in Ontario. It used online voting in the 2018 municipal elections. Additionally, the government of Canada provides the MyVoice platform . Here, citizens can voice their opinions on issues, join online discussions and participate in online polls.

E. Influencing Public Opinion:

Social media also plays a significant role in shaping public opinion. Through social media, individuals and organizations can disseminate information. They also can express their views and shape public discourse. This has the potential to influence political decision-making and public policy. Additionally, social media platforms can be used to target specific audiences and demographics, which can impact public opinion and the outcome of elections.

Its examples were seen during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, the 2016 US general elections, and the Black Lives Matter Movement.

F. Amplification of Marginalized Voices:

Social media platforms can also amplify the voices of marginalized communities and individuals, giving them a platform to share their perspectives and experiences. This can contribute to increased diversity in political discourse and representation. However, it also highlights the need for further research and regulation in this area to ensure that social media is inclusive, transparent, and fair for all voices.

The #MeToo movement is a specific example of how social media platforms can amplify the voices of marginalized communities and individuals. It gave them a platform to share their perspectives and experiences. The movement, which began in 2017 , aimed to raise awareness about sexual harassment and assault and to support survivors. The hashtag #MeToo was used extensively on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. Many women shared stories and experiences of sexual harassment and assault.

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III. The Challenges of Digital Democracy and Social Media

While social media and digital platforms have the potential to enable greater political participation and amplify marginalized voices, there are also several challenges that need to be addressed. Some of these challenges include:

• Misinformation and fake news : Social media platforms have been used to spread misinformation and fake news, which can undermine the democratic process and manipulate public opinion.
• Privacy and security : Social media platforms collect and store vast amounts of personal data, which can be vulnerable to breaches and misuse. This can compromise the privacy and security of individuals and threaten the integrity of the democratic process.
• Digital divide : Not all citizens have access to digital technologies and platforms, which can lead to a digital divide and exclude certain groups from participating in the democratic process.
• Lack of regulation : Social media platforms are currently not subject to the same regulations as traditional media, leading to a lack of accountability and oversight.
• Lack of diversity : Social media platforms can be dominated by certain groups or individuals, which can limit the diversity of voices and perspectives in political discourse.
• Cyberbullying and hate speech : Social media platforms have been used to spread hate speech and cyberbullying, which can undermine the democratic process and harm marginalized communities.

IV. Conclusion

In conclusion, social media and digital platforms have the potential to enable greater political participation and amplify marginalized voices. However, there are also several challenges that need to be addressed, including misinformation and fake news, privacy and security, digital divide, polarization and echo chambers, lack of regulation, lack of diversity, and cyberbullying and hate speech.

Addressing these challenges will require further research and regulation of social media and digital platforms, as well as efforts to increase access to digital technologies and platforms for all citizens. It’s also important to note that addressing these challenges will require the collaboration of government, the private sector, civil society, and citizens. Ultimately, a healthy digital democracy requires a balance between the benefits and challenges of social media and digital platforms, and the need to ensure that they are inclusive, transparent, and fair for all voices.

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Expert Commentary

How does social media use influence political participation and civic engagement? A meta-analysis

2015 paper in Information, Communication & Society reviewing existing research on how social media use influences measures such as voting, protesting and civic engagement.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by John Wihbey, The Journalist's Resource October 18, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/social-media-influence-politics-participation-engagement-meta-analysis/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Academic research has consistently found that people who consume more news media have a greater probability of being civically and politically engaged across a variety of measures. In an era when the public’s time and attention is increasingly directed toward platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, scholars are seeking to evaluate the still-emerging relationship between social media use and public engagement. The Obama presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and the Arab Spring in 2011 catalyzed interest in networked digital connectivity and political action, but the data remain far from conclusive.

The largest and perhaps best-known inquiry into this issue so far is a 2012 study published in the journal Nature , “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” which suggested that messages on users’ Facebook feeds could significantly influence voting patterns. The study data — analyzed in collaboration with Facebook data scientists — suggested that certain messages promoted by friends “increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.” Close friends with real-world ties were found to be much more influential than casual online acquaintances. (Following the study, concerns were raised about the potential manipulation of users and “digital gerrymandering.” )

There are now thousands of studies on the effects of social networking sites (SNS) on offline behavior, but isolating common themes is not easy. Researchers often use unique datasets, ask different questions and measure a range of outcomes. However, a 2015 metastudy in the journal Information, Communication & Society , “Social Media Use and Participation: A Meta-analysis of Current Research,” analyzes 36 studies on the relationship between SNS use and everything from civic engagement broadly speaking to tangible actions such as voting and protesting. Some focus on youth populations, others on SNS use in countries outside the United States. Within these 36 studies, there were 170 separate “coefficients” — different factors potentially correlated with SNS use. The author, Shelley Boulianne of Grant MacEwan University (Canada), notes that the studies are all based on self-reported surveys, with the number of respondents ranging from 250 to more than 1,500. Twenty studies were conducted between 2008 and 2011, while eight were from 2012-2013.

The study’s key findings include:

• Among all of the factors examined, 82% showed a positive relationship between SNS use and some form of civic or political engagement or participation. Still, only half of the relationships found were statistically significant. The strongest effects could be seen in studies that randomly sampled youth populations.
• The correlation between social-media use and election-campaign participation “seems weak based on the set of studies analyzed,” while the relationship with civic engagement is generally stronger.
• Further, “Measuring participation as protest activities is more likely to produce a positive effect, but the coefficients are not more likely to be statistically significant compared to other measures of participation.” Also, within the area of protest activities, many different kinds of activities — marches, demonstrations, petitions and boycotts — are combined in research, making conclusions less valid. When studies do isolate and separate out these activities, these studies generally show that “social media plays a positive role in citizens’ participation.”
• Overall, the data cast doubt on whether SNS use “causes” strong effects and is truly “transformative.” Because few studies employ an experimental design, where researchers could compare a treatment group with a control group, it is difficult to claim causality.

“Popular discourse has focused on the use of social media by the Obama campaigns,” Boulianne concludes. “While these campaigns may have revolutionized aspects of election campaigning online, such as gathering donations, the metadata provide little evidence that the social media aspects of the campaigns were successful in changing people’s levels of participation. In other words, the greater use of social media did not affect people’s likelihood of voting or participating in the campaign.”

It is worth noting that many studies in this area take social media use as the starting point or “independent variable,” and therefore cannot rule out that some “deeper” cause — political interest, for example — is the reason people might engage in SNS use in the first place. Further, some researchers see SNS use as a form of participation and engagement in and of itself, helping to shape public narratives and understanding of public affairs.

Related research: Journalist’s Resource has been curating a wide variety of studies in this field. See research reviews on: Effects of the Internet on politics ; global protest and social media ; digital activism and organizing ; and the Internet and the Arab Spring . For cutting-edge insights on how online organizing and mobilization is evolving, see the 2015 study “Populism and Downing Street E-petitions: Connective Action, Hybridity, and the Changing Nature of Organizing,” published in Political Communication .

Keywords: social media, Facebook, Twitter

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John Wihbey

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Digital democracy

Introduction.

Digital democracy is a much discussed but rather fuzzy concept that still lacks a clear definition. We propose understanding digital democracy as a concept that links practices and institutions of collective political self-determination with its mediating digital infrastructures. Digital democracy has both an analytical and a normative dimension. As an analytical lens, digital democracy investigates how the use of digital technologies may influence the conditions, institutions and practices of political engagement and democratic governance. As a normative concept, it enables us to think about democracy as an open, alterable form of political organisation that is always in the making. Its dynamics are on the one hand due to conflicting principles, interpretations, and aspirations endemic to the democratic idea, like freedom, equality, or popular sovereignty. On the other hand, these dynamics also reflect a changing media landscape, which brings about new possibilities of imagining, realising, and practicing political self-determination. Therefore, digital democracy should neither be seen as a utopian model of an imminent future nor as a mere disintermediation of the existing democratic institutions. Instead of relying on monocausal, linear explanations, we suggest studying digital democracy as a contingent, open-ended phenomenon that interconnects two evolving areas, that of democratic self-government and that of digital infrastructures.

This text consists of three parts. The first section traces the harbingers and histories of digital democracy including their specific media constellation. It describes continuities and discontinuities in the interplay of technical change and hopes for democratisation. Interestingly, dreams of a direct democracy are among the recurring motifs. The second section critically reviews the premise of democratisation through technology. We find two schools of thought, one identifying digitalisation as a (disintermediating) driver of political change and another assessing the potential of digital technologies to bring democratic principles to bear in new and experimental settings. The final section covers four domains of digital democracy to illustrate the current transformation of democratic institutions and practices: democratic governance and the role of citizens, the public sphere as a condition of democratic action and political opinion formation, the organisation and repertoires of political action, and finally new forms of power and domination.

1. A brief historical outline

Digital democracy is a term filled with political aspirations. From an historical perspective, it is the latest model succeeding electronic democracy or teledemocracy, each of which emphasise the idea of democratisation through technology. Importantly, this idea has manifested itself not only in texts and discussions, but also in experimental projects. From the WELL (Rheingold, 1993) to the political participation platform “Rousseau”, these projects have sought to link specific visions of communication technology with the objective of improving democracy (Dahlberg, 2011) by reducing political alienation and increasing self-determination. Over the last 40 years, we can roughly distinguish three historical constellations in the evolution of digital democracy, each consisting of specific configurations of technologies and democratic imaginaries: i) electronic democracy, ii) virtual democracy, and iii) web 2.0 / network democracy. Depending on one’s point of view, these three periods are linked either by continuities or discontinuities in thought (for a different periodisation, see Vedel, 2006). A central common idea of these configurations refers to the use of communication technologies for implanting direct-democratic elements into representative democracy, which is often regarded as a “sorry substitute for the real thing” (Dahl, 1982).

Electronic democracy

One of the early forerunners of today’s social network sites (boyd & Ellison, 2007) and participation platforms is the back-channel-capable cable television of the 1980s, which inspires the idea of teledemocracy (Dutton, 1992; se Etzioni, 1992; Toffler, 1980). Using technology for improving democracy in the 1980s centres on strengthening information flows among citizens and facilitating participation. Cable TV channels would allow citizens to communicate among themselves without mediators (van Dijk, 2012, p. 50) and thereby create direct-democratic opportunities (Hindmann, 2009, p. 5; see Grossmann, 1996). An iconic image of this idea is the electronic town hall meeting. Evoking the dream of an Athenean agora, they are addressing political alienation by assembling like-minded people, making democracy more tangible and bridging the gap towards the political class (Dahlberg, 2011; Bimber, 2003; Barber, 1984; Held, 1987; Dahl, 1989).

The notion of information technology underlying the model of teledemocracy is predominantly limited to that of a tool, and therefore often shallow. An exception is Barber’s concept of a strong democracy, which argues that technology can be used in various, more or less democracy-enhancing ways. Hence, its “penchant for immediacy, directness, lateral communication” needs to be teased out (Barber, 1998, p. 585). Examples are Fishkin’s technique of deliberative polling (developed in 1988) or the use of Bulletin Board Systems for the networking of political activists (Myers, 1994; Rafaeli, 1984).

Virtual democracy

With the spread of the internet and its communication services in the early 1990s, new visions of virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993) emerged, which highlighted their unique features. The iconic image is no longer that of a local town hall but of “the global village”. Roughly thirty years after McLuhan coined the term, the global village seizes the Californian “small is beautiful” formula and links it to the utopian idea of a denationalised democracy, which will unfold in the virtual realm out of the government’s reach. Condemning existing political institutions as alienating, the internet pioneers intend to transfer their techno-libertarian imaginary of democracy into the emerging cyberspace (Schaal, 2016, p. 285). John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence (1996) boldly portrays established democracies as tyrannies while cyberspace will facilitate new forms of political and economic self-determination, consisting of free and equal individuals (for the economic equivalent of liberation, see Dyson, 1997).

Merging neoliberal ideas of freedom from government (Johnson & Post, 1996) with a strong sense of individual liberation and privatisation counterculture (Turner, 2006), the distributed, seemingly power-diverting architecture of the internet comes to epitomise the 1990s style of political self-determination (for a different take, see Lessig, 1999; Goldsmith & Wu, 2006). Yet, in the shadow of neoliberalism, the rise of usenet groups, IRC channels and email lists also supports a communitarian version of democracy. It aims to revive the lost community as a new form of civic commons that John Gastil would later refer to as a “democracy machine” (Gastil, 2016). New types of “network cultures” (Lovink, 2009) are emerging, which may shed off “meat-spaced” ways of discrimination and marginalisation: “on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, with the demise of “internet exceptionalism” (Wu, 2011) in the early 2000s and the rising calls for regulating the digital infrastructure, democratic notions of a distinct cyberspace are losing traction.

Between web 2.0 and network democracy

T he participatory web of the new century’s first decade marks the transition from the “read-only” to the “read/write” web, with now constantly changing services supposed to “get(s) better the more people use it” (O’Reilly, 2005; see also Beer & Burrow, 2007). In light of the web 2.0, the netizens (Hauben & Hauben, 1997) of the 1990s are now turning into content producers who are able for the first time to individually contribute to the public discourse (Bruns & Schmidt, 2011; Shirky, 2008). Emerging communication services such as blogs, ‘daily me’ diaries, podcasts, virtual radios and video channels create novel possibilities of practising but also of imagining democracy (Dahlgren, 2000, p. 339).

While the web 2.0 democracy is broadly welcomed as a “tool for political change” (McPhillips, 2006), it lacks the utopian, revolutionary touch of virtual democracy. Instead, it focuses on realising a new stage of “mass participation in a representative democracy” (Froomkin, 2004, p. 3). Freedom is no longer the privilege of an elite of internet pioneers but becomes reconciled with notions of “cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice” (Benkler, 2006) within a “network democracy” (Hacker, 2002) or a “wikidemocracy” (Noveck, 2009). The price for mainstreaming the internet, however, is the amalgamation of commercial and emancipatory logics. New business models drive the global socialisation of novel communication services while simultaneously commodifying the private sphere and the human mind.

The perceived immediacy of digital technology and its possibilities of “organizing without organization” (Shirky, 2008) are expected to flatten established hierarchies and eliminate powerful bureaucracies. Indeed, there is a specific strength found in the “weak cooperation” among digitally connected people, which links individualism and solidarity in unpredictable, crowd-enabled ways (Aguiton & Cardon, 2007). The web 2.0 democracy also strongly resonates with Habermas’ concept of deliberative democracy, which emphasises the role of the public sphere for collective self-determination (Chadwick, 2008; see Habermas, 1996).

Unlike virtual democracy, which revisited the revolutionary roots of American independence, the periods of teledemocracy and web 2.0 democracy primarily pursued reformatory intentions. Premised on the optimistic belief that communication technology is democratic per se (Hindmann, 2009, p. 5), the overall goal is to release its potential for a more direct-democratic self-determination. A few years later, “platform populism” (Morozov, 2021) will take up the hope of an unmediated and direct ability to collectively act through digital technology (De Blasio & Sorice, 2018).

2. Mediated democracy in the digital constellation

Most contributions to the concept of digital democracy are concerning themselves with the ongoing transformation of democratic government. While some approaches centre on the de-institutionalising aspects of this change, others are interested in the experimental practices that may result in new or modified democratic institutions.

The first set of works tells stories of decay and destabilisation. This includes observations on the growing fragility of once powerful political parties, the dethroning of elections and electoral bodies as core democratic institutions and the profound structural change of the public sphere. The latter also concerns the eroding agenda-setting power of the mass media in favour of a more direct form of political communication (Dahlgren, 2005; Coleman, 2017). According to this perspective, digital communication services have become a threat to post-world war democracy and, therefore, raise the question if and how democracy needs to be defended against the fragmentation and hybridisation of the public sphere, the growing unpredictability of political will formation, but also the normalisation of hate speech, violence and disinformation campaigns (De Blasio & Viviani, 2020; Howard, 2020; Bennett & Livingston, 2020).

Approaches of de-institutionalisation or “disintermediation” (Urbinati, 2019) tend to put the blame on digital technologies. They take platforms and algorithmic systems as drivers of democratic change and thus ascribe a strong agency to digitalisation and its underlying business models. According to this popular view, social media distort democratic discourse through echo chambers and social bots (Pariser, 2011; Sunstein, 2017). Due to their global scope, social media concentrate “instrumentarian” (Zuboff, 2019) or “communication” power (Castells, 2009) in the hands of a few tech giants, effectively undermining a society’s capacity for self-determination (Rahman & Thelen, 2019). Terms such as “network democracy” imply that digital infrastructures also have formative effects on democratic institutions and thus tacitly accept them as blueprints of social change (Hacker, 2002).

By contrast, narratives on democratic transformation portray digital democracy as an experimental setting for the active reform of existing representative institutions. Digital resources for political action allow challenging democratic processes, some of which may translate into novel institutional settings. Traditionally, the law and the legislator form a central political medium: laws are the means by which citizens, through their parliamentary representatives, shape social order and social relationships. A growing number of civic tech organisations are emerging around legislative functions with the goal of reforming, enhancing or even replacing those legislative functions (Lukensmeyer, 2017). Platform parties aim to make organised political will formation more transparent and direct (Deseriis, 2020a; Gerbaudo, 2019). NGOs such as European Digital Rights (EDRi) strive for more effective ways of holding the political elite to account. Social movements also experiment with direct forms of democratic decision-making that includes the development of customised infrastructures for local bottom-up engagement, such as the digital platforms of “democracy-driven governance” in Barcelona and Madrid (Bua & Bussu, 2020; Lopez, 2018).

From the present vantage point of a democracy in flux, both narratives on digital change (the version on de-institutionalising and the one on re-institutionalising democratic institutions) shed light on practices, bodies and mechanisms once taken for granted, which used to constitute a now disintegrating political constellation (Berg et al., 2020a). Both perspectives thereby strengthen our awareness of the alterability of democracy, but particularly the latter points out new options for putting political self-determination into practice and thus politicising and shaping democracy itself.

Following the latter line of thought, digital technologies should neither be regarded as independent drivers nor a mere tool of political change. In philosophy of technology lingo, they constitute a “space of possibilities” (Hubig, 2006, pp. 155-160) structured by specific “affordances” (Evans et al., 2017), which may suggest but do not determine how democracies appropriate digital media (see Bossetta, 2018 for a contrasting approach). The notion of space of possibilities means that technologies enable countless, contingent ways of making use of them, with unpredictable effects on our future lives. “Digital democratic affordances” in the sense of Deseriis (2020b, p. 1), for example, refer to “the democratic capacities of digital media”, roughly defined as reducing the costs of political coordination. Crucially, such collective capacities can accommodate very different scenarios, ranging from instrumental action committed to a modernised representative democracy to ambitions of “democratising democracy” ( De Sousa Santos , 2005) aiming to challenge the given power distribution of governance structures.

Understood as media, the appropriation and use of technologies change our world views, our experiences, interpretations and expectations. However, how digital technologies are perceived and integrated into a democracy’s texture of political institutions, how we shape them and how they shape us, cannot be understood without taking into account the broader constellation of social, cultural and economic change (Hofmann, 2019). Digital democracy, then, is to be perceived as a re-intermediation rather than a disintermediation, ultimately resulting in new or changing institutions and infrastructural logics (Epstein, Katzenbach, Musiani, 2016; see Bolter & Grusin, 1999).

Understood as re-intermediation, digital democracy also encourages us to trace the evolution of democracy in a dynamic, open-ended fashion instead of creating linear narratives of rise and decline. The multiple, often conflicting trends in the relationship between political self-determination and its mediating infrastructures are becoming more visible from this perspective. Such a temporalising view on democracy entails sense-making narratives of the past: at least implicitly, we make sense of digital democracy by distinguishing it from former models of self-determination whose characteristics are taking on new meanings in the course of their decline.

3. Four domains of democratic transformation

Digitalisation provides new possibilities for realising democratic self-determination. This concerns constitutional dimensions that can be clustered in four domains of democratic transformation. These domains are i) the role of government and citizenship, ii) the public sphere, iii) the relationship between participation and representation, and iv) the issues of domination and rights. The following section takes a look at the concepts, terms and discourses that indicate how these possibilities are perceived and put into practice.

Democratic government and the role of citizens

In line with its predecessors, digital democracy implies various new notions of democratic governance. These notions include initiatives for Open Government (Noveck, 2015) or Open Democracy (Landemore, 2020) at one end of the spectrum and managerial data-based modes of governing the population at the other end.

Open government and open democracy projects aim to make policy processes more responsive and transparent. By empowering citizens to directly engage with public administrations, policies can be tailored more closely to their needs. The concept of open democracy extends to all levels, from local collaborations to nationwide digital Town halls or international agreements such as the Open Government Partnership (see Schnell, 2020). Some open government projects explicitly pursue strategies to sideline political parties and traditional hierarchies. The reimagining of government as a digital platform (O'Reilly, 2011, p. 13) or "wiki” (Noveck, 2009) intends to achieve horizontal forms of civic collaboration towards the undistorted realisation of the common good.

Despite all hopes for effective steps towards a digitally enabled direct democracy, concepts of mass participation have been facing organisational limits (Landemore, 2021, p. 78). For this reason, open government initiatives used to primarily focus on improving "accountability through transparency" (Hansson et al., 2015, p. 545) and exchange between citizens and government institutions (see Coleman, 2017). In the meantime, new decision-making systems and models for active mass participation have emerged, accommodating a broader understanding of citizenship. Notwithstanding the avant-gardist status, in most of these projects citizens are no longer perceived in their role of voters or (critical) spectators of democratic governance. Instead, citizens are meant to become actively involved in consultation as well as decision-making processes (Simon et al., 2017, p. 5; Deseriis 2020a, p. 2; De Blasio & Selva, 2016). Again, the city of Barcelona exemplifies the development of a well-thought-out participation strategy that has translated into a highly praised experiment of digitally empowered municipal self-government (Morozov & Bria, 2018; López, 2018, 2020).

In contrast to these participatory initiatives, digital technologies also facilitate more technocratically-oriented notions of responsive governance. The concept of "data democracy" (Susskind, 2018, p. 246), for example, imagines digital democracy as a science and management project geared towards perfecting the information base as a condition for effective policies. Epistemic practices such as "demos scraping", which seek to create data-based representations of the citizenry, reflect the idea that data analytics can "yield unprecedented insights into populations for policy makers" (Ulbricht, 2020, p. 429, see Khanna, 2017, p. 30). Approaches such as data democracy are criticised for epitomising the spirit of paternalistic liberalism (König, 2019). They tend to substitute data collection for political participation and achieve social well-being through “nudges” from above rather than through capacity-building for everyone.

Public sphere

As a space of opinion and will formation, the public sphere is an essential condition for liberal democracies. Communication media, the public sphere and democratic life are interconnected in many ways. This becomes obvious when we consider the profound political changes that new communication infrastructure have made possible since the introduction of broadcasting (Chadwick, 2013). With regard to digitalisation, this chiefly concerns the facilitating of public voices or user-generated content. While broadcasting and the printing press afforded privileged access to public speech to professionally trained journalists and the social elite, digital media has introduced many-to-many communication services, which, at least in principle, give a voice to everyone and create the foundation for “networked publics” (Varnelis, 2008). Social networks, the blogosphere and messenger services have formed a communication infrastructure, which both enables and shapes the present type of “mass self-communication” (Castells, 2009).

The transformation of the public sphere cannot only be attributed to digital media, however. As the growing appreciation of deliberative democracy (Habermas, 1996) shows, political opinion formation through public discourse has become increasingly important in itself but also relative to elections and parliamentary decision-making (Urbinati, 2006). Responding to a decline in trust in democratic institutions and public elites, the public sphere has also assumed the function of a watchdog, which holds the exercise of political power to account. In the digital constellation, the expanding role of the public sphere and the rise of digital media intersect, resulting in a changing representation of the public and a diversifying watchdog function. Tweets and hashtag assemblages have become accepted as expressions of public opinion and vox populi (McGregor 2019); the watchdog function is now exercised by a broader range of actors, among them civic tech activists, grassroot media and “influencers”.

Notions of monitory democracy (Keane, 2013) or “counter democracy” (Rosanvallon, 2008) represent one way of making sense of the digital constellation. “Networked publics” emphasises the horizontal links within a more active audience (Ito, 2008), with repercussions for our understanding of democratic agency and the democratic subject (Hofmann, 2019). In sum, there is a strong interdependence between shifting interpretations of the public sphere, changing democratic practices and the appropriation of digital technologies by citizens. This interdependence cannot be easily understood in terms of causal relationships.

As a side-effect of interacting through digital media such as platforms, the public is contributing to the production, circulation and ranking of information flows (Castells, 1996). With the public becoming generative, established social and legal boundaries between the production, circulation and consumption of news are blurring. Traditional mass media are losing control over their channels of communication to social networks (Kleis Nielson & Ganter, 2018). Journalistic standards of relevance are competing against algorithmic methods of content curation, including a probabilistic calculation of popularity and personalised interests (Ananny, 2020). The personalisation and horizontal distribution of information flows contributes to a significant pluralisation of the public sphere (Kleis Nielsen & Fletcher, 2020; Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). As a result, shared political reference points, previously seen as a prerequisite for democratic discourse and will formation, may lose their self-evidence.

The ongoing “platformisation” (Poell et al., 2019; Helmond, 2015) of the public sphere offers insights into the now decaying stabilising mechanisms of representative democracies. The redistribution of public voice illuminates the rules and norms that used to delimit public discourse. This concerns familiar binaries between public and private, truth and lie, rational and irrational, politically influential and marginal positions. The agenda-setting power of traditional mass media shaped national world-views and helped delimit the invisible yet powerful “universe of the thinkable and unthinkable” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 236). Democracy research has acknowledged the ambivalence of this development. Digital democracy may shift the locus of self-determination towards post-electoral, extra-parliamentary practices and institutionalise some form of “negative sovereignty” (Rosanvallon, 2008), which focus on the limitation of power rather than on its constructive use.

Political action beyond participation and representation

Digital democracy is taking shape at a time when once privileged forms of political action are in decline: political parties are suffering from membership loss, the emancipatory aura of the electoral franchise is fading, and the audience of the passive citizen has evolved to the active audience of “prosumers” (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). A rebalancing has been taking place among the “two powers of the democratic sovereign” (Urbinati, 2014, p. 22), the public sphere as a space for discussion and the sphere of institutional decision-making, whereby the former has gained relevance compared to the latter. At the “democratic interface” (Bennett et al., 2018) between the institutionalised and non-institutionalised sphere of political action we observe a spirit of change, of exploring new types of engagement and influencing representative institutions. Not all of these experiments qualify as emancipatory, however. Some of them are testing constitutional boundaries, are manipulative or anti-democratic (Bennett & Livingston, 2018), evoking an “industry of democratic defences” (Müller, 2021) that are no less problematic (Farkas & Schou, 2019).

Digital campaign platforms enable mobilising for political issues, which, as in the case of Moveon.org or Avaaz, stand for the idea of voicing the people’s will more directly via crowdfunded lobbying (Karpf, 2012). Hashtag activism on social networks diversifies traditional forms of journalistic agenda-setting, transcends the passive notion of audience, and complements activist practices via the bottom-up creation of issue-publics, such as in the case of #BlackLivesMatter (Garza, 2020; see Berg et al., 2020b). The evolving civic tech activism creates digital infrastructures such as DECIDIM to “make engagement easier for citizens, improve communication and feedback between governments and citizens, and strengthen political accountability” (Baack, 2018, p. 45; Webb, 2020; Shrock, 2018). However, digital activism is not automatically more inclusive and receives more political recognition than analogue forms of engagement (Hindmann, 2009). On the contrary, the rise of the communicative paradigm that highlights public discourse and manifests in social movements runs the risk of neglecting the necessity of organisational ties to decision-making institutions such as parliaments and parties.

Political participation undergoes a shift from long-term engagement in political parties or associations towards issue-oriented, short-term and ephemeral forms of action, described by Bennett and Segerberg as a transition from collective to “connective action” (2012; see also Bimber, 2016). Yet, the fragile, volatile nature of most digital movements indicates that political organisations are not becoming obsolete. “Platform parties”, for example, aim to establish horizontal membership structures and engagement platforms designed to make internal communication and decision-making more direct and transparent (Deseriis & Vittori, 2019; McKelvey & Piebiak, 2018). Other political parties make their boundaries more permeable to recruit the temporary support of non-members (Scarrow, 2015, p. 128; Chadwick & Stromer-Galley, 2016).

Again, not all of these organisational experiments imply a democratisation of political structures. "Computational management" strategies (Kreiss, 2012, p. 144) aim to control political mobilisation along the manipulative incentive structures of the “voter surveillance” (Bennett & Lyon, 2019) and advertisement industry (Boler & Davis, 2021). In particular, this concerns the adoption of psychometric heuristics for the purpose of microtargeting specific groups of voters, which may fuel identity politics rather than create an enlightening public discourse (Kreiss, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015). The democratic idea of undermining the control of party elites through primaries and networked mobilisation not only allows for progressive politics. These structures also foster populist mobilisation, the rise of celebrities and political demagogues (De Blasio & Viviani, 2020).

The infrastructure of digital democracy allows for horizontal democratic self-organisation on a broader and interactive scale. Simultaneously, representative institutions are changing their repertoire of political coordination. Thus, digital democracy tackles the hierarchical bureaucratic organisation of representative democracy. New models are emerging along the tension of "interactivity and control" (Chadwick & Stromer-Galley, 2016, p. 3), partly absorbing the influences of a commodified and market-based approach to politics, through which political citizenship emerges to form public opinion and impact political decision-making.

Domination and rights

In the broadest sense, political power can be understood as a potential for individual and collective action to shape social order (Arendt, 1958; Rosanvallon, 2006). In its institutionalised form, power turns into rules, norms and domination. Digital democracy generates both new sources of power and changing constellations of rule and domination. Data and datafication exemplify new forms of power while their systematic collection and commodification as part of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) constitute novel modes of domination. Both, new forms of power and changing constellations of domination are related since the latter structures the opportunities for democratising digital governance.

Today, digital platforms are described as the “organizational form of the early twenty-first century”, which monopolises the collection and analysis of data and establishes a specific form of “network dominance” (Stark & Pais, 2021; Magalhães & Couldry, 2021). As economic actors, they merge the datafication of everything with a commodification of everything, even democratic communication (Dean, 2009, see Zuboff, 2019). As versatile intermediaries, platforms have become private governors in their own right (Helberger, 2020; Gillespie, 2018), with profound effects on the infrastructure of democracy, including the conditions of “opinion power” (Helberger, 2020, p. 4), will formation, and self-government (Müller, 2021; Urbinati, 2019). Hence, platform power creates specific problems of domination for digital democracy and challenges constitutional ideas and arrangements of power-balancing (Suzor, 2018; Celeste, 2019).

The relationship between governments and digital platforms is complex and charged with paradoxical effects, subverting traditional notions of democratic sovereignty. As a customer of data, governments are mandating cooperation and obliging platforms to grant access to their data trove, for example in the area of law enforcement, police work and state security. For the field of intelligence services, Edward Snowden’s revelations have demonstrated the extent of public-private collaboration, including its problematic effects for human rights (Lyon, 2015; Jørgensen, 2019). As a regulator of data-based services, governments are enrolling platforms “as proxies of the state to enforce laws” (Fourcade & Gordon, 2020, p. 94), for example through “notice and take-down” provisions in the field of media law and communication (Keller & Leerssen, 2020). The boundaries between public and private sector seem to be blurring towards a symbiotic power constellation of aligned interests, which become legally and technically inscribed into the provision of digital infrastructures. The outsourcing of law enforcement to the private sector appoints platforms as “the primary governors of online communication (Helberger, 2020, p. 7; Klonick, 2017), with unclear consequences for the quality of public oversight and democratic accountability. And while fundamental rights could principally be strengthened in digital democracy, they are practically coming under pressure from both data-based business models and expanding surveillance competences of the state (de Gregorio, 2021; Redeker et al., 2018).

However, there are also initiatives towards a democratic re-embedding of these constellations of power and domination. With regard to human rights, the growing discrepancy between the potential and practical conditions of exercising human rights is increasingly yet unsystematically politicised across national borders. Internationally, the political struggle evolving around democratic principles for the digital constellation centres on a “language of users’ rights” (Suzor, 2018, p. 4) aiming to combat the current power constellation and the corresponding vulnerabilities of citizenship (Padovani & Santaniello, 2018). Such a language could sediment in a reinterpretation of fundamental rights as the normative framework for regulating platform power (Suzor et al., 2019). Since platforms govern the public sphere and thus determine the conditions for exercising the rights to freedom of speech and privacy, platforms should also be required to respect and protect human rights (Haggart & Keller, 2021; Kaye, 2019).

Mushrooming initiatives towards an “Internet Bill of Rights” are seen as evidence for a digital constitutionalism from below (Redecker et al., 2015). Digital constitutionalism gives birth to a new category of “constitutional subjects” (Teubner, 2004), among them not only international NGOs but, according to some, also the global platform corporations themselves. In this view, all actors affected contribute with informal norms to the juridification of the digital sphere (for recent examples, see Douek, 2019; Kloneck, 2020). However, such an approach has to navigate the fine line of including the private sector as constitutional subjects while at the same time preventing it from becoming the dominant one.

In addition to rights-based approaches, which pose the risk of individualising and depoliticising digital forms of domination, other forms of engagement can be found on the micro and the macro level. An example of the former refers to the growing political engagement of IT sector employees against management decisions in the form of “leaks” or walk-outs. On the macro level, national governments are addressing platform power under the claim of digital sovereignty. However, notions of sovereignty primarily justify a strengthening of the nation state instead of promoting democratisation (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). In contrast, civic tech approaches may be paving the way towards democratising digital constellations of power from below. As part of a “constitutional moment” (Celeste, 2019), digital democracy challenges the traditional state- and nation-centred focus and argues for a more pluralist approach to re-embed platform power and tame digital constellations of domination.

4. Conclusion

Digital democracy links political self-determination to technical innovation in contingent, unpredictable ways. Hence, its evolution reflects the open-ended, often experimental interplay of political imaginaries, concerns, and goals with new technical possibilities. However, investigating digital democracy entails lessons that go beyond the present techno-political constellation: political self-determination is a profoundly mediated project whose institutions and practices are constantly and contingently in flux. The changes we observe are often ambivalent and do not reflect a linear progression towards more direct, unmediated, or transparent forms of sovereignty. Likewise, digital democracy cannot be reduced to a strengthening, or weakening, of single elements such as freedom, equality, participation, or directness. Instead, political engagement and its objective are driven by different ways of interpreting and implementing democratic principles, which more often than not are in tension with each other. Given these endogenous dynamics, current changes of democracy defy a monocausal explanation and ask for interpretations that pay attention to the contingent interplay of political aspirations, digital possibilities and their social context.

Digital democracy evolves under mediated conditions that political actors can only partly control. While emerging democratic practices show traces of digital business models as well as commercial and political surveillance ambitions, they are simultaneously pushing back against these forms of alienation. New technologies are not only means, they also have become subject of political engagement. Hence, digital democracy involves struggles over its foundational principles, its directions and meaning, its infrastructure. It should therefore be understood as a contingent political arrangement in flux.

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Systematic review article, digital democracy: a systematic literature review.

• 1 Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Mahammadiyah Sinjai, Sinjai, Indonesia
• 2 Department of Accounting and Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business, Regional Campus of International Excellence “Campus Mare Nostrum”, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
• 3 Department of Government Studies, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
• 4 Department of Government Studies, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University Muhammadiyah Malang, Malang, Indonesia

Digital democracy provides a new space for community involvement in democratic life. This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to uncover the trend of concepts in the study of digital democracy. This study used descriptive analysis with data sources derived from the Scopus database from the period between 2014 and 2020 (a total of 230 articles) and processed with VOSviewer. The results showed three dominant concepts, namely democracy, the internet, and movement. In addition, it was found that the digital era provides positive and negative impacts on democracy, that public knowledge in a quality digital democracy is important, and that there is strong elite control in virtual democracy. The results of this research can be used as a basis for developing digital democracy studies. Meanwhile, this study was limited by the fact that the articles reviewed were only sourced from Scopus and did not include publications from 2022. Therefore, future studies need to take a comparative analysis approach that uses the Web of Science (WoS) database and increases the time period in which articles are sourced.

1. Introduction

The advancement of technology, information, and telecommunications (ICT) has resulted in significant changes to practically every aspect of human life in the 21st century. Nowadays, virtualization and digitalization are comprehensively affecting the pattern of people's lives, in state, social, cultural, economic, political, and religious environments ( Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2020 ). Particularly, in regard to democracy, there are many advancements or modern patterns caused by the rapid development of ICT. Communities and countries across the digital world can now communicate with each other very easily and accessing information is no longer a complicated process ( Bastien et al., 2020 ). Meanwhile, democracy in the old era used conventional patterns in which it was quite difficult for people to gain access to information related to government and state issues. Additionally, people found communicating or expressing opinions challenging. This was because of the complexity of the systems in democratic countries in the old era, which led to minimal public participation in activating democracy ( Dunan, 2020 ).

The development of the pattern of democracy through ICT advancement has brought about a great deal of change and provided many convenient benefits. Democracy in the digital era is able to provide easy access for the community, especially in terms of obtaining and expressing information ( Hardiman, 2018 ). However, as well as the positive impacts, digital democracy is also associated with negative impacts. The misuse of digital platforms as a means of community democracy is common. The key part of democracy in the digital era that all internet users must consider is their ethics and manners when expressing their thoughts ( Mahliana, 2019 ).

Digital democracy in its development is very much influenced by virtual space, especially social media. Meanwhile, social media is an embodiment of virtual space. The provision of internet access is the most important issue in this instance ( Indianto et al., 2021 ). The existence of virtual space and social media is one aspect that can provide great benefits for democratic life. Social media, if used by people as a means to activate democracy, will fulfill the true purpose of digital democracy ( Mahliana, 2019 ). The general population can readily obtain information and express their goals using social media platforms, such as Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Line, blogs, websites, and other similar platforms. Moreover, nowadays, social media users are more likely to see content with varied meanings. This ease of access may undoubtedly be used to voice opinions, acquire information, and mobilize the populace on important topics in a democracy ( Waluyo, 2019 ). Lower-earning citizens can also take advantage of new technologies, such as social media (e.g., Facebook), which are extremely popular, inexpensive, and simple to use. In this instance, low-income individuals may demand increased information disclosure via these media, and local governments may use these tools to reach out to these citizens ( Guillamón et al., 2016 ). Additionally, candidates/politicians often use social media during political campaigns in which they use various platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, to disseminate political programs and ideas that will be implemented.

When looking at the long journey of democratic methods in the past using conventional patterns and comparing them with digital democracy in the modern era, there is a fairly strong distinction. In the 1990s, internet information technology became known in the community. This had implications for how people adapted to democratic life ( Waluyo, 2018 ). In the past, people could only access information and express opinions through mass media, such as radio, television, and printed newspapers. Now, this behavior has shifted and people generally use digital platforms. Today, the public can promote democracy freely using the internet and social media ( Vittori, 2020 ). An additional benefit of the internet and social media is that they may be used to inspire and motivate. In the past, it was difficult to communicate directly with the government and society as they seemed so far away, but this has now been made possible by the internet and social media ( Hardiman, 2018 ).

Digital democracy is related to the use of digital media and networks for political and government purposes. In the context of democracy, digital technology greatly influences the democratic process through political mobilization, campaign strategies, and polarization of public opinion ( Gilardi, 2016 ). Furthermore, digital democracy is also related to the implementation of e-government ( Bastick, 2017 ; Sundberg, 2019 ; Filipova, 2020 ), e-Voting ( Yang et al., 2021 ; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2022 ), and social movements ( Treré, 2015 ; Canella, 2017 ; Agur and Frisch, 2019 ; Pavan and Felicetti, 2019 ; Leong et al., 2020 ; Storer and Rodriguez, 2020 ).

Based on some of the explanations above, studies related to digital democracy are needed. The problems that arise in a digitally democratic society are things that must be minimized and normalized. Studies related to digital democracy in the world of democracy and science are fundamental and can provide implications or benefits for future democratic life. Therefore, researchers consider this to be an important issue and are interested in studying and analyzing how digital democracy is discussed and how it should be implemented. In studies related to democracy in the digital era, researchers try to use a structured literature review system when this method is considered to be capable of answering the researcher's basic questions and presenting relevant conclusions.

Several studies have demonstrated the development of digital democracy across the world. Bessant (2014) points out that digital democracy has succeeded in driving political change in Arab countries through the Arab Spring due to the involvement of students, who were able to use social media as a means of communication in developing resistance movements. Wells (2014) states that social media encourages the rise of civil politics because people are more concerned with political issues. Vlachokyriakos et al. (2014) show that the presence of e-voting succeeded in making the election process more efficient and effective. Lee et al. (2014) demonstrated that social media succeeded in breaking the chain of political inequality in Thailand, where young people were more active, especially in the case of the referendum. Natale and Ballatore (2014) highlighted the role of new media, specifically websites, in spreading influence and campaigning during the growth of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy. Bessant and Watts (2017) show that Aboriginal tribes in Australia, as indigenous people, have succeeded in increasing their equality and political influence using social media. Vaccari and Valeriani (2018) argue that people's political participation via social media is greater in established democracies, such as Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States than in “third wave” democracies, such as Greece, Poland, and Spain. Michaesel (2018) looks at how the Iranian government strictly controls the internet through censorship of information to prevent the emergence of a democracy promotion movement.

Evans (2019) shows a strong correlation between massive internet use and the development of democracy in Africa. This study shows that democracy in African countries is currently heading in a new direction due to the strengthening of digital politics in the community to oversee the running of government and protest. Chitanana and Mutsvairo (2019) show how social media has succeeded in growing a repressive community resistance movement in Zimbabwe; people are using social media for citizen journalism and fighting for democracy. In Russia, Glazunova (2020) shows how YouTube has succeeded in becoming an alternative media used by Alexey Navalny as an opposition figure to organize mass protests in Russia, especially in the anti-corruption protest event in 2017. Finally, Flew and Iosifidis (2020) emphasize how populism is an aspect of the right wing that exploits the spirit of nationalism and has become stronger lately because it maximizes the use of social media. Another study analyzes the determinants of public engagement on municipal Facebook pages ( Metallo et al., 2020 ). The sample included 170 cities in Italy and Spain that used Facebook in 2014. The data indicate that excessive publication of city information on Facebook Pages has little effect on citizen involvement. Additionally, routinely posting information does not constitute public participation. However, if it is posted and made publicly available (for example, on a holiday), the possibility of public engagement increases. Additionally, citizen engagement on the city's Facebook page is dependent on the person's income level, with a negative correlation between income and participation. In comparison to these studies, which were conducted explicitly, this research makes a novel addition by using the systematic literature review (SLR) approach to demonstrate the trend of digital democracy studies and their analysis to make them more comprehensive and comparative.

2. Literature review

2.1. democracy in the digital era.

The development of globalization has many implications for present society. The current rapid globalization has minimized limitations in the global community. This is based on the rapid development of technology and information so that it is easy for the global community to access information ( Kud, 2021 ). Changes in the democratic patterns of society and government in each country have coincided with this massive development of information technology and globalization. Advances in technology, information, and communication have changed the democratic patterns of society and government so that they can move in digital spaces ( Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2020 ).

There are positive and negative sides to the study of democracy in the digital era. The positive aspects make it easier for people to express their aspirations, form groups, protest policies, control policies put forward by governments, and so on. The point is, from this perspective, democratic countries are becoming more democratic because virtual spaces and internet access can provide opportunities for users to express their opinions ( Dwifatma, 2021 ). However, in this case, good understanding and ethics are needed so that people do not use freedom of expression to violate ethics in the virtual world as well as human rights ( Nasution, 2020 ). On the other hand, there is a negative side to democracy in the digital era. Public understanding of social media is something that is often a problem. Many cases of ethical violations and use are out of the realm of the public in the virtual world. These cases can be in the form of hoaxes, hate speech, defamation, and so on ( Masduki, 2021 ). The basic understanding of society in conveying and using freedom of expression on digital platforms is sometimes far beyond limits. This is one of the problems and challenges for democracy in today's digital era.

Based on the explanation above, digital democracy has a significant impact on society and government. Digital democracy can support the realization of democratization in a country. This can happen because the digital world makes it easier for people to control and express their aspirations regarding existing problems ( Charnock et al., 2021 ). On the other hand, the government as a policymaker should also provide substantial and periodic socialization, as well as education regarding how to use digital platforms properly ( Blühdorn and Butzlaff, 2020 ).

2.2. Virtual space and social media

Virtual space is a space that results from a simulation of reality and then becomes a hyperreality or the adoption of reality on a digital platform. Virtual space can also be interpreted as a form of virtual communication. Virtual space is present as an alternative solution for meeting human needs to socialize widely beyond limits. Meanwhile, social media is an embodiment of the virtual space. Internet access is the most important factor in this instance ( Indianto et al., 2021 ). The existence of virtual space and social media is one aspect that can provide extraordinary benefits for democratic life. The meaning or value of democracy can be achieved through social media, which make it easier for people to actively participate in a democratic country ( Mahliana, 2019 ). People can readily obtain information and express their goals using social media networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Line, blogs, and websites, among others. This ease of access can certainly be used as a means of expressing opinions and gathering and mobilizing the masses regarding certain issues in a democratic country ( Waluyo, 2019 ).

To support this, substantial and periodic virtual political education is needed to support democratization in today's digital era. This is an important aspect for supporting the basic understanding of the community regarding how to use various digital platforms to support democracy ( Malik et al., 2020 ). There will be complex problems if the virtual political understanding of society is not fully fulfilled. Hoaxes, hate speech, defamation, discrimination, political stereotypes, and so on are things that can arise if the social media user community is not able to use social media properly.

3. Research method

This study examines various articles that are closely associated with digital democracy. Articles of an international scale and reputation are the main sources of reference in the preparation of this study. The focus of the review discussed in this study is based on several basic factors, especially in terms of understanding the concepts, impacts, and patterns related to digital democracy. Researchers are attempting to summarize studies that have been reviewed by previous researchers to find a common thread to understand how digital democracy takes place in the current era.

Figure 1 shows that this research began with a search for articles using the keyword “digital democracy” in the Scopus database for the 2014–2021 period. This search identified 258 articles that were then reviewed based on stages: a search for articles, import articles in the application software, and mapping of discussion topics.

Figure 1 . Flow diagram showing the different stages of the method used in this review with PRISMA.

Several articles that had strong links were obtained by researchers based on the following procedure: first, article identification attempted to sort and select various articles so that only those related to the topic were used. This was carried out by inputting the keywords “digital democracy” in the search column, with restrictions from 2014 to 2021. Based on the search process, 2,508 articles related to the topic were obtained. The second stage involved verifying the various articles found to determine whether they were really needed and were closely related to democracy issues in the digital era. Verification was carried out by limiting the subject area (social sciences), document type (article), publication stage (final), and language (English). The verification process identified 258 articles/journals that were relevant to digital democracy. These articles were used as a reference for studying “digital democracy”.

4. Data analysis

4.1. publication and leading author.

Articles on the topic of digital democracy are one of the the most popular types of study and continue to increase every year. Figure 2 shows that from 2014 to 2021, in general, there was an increase even though there was a stagnation in 2016. Furthermore, the year in which the highest number of articles were published was 2021 (89 articles). By contrast, the year in which the fewest articles were published was 2014 (14 articles).

Figure 2 . Number of publications from 2014 to 2021.

Furthermore, the 10 authors with the highest number of publications related to digital democracy between 2014 and 2021 are shown in Figure 3 . De Blasio had the highest number of publications (four articles). Furthermore, three authors, Casserro Ripolles, Sorice, and Trere, published three articles. Finally, six authors, Vaccari, Assenbaum, Ballatore, Berg, Condy, and Davies, published two articles.

Figure 3 . Top 10 authors of publications related to digital democracy between 2014 and 2021.

4.2. Correlation and grouping of themes in digital democracy studies

The following description is a follow-up procedure sourced from various articles/journals after the previous selection and verification process. The results of the review were processed using the VOSviewer application to categorize concepts based on groups. Figure 4 shows the various concept names displayed with cluster densities, with a total link of 511 and a total link strength of 821. The difference between cluster colors is an indication of differentiation between one discussion group and another focus group. This makes it easy for researchers to map groups of data so that they can be studied and analyzed. Regarding the study of digital democracy, Figure 4 displays different colors for each existing cluster and refers to the grouping of their respective concepts.

Figure 4 . Clusters of discussion topics related to digital democracy.

Figure 4 shows how the themes were grouped, and these groups were sorted for review with those that actually have a correlation based on the themes discussed. Table 1 maps concepts or themes based on clusters related to the study of digital democracy.

Table 1 . Themes grouped based on clusters.

Table 1 shows that cluster 1 predominantly discusses how the internet or digital space can be used as a forum to participate in strengthening democracy. In cluster 1, the most dominant keyword is internet. This shows that the topic of the internet has the highest frequency, or is often mentioned, in cluster 1. This happens because all the concepts written by the author always refer to the internet.

Gauja (2021) , for example, explains that the presence of digital networks can strengthen democracy as people can participate online to strengthen and activate it. Nowadays, public opinion can be channeled through digital platforms or social media. Twitter, Facebook, websites, and various other platforms can be used to communicate public opinion in a virtual form. Digital democracy, or what can also be referred to as e-democracy, on the other hand can function as campaign media. The breadth of access and the number of internet users are the main reasons why online participation is massive ( Flew and Iosifidis, 2020 ).

A fairly monolithic scientific argument is also elaborated by Smith and Martín (2021) . This study, conducted in Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, reveals that digital or technopolitical platforms can influence democratic activity and democratize a region or country. Smith and Martín (2021) also explain that digital features have become a platform for aspirations of community involvement and activism. This underlies the notion that the pattern of digital democracy must be strengthened through socialization and strong education so that people can understand the pattern of democracy in the virtual space. Additionally, Vittori (2020) further reveals that the community can influence policymakers through the digital space, where the masses can be mobilized virtually to provide reflection so that policies made by the government or members of parliament can be influenced. Thus, the digital space is highly beneficial for activating democracy. Democracy is one thing that can be realized through the active participation of citizens, and the internet and social media can be a platform to manifest this participation ( Fuchs, 2021 ).

Cluster 2 predominantly features the function of the community to control government policies and is also related to public understanding during political arguments in digital media. In cluster 2, the most dominant keyword is citizenship as all the concepts written by the authors always refer to the topic of citizenship because citizens participate in politics, primarily to control government policies; therefore, many authors research this topic.

To activate democracy and foster a participatory political culture, the public should massively control and oversee government policies. Democracy and participation is not only defined as using voting rights in general elections but also as guarding the elected political actors to keep the public interest first ( Masduki, 2021 ). Feldman (2020) finds that one of the most important things in digital democracy is a good basic knowledge of digital media users. Sometimes, there is a misunderstanding in society that freedom of expression in digital media is defined as a very high level of freedom. This is biased and out of control and leads to the violation of the human rights of individuals or political actors, hoaxes, SARA, black campaigns, and so on. Therefore, it is necessary for the public to have a strong awareness about how to argue when using digital media. Understanding which words to use and which arguments to engage with exemplifies this and underpins the appropriate manner in which to express opinions or argue in the digital world ( Moya, 2020 ).

Similar to the dominant concept in the previous cluster, cluster 3 predominantly features community participation in enlivening democracy. Therefore, the dominant keyword is participant, which means all authors refer to it in cluster 3. Even though every democratic country has its own representative council, the advancement of ICT allows people to directly control policy and debate freely through digital media ( Dommett et al., 2021 ). In terms of the implications or problems that arise because of regulations that deviate from government, the public can use social media to raise cases and mobilize the masses to oppose government regulations. This is what is referred to as public participation in the new era of digital democracy ( Siagian and Yuliarti, 2021 ). In the conventional era, people had to report to the government at the closest level and to representatives; however, in the era of digital democracy, people can express their opinions in digital spaces or platforms. The expression of public dissatisfaction on social media has led to governments improving policies or redelivering policy intentions. This is certainly very democratic, with the benefits of digital media positively impacting democracy ( Attatfa et al., 2020 ).

Cluster 4 predominantly discusses the impact of the presence of the internet and digital media on democracy, which has an impact on the ease and equality of public access to participation. Therefore, the dominant keyword is access, which means all authors refer to it in cluster 4. Bastien et al. (2020) explain that the ease of access offered by the digital space can be of great benefit to marginalized and disabled people. For example, social media can be used as a forum for channeling the opinions of this group of people. Social media that does not prioritize social stratification provides a positive space for this group. A democratic system that requires any citizen to have an opinion through social media can indirectly be properly accommodated. Social media is an alternative way for people to participate in and activate democracy ( Vittori, 2020 ). Finally, Dunan (2020) also suggests that democracy in the digital era makes people closer to the state and government. This is because of the lack of boundaries in the digital world, which allows people to easily convey their aspirations to the government. The community in this case can move away from the political culture of the subject and participate politically. In general, democracy in the digital era, putting aside its negative impacts, can provide great benefits for the community so that they can actively participate in a democratic state system.

The dominant themes or concepts featured in cluster 5 are capitalism and digital democracy. Marenco (2021) explains that digital democracy has a strong causality with the capitalist system. The dominant keyword is capitalism, which is referred to by all authors. The focus of cluster 5 is to link capitalism with political democracy; in a capitalist system, political democracy must be carried out. The concentration of economic and political power in a handful of groups indicates a pattern of digital democracy mobilization. In this instance, democracy in the digital era faces challenges. Capitalist groups can control and supervise internet users. This is a real problem for democracy in the digital age. To minimize this, digital media users are required to have knowledge about verifying the information contained in various digital platforms ( De Blasio and Viviani, 2020 ).

Finally, in cluster 6, the concept predominantly discusses the presence of digital media as an alternative to society in democracy. This is indicated by the fact that alternative digital medium is the dominant keyword, which means it is the main reference for authors in cluster 6. Democracy in the digital era requires citizens to have accounts on various social media platforms. These accounts can be used to as a weapon to convey opposing arguments against the government as a policymaker ( Gao et al., 2021 ). Additionally, digital media are now used as a tool for political advertising by political groups and individuals. In this instance, these advertisements have positive and negative values. This requires the public to be observant so that they can understand information in advertisements delivered on digital platforms ( Gauja, 2021 ). To support public understanding of democracy in digital media, the government should also massively provide socialization and education regarding how digital media should be used as a means of channeling aspirations. This is considered important for democracy in today's digital era. Positives and negatives are always present in democracy in the digital era; therefore, it is important to understand how to properly express opinions on social media or the internet ( Gauja, 2021 ).

4.3. The dominant themes in the study of digital democracy

Based on the data analysis undertaken, there are several dominant themes or themes that have a strong association with the study of digital democracy. This categorization or grouping of dominant themes aims to make the study more focused so that it can present a relevant conclusion. Additionally, the categorization and classification of dominant themes are also used because they can make it easier for the author to map out any topics that have a strong association with the topics discussed. Reviewing the studies of democracy requires verification or sorting of the data so that it is truly in line with the topic of a study. This is carried out so that the discussion or subject of the study is not too general and widespread. Figure 5 shows some of the dominant concepts associated with the study of digital democracy.

Figure 5 . Dominant topics in the study of digital democracy.

Looking at the group of words featured in Figure 5 , it would appear that of the various previous discussions on digital democracy, several groups discussed the dominant themes or concepts that tended to be discussed the most. Researchers in this study used an analytical tool called VOSviewer to process data and come up with dominant themes or concepts related to the study of digital democracy. The dominant concepts/themes that were often discussed by previous researchers included democracy, internet, movement, concept, public sphere, control, implication, framework, representative democracy, democratization, relationship, knowledge, participatory civic, citizenship, public opinion, media control, e-democracy, and online participation.

The color thickness in Figure 5 indicates how dominant each focus group is. The group of themes with the thickest colors were discussed the most. These various groups of dominant concepts have a strong mutualism symbiosis that makes it easier for researchers to come to conclusions that are truly conical to studies related to democracy in the digital era. This review of the dominant theme was needed to provide a reference for concepts that were often discussed. Therefore, the results of the processed data are shown in Figure 5 .

Based on the dominant concepts or themes related to digital democracy, as described in Figure 5 , several topics are quite dominant or have been frequently studied. The first dominant topic, democracy, is at the center of studies related to digital democracy. Democracy in the digital era is one of the topics discussed in the modern era. The presence of digital media has strong implications for democratic life. The positives and negatives presented by democracy in the digital era are complex and interesting issues to study. This foundation is one of the reasons why “democracy” has become the dominant discussion in various previous studies. Another dominant theme indicated by color thickness in Figure 5 is the internet. Democracy and the internet are groups that have strong causality in studies related to digital democracy. The presence of the internet raises the spirit of democracy in the community because of the convenience offered in the various virtual spaces in it. The internet arrived and changed people's democratic habits. However, there are many problems associated with the digitalization of democracy. These problems have been predominantly studied by several researchers.

Another dominant theme in the study of digital democracy is knowledge. The active participation of the community in the era of digital democracy must be accompanied by strong knowledge regarding the use of digital media in democracy. This is important to discuss because there are many cases of violations and irregularities when opinions are expressed on digital platforms ( Reiter and Matthes, 2021 ). Then there is the dominant theme of public opinion in the era of e-democracy. E-democracy, in this sense, is intended as a pattern of delivering public opinion through digital systems. In the modern era, people can more easily and freely express their opinions, conduct campaigns, and mobilize the masses ( Flew and Iosifidis, 2020 ). The presence of the internet has improved democracy. Although there are many drawbacks with virtual democracy, the minimal limitations associated with digital platforms are positive for society in terms of activating democracy and presenting democratic values ( Gauja, 2021 ).

There were other dominant themes that could not be fully covered by this study. Nevertheless, each dominant theme contained in Figure 5 has a correlation with one another and can be used as a reference for studies related to digital democracy. When conducting studies related to digital democracy, it is necessary to first understand the dominant concepts that have been discussed by previous studies. This is important because it can make it easier for researchers to summarize and produce relevant conclusions regarding the theme of digital democracy.

4.4. Period of article publication in digital democracy studies

The next elaboration relates to the period of publication of articles in the study of digital democracy.

Figure 6 shows articles published during the period from 2014 to 2020. When examined based on thickness or color dominance, studies related to digital democracy published between 2014 and 2016 were more dominant in discussing the internet, participants, services, and so on. This means that during the 2014–2016 period, focused or dominant studies discussed how the internet can be used as a field for community participation in democracy. From 2016 to 2018, the study that was dominant began to change and attempted to examine the benefits of the internet for presenting democracy in democratic countries. The studies in this time span were also dominant in discussing the internet as a means of control and conveying aspirations and as a space for movements that can support democracy. Then, the period from 2018 to 2020 saw the emergence of capitalism, digital advertising, and virtual space controlled by certain groups. This means that there has been a very dynamic study of digital democracy. However, in general, studies on related themes are always dominantly related to, or have implications for, “democracy”.

Figure 6 . Publication trend of the study of digital democracy.

Studies and publication of articles on digital democracy are considered very important given the massive changes that have occurred in the modern era. Additionally, democracy in the digital era has challenges and shortcomings associated with its implementation; therefore, future studies need to be scaled up to provide updates and communicate the lessons learned about digital democracy. The novelty presented in studies related to digital democracy provides benefits as a reference and alternative solution for the future. Therefore, researchers expect to undertake large-scale studies and present new findings to provide lessons that can be incorporated into future studies related to digital democracy. One of the important studies conducted by De Blasio and Viviani (2020) , “Platform party between digital activism and hyper-leadership: the reshaping of the public sphere”, emphasizes that politicians/political parties can maximize social media to repair their damaged image in the eyes of the public through smart and sustainable political advertising. In addition, politicians/political parties must improve their intensive communication skills through digital means (social media) to connect them with the public so that their damaged reputation can be repaired.

4.5. Co-authorship analysis

Network mapping by author's name was also carried out in this study. The involvement of the authors in relevant studies is important because it can show the intensity of the author and the relationship between authors in this area of study. Network mapping by author can also show how active an author is in collaborating with other researchers and can also find references between authors to indicate who might collaborate with each other in the future.

As shown in Figure 7 , the author with the most publications was De Blasio (four articles). However, when a co-authorship analysis of collaboration between authors was undertaken, of the 43 selected authors with at least two articles, only one cluster with four authors (Reinhard, Knufher, Heft, and Meyerhofer) was identified and indicated a very minimal collaboration in the topic of digital democracy. De Blasio was not among those who collaborated with other authors.

Figure 7 . Co-authorship analysis.

5. Conclusion

Studies related to digital democracy are important and need to be widely presented. The rapid development of ICT has brought change and dynamism to the pattern of democracy in the digital era. This research reveals several dominant studies related to digital democracy. Some of the most important aspects of digital democracy were as follows: first, the digital era and its benefits for democracy—the presence of the internet has many implications for the pattern of democracy. The internet, which offers freedom and easy access for users, can be used as a forum for community participation to actively contribute to democracy. Virtual space provides a new dignity to the rise of democracy, thus democratic values can be presented in today's digital era. A second aspect involves people's knowledge of democracy in the digital era. In the era of digital democracy, freedom of expression is not regarded as a completely unlimited freedom. Values and ethics need to be applied when expressing opinions in virtual/digital spaces. Therefore, public knowledge is fundamental in the era of digital democracy (e-democracy). Finally, another important aspect is the presence of capitalism and control in democracy. In today's studies of digital democracy, there are indications of control by a group of elites in the virtual democratic pattern of society. This negativity affects democracy in the digital era, but the basic understanding of society is one of the main shields against this problem.

This research is useful for showing the development of, and urgent need for, digital democracy at a global level. However, this research also has limitations. First, the articles reviewed were only sourced from the Scopus database; therefore, there are no comparison data. Second, it excludes articles published in 2022, during which time the COVID-19 pandemic endured and even worsened in several places, which of course greatly affected virtual democracy. Therefore, further studies need to apply a comparative analysis approach that uses the Web of Science (WoS) database as a source of highly reputable international journals and widen the time period from which to source published research.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: digital democracy, government, participation, social media, internet, movement

Citation: Congge U, Guillamón M-D, Nurmandi A, Salahudin and Sihidi IT (2023) Digital democracy: A systematic literature review. Front. Polit. Sci. 5:972802. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2023.972802

Received: 19 June 2022; Accepted: 09 January 2023; Published: 09 February 2023.

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Copyright © 2023 Congge, Guillamón, Nurmandi, Salahudin and Sihidi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Social Media and the Political Engagement of Young Adults: Between Mobilization and Distraction

Scholars have expressed great hopes that social media use can foster the democratic engagement of young adults. However, this research has largely ignored non-political, entertainment-oriented uses of social media. In this essay, I theorize that social media use can significantly dampen political engagement because, by and large, young adults use social media primarily for non-political purposes, which distracts rather than mobilizes.

Design/methodology/approach

I illustrate this argument using aggregate level data from the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, and Japan by comparing relative voter turnout and social media use data of young adults.

Data suggest a so called Social Media Political Participation paradox in those countries: The gap in voter turnout between young adults and older generations has not significantly decreased, despite a skyrocketing rise of social media use on the side of young adults, and the overwhelming research evidence that social media use fosters offline political participation.

Implications

When trying to understand the implications of social media for democracy across the globe, entertainment-oriented content needs to be brought back in.

Originality/value

This essay challenges the dominant research paradigm on social media use and political participation. It urges future research to theoretically develop, describe, and empirically test a comprehensive model of how social media use has the potential to mobilize and to distract.

1 Introduction

Around the globe, social media have become a centerpiece in young adults’ lives. Particularly with their smartphones, young adults can literally be on social media 24/7, permanently connected to the world and their peers ( Vorderer and Kohring 2013 ). In fact, when comparing the current young generation to their older counterparts, there is a fundamental difference in media use behaviors: While young adults, aged 16–25, rely on digital platforms or messenger services, such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, or WeChat, to get the news, the older generation is much more likely to be exposed to traditional news sources such as television or newspapers. At the same time, there are dozens of studies around the globe demonstrating that, traditionally, young adults are less interested in traditional politics compared to older generations ( Delli Carpini 2017 ), less likely to vote, and generally less politically sophisticated ( Binder et al. 2021 ). In short, political parties had been, before the emergence of digital media, struggling to reach out to the younger generation. Especially when it comes to traditional institutions, you adults are often described as detached and apathetic (e.g., Binder et al. 2021 ; Loader et al. 2014 ).

Yet with social media, scholars have expressed great hopes regarding young adults’ democratic engagement (see Binder et al. 2021 ; Oser and Boulianne 2020 ): It has been argued that particularly social media can build new relationships between political actors and young adults, enable social interaction about political topics, connect people, enhance political opinion expression, equalize engagement and generally foster participation as well as boost voter turnout or contribute to social cohesion (e.g., Boulianne 2011 , 2015 , 2020 ; Goh et al. 2019 ; Loader et al. 2014 ). So, with digital media, there are grounds to believe that the generational engagement gap may be reduced, and that young citizens could be reengaged into the political world. In fact, scholars working on digital media and political engagement have been fascinated by this idea, largely pointing to democratically welcomed outcomes of social media use, such as learning or participation. For instance, researchers observed a positive relationship between the frequency of social media use and protest participation among the youth ( Valenzuala et al. 2014 ), and more generally, it has been found that political social media use is positively related to various forms of political participation (e.g., Ekström et al. 2014 ; Skoric and Zhu 2016 ). With recent meta-analyses on the topic, the evidence for the democratically positive outcomes of social media use is simply overwhelming, particularly in cross-sectional survey research ( Boulianne 2011 ; Chae et al. 2019 ; Skoric et al. 2016 ) and also with respect to young adults ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ).

However, scholarship on the democratic outcomes of social media frequently seem to overlook the fact that social media are primarily used for entertainment and relational purposes, especially when it comes to young adults ( Dimitrova and Matthes 2018 ; but see Skoric and Zhu 2016 ; Theocharis and Quintelier 2016 ). That is, the social media use of young people is clearly dominated by non-political content ( Binder et al. 2021 ). Yet the vast majority of studies do not take these forms of exposure into account, eventually ignoring a large share of the diversity in content on social media. As a consequence, scholars have turned a blind eye on potentially distractive effects of social media use on political engagement, leading to a skewed overall picture of this research field. In this conceptual paper, I take a different approach by theorizing that social media use can significantly dampen political engagement. The main reason is that social media are primarily used for entertainment and social networking purposes, which has the potential to distract rather than mobilize ( Heiss and Matthes 2021 ).

In what follows, I will briefly summarize the literature on digital media and young adults’ political engagement. Then, using illustrative, aggregate level data from the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, I will then describe the so called Social Media Political Participation Paradox , that is, the gap in voter turnout between young adults and older generations has not significantly decreased, despite a skyrocketing rise of social media use, on the side of young adults, and the huge amount of studies suggesting a significant relation between social media use and political participation. Then, I will develop a theoretical argument for why social media use is also likely to disengage, challenging the prevailing academic reading of the literature as well as the existing empirical evidence.

2 Digital Media and Young Adults’ Political Engagement

Political engagement, often also referred to as political participation, is understood as “actions or activities by ordinary citizens that in some way are directed toward influencing political outcomes in society” ( Ekman and Amnå 2012 , p. 287). This entails a diverse repertoire ranging from traditional (e.g., voting) and non-traditional (e.g., political online discussion; see Hopmann et al. 2015 ) forms of engagement to political consumerism ( Skoric et al. 2016 ). Political engagement can be conceptualized along the lines of individual and collective actions ( Adler and Goggin 2005 ). In addition, formal political participation, such as voting or party membership, and activism, which allows for influence in the political decision making process though protests represent distinct dimensions of political engagement ( Ekman and Amnå 2012 ).

Social media has given rise to entirely new forms of action and interaction that can only happen in a digitally networked space, such as online petitions or commenting on politicians’ posts ( Sloam 2014 ). Social networks allow for non-institutionalized and horizontal modes of engagement, which are often favored by young adults ( Sloam 2014 ). Since such forms of political engagement only exist and can be exercised within social media, they also have to be treated as a separate subdimension of political engagement. Overall, the various forms of engagement can be described as either institutionalized (e.g., voting) or non-institutionalized (e.g., protest behavior). This distinction is relevant because “young adults are disproportionately more likely to participate through non-institutionalized means.” ( Weiss 2020 , p. 3), particularly in the online world. This is by no means a new insight. Since decades, scholars have bemoaned a participation gap between younger and older individuals ( Quintelier 2007 ), as “in almost every election young people are the least likely to vote, and these participation rates are continuously declining” ( Quintelier 2007 , p. 165). For instance, in Austria, young people are allowed to vote at the age of 16, but nevertheless, their turnout rates are comparably low ( Binder et al. 2021 ). Findings from other countries also suggest that young people have comparatively negative attitudes toward politics and low trust in the political system ( Quintelier 2007 ; see Binder et al. 2021 ).

But there is also hope. In this research area, “[y]outh’s digital media use is often seen as a partial remedy to the decline of youth participation in political and civic life” ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 , p. 112). The argument is that digital media is an important source of information for those not primarily interested in institutional politics. More specifically, it is generally assumed that social media fosters young adults’ political engagement because the networking function of social media helps young citizens to develop skills and psychological dispositions that promote offline participation ( Kahne and Boyer 2018 ). Also, a seminal, cross-sectional study by Gil de Zuniga et al. (2012) suggests that social media indirectly promote participation by fostering opinion expression, which is a key driver of political participation. As another indirect effect of social media on political participation, it has been argued that some forms of social media use, such as news sharing, can strengthen social relationships and increase social cohesion, which in turn, may be the driver for collective action and group engagement (e.g., Goh et al. 2019 ; Hwang and Kim 2015 ). Similarly, social media shapes civic attitudes, and such “civic identity is a central factor that fosters civic engagement because it helps individuals to see society as a construction of human actors with political and moral goals” ( Chen et al. 2015 , p. 445).

In addition, it has been theorized that social media fosters incidental exposure to political information, which leads to learning effects, and ultimately, an increase in traditional forms of political participation ( Matthes et al. 2020 ). Furthermore, as explained by Boukes (2019) , social media increase the opportunities for citizens to learn because “never before has so much information, mostly without extra financial costs, been so close at hand for citizens” (p. 39). In line with this argument, the timeline structure of social networking platforms can lead to a “by-product” learning mechanism through which knowledge gaps are reduced ( Chadwick 2012 ), ultimately leading to political participation. And, more germane to young adults, the Impressionable Years Hypothesis ( Sears and Levy 2003 ) suggests that young people are more susceptible to social media effects compared to adults, as political efficacy and engagement are not fully consolidated during adolescence (e.g., Eckstein et al. 2012 ). That is, when exposed to social media, the notion of efficacy can be strengthened in young adults, leading to participation.

So overall, the dominant argument is that social media use can foster soft—that is, non-institutionalized—forms of engagement in a first step, such as online political expression or low-effort forms of political participation. This, in turn, will then shape classical, institutionalized types of political engagement in a second step. As Bode et al. (2014) have put it, “When adolescents use social networking sites – something many of them do in their daily lives – in a new, politically oriented way, it may actually increase their likelihood of participating in politics in other ways.” (pp. 424–425). In addition, social media can also directly lead to a rise in offline participation among young adults ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ). This theory, in line with the available meta-analyses, leads to the clear prediction that social media use should increase not only non-institutionalized forms of participation, but also—indirectly or directly—traditional forms such as voting. The available “findings offer a strong, conclusive statement that online and offline forms of engagement are highly correlated; youth engage in both environments” ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 , p. 123). But how is this observable at the aggregate level when it comes to the institutionalized forms of participation, such as voting in national parliamentary elections?

3 The Generational Political Participation Gap

To reiterate, the previously available literature unequivocally suggests that social media use, particularly political forms of use, can foster online and offline political engagement (e.g., Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ). With these insights at hand, the traditional generational gap between the young and older generations in terms of institutionalized participation needs to be revisited. One could argue that, over the past decades, social media use of young adults, unlike older generations, increased from basically zero to very high levels. That is, assuming there is a significant small to medium effect size for the relationship between political social media use on online participation, and a medium to large effect size for the relationship between online and offline participation ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ), we would expect that, in the past decades, the generational gap should have decreased.

3.1 The Social Media Political Participation Paradox

To test this idea, I draw on official voter data (i.e., not self-report survey data) from the National Parliamentary Elections in Germany. As can be seen in Figure 1 , as can be expected, social media use of young individuals has increased from zero in the early 2000s to more than 80% at the time of the last election in 2017. So, in terms of the meta-analyses reported above and although such aggregate level analyses do not allow causal conclusions, one of the theorized drivers of engagement has witnessed a skyrocketing increase. But paradoxically, as visible in Figure 1 , there were no significant increases in voter turnout for individuals aged 18–24 over the years. By contrast, in 1983, young individuals showed a turnout of 84.30 (18–20 year old) and 81.50 (21–24 year old)% in the national election. In 2017, these numbers were significantly and substantially lower (69.90% and 67.00% respectively). That is, if anything changed, the numbers are more suggestive of an increase in the generational gap, rather than a decrease. Although these are only aggregate level data, they do not suggest that social media use—emerging in the last two decades—has completely changed the picture.

Voter Turnout in National Elections and Young Adults Social Media Use over Time, Germany.

Source for social media data: Koch and Frees (2007) , source for election data: Bundeswahlleiter (2017) .

Data from the United States suggest a similar, albeit not identical picture. As can be seen in Figure 2 , the generational gap in voter turnout is clearly visible over time, although young individuals slightly increased in turnout (e.g., from 44.30% in 2008 to 48% in 2020), whereas turnout for older generations remained largely at the same level. However, a fundamental shift in turnout when it comes to young adults is clearly not visible in the data, the generational gap is still evident. In Switzerland ( Selects 2019 ), 28% of young adults aged 18–24 participated in the national parliamentary election in 1999 (35% in 2003), 33% did so in the last election in 2019. By contrast, 57% of adults aged 65–74 participated in the election in 1999 (54% in 2003), and 62% did so in the last election in 2019. Again, a clear generational gap that has been consistent over time. Finally, looking at data from Japan, the turnout of people aged 20–24 was 35.3% in 2012 and 30.69% in 2017. These numbers, however, were significantly higher for individuals aged 65–69 (77.15% in 2012 and 73.35% in 2017), 70–74 (76.47% in 2012 and 74.13% in 2017), and 75–79 (71.02% in 2012 and 70.26% in 2017). This suggests a huge generational gap when it comes to participation in national elections in those countries, and there is no clear indication the gap has decreased over the years.

Voter Turnout in National Elections and Young Adults Social Media Use over Time, USA.

Source for voting: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Source for social media use: Pew Research Center, 2021.

So overall, these aggregate data deliver a clear message for these four countries, none of which has witnessed huge protest movements outside traditional party politics. Young adults are significantly less likely to vote in national elections compared to older generations, and it seems this gap has not decreased over the past decades, as one would expect from the enthusiastic voices in research on social media use and political participation.

In fact, the findings appear somewhat paradox: The social media use has increased from zero to almost 100% in the last two decades, which should, considering the effect sizes observed in previous research, also become visible at the aggregate level. So, on the one hand, we learn from previous research that social media significantly fosters political participation, online and offline (e.g., Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ), on the other hand, we don’t see a higher turnout compared to older generations, who are much less likely to use social media compared to their younger counterparts. And even if they did, we would expect an increase in turnout for this group as well, which has not been the case. This phenomenon can be called the Social Media Political Participation Paradox . In short, at the aggregate level, it appears as if social media has not changed a thing, although social science research suggests quite the opposite.

3.2 Explaining the Paradox

Of course, on the methodological the most obvious explanation is ecological fallacy. We can’t derive any assumptions on individual level effects when looking at aggregate level data. Ultimately, no causal claims can be made, nor can we say anything about intraindividual change or processes. There may also be simultaneous, competing processes, and third variables cannot be controlled at all. Yet what we learn is that there is a generational gap in participation at the aggregate level which is, by and large, rather substantial. So at best, the data reported above can be understood as anecdotal evidence . Yet on theoretical grounds, the findings could inspire us to elaborate on why social media use may not automatically lead to strong shifts in institutionalized forms of political participation.

Several reasons can be found for this in the literature. On the theoretical side, the recent Social Media Political Participation model ( Knoll et al. 2020 ) holds that social media can foster participation only when a chain of subsequent conditions are met. According to this model, young adults have to be (intentionally or incidentally) exposed to political content on social media, they need to appraise political content on social media as relevant (as compared to other content that is simultaneously present), there needs to be a discrepancy between a current state and a future, desired state, they need to believe that a participation goal is attainable, and this goal must then be dominant in a real behavioral situation, in which other behavioral goals may be present as well (see Knoll et al. 2020 ). If one of the conditions is not met, social media use may not increase offline forms of political participation, according to the model. This model can explain why participation efforts of young adults are often short-lived, they can rise to substantial amounts during times of protest, but remain low in times of national elections. It would suffice if one of the appraisals is negative, as for instance, when other goals appear to be more important in an behavioral situation. Obviously, typical self-report survey studies cannot fully grasp the process described in the model because the behavioral situation is hardly taken into account in the typical research designs and the processes can hardly be measured in retrospect.

Second, it has been argued that social media is more likely to impact non-institutionalized forms of participation, rather than institutionalized ones ( Sloam 2014 ). That is, social media may engage young people politically, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more likely to participate in elections. In other words, social media can have the potential to engage, but such engagement may be short-lived, conditional, and bound to specific topics such as environmental engagement, animal rights, or social protest.

Third, and more importantly, when looking at the democratically relevant effects of social media use, scholars rarely consider (or control) non-political, entertainment-oriented content ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ). Non-political, entertainment-oriented content can be information on lifestyles, products, leisure, sports, or social relationships on social media (see Hanitzsch and Vos 2018 ). Yet when we estimate the effects of political social media use without at least controlling non-political forms, we may end up with erroneous conclusions about the mobilizing potential of social media. Political contents and entertainment-oriented contents are simultaneously present on social media. A typical newsfeed completely mixes both.

As expressed by Boulianne and Theocharis (2020) , “purely social-, entertainment-, and leisure-oriented activities carried out on digital media do not necessarily mobilize individuals for civic or political action.” (p. 114) Entertainment-oriented use of social media may serve the purpose to create an “emotional relief generated by temporarily recreating or recessing from daily routines” ( Buzeta et al. 2020 , p. 81). When compared to political social media use, entertainment-oriented use accounts for a large proportion of everyday Internet use, especially among adolescents ( Büchi et al. 2016 ). For instance, in a recent over time experiment using behavioral browsing data, Wojcieszak et al. (2021) found that news websites comprised only 3.54% of the browsing behavior. The authors conclude that “news content is nearly unnoticeable in the context of overall information and communication ecology of most individuals” (p. 8).

Despite the relevance of non-political content on social media, scholars have hardly looked at the relationship of entertainment-oriented use of social media and political participation ( Skoric et al. 2016 ). As one rare exception, Kahne and Bowyer (2018) , observed that non-political content can serve as a gateway to various forms of civic and political participation. Yet other studies found no such gateway effects. In a cross-sectional study conducted in the Netherlands, Bakker and de Vreese (2011) observed non-political social media use had negative consequences for political participation. Additionally, data collected by Chan et al. (2012) suggest that the effect of Weibo use on the willingness to express one’s political views was weakened when entertainment motives prevailed. An experiment by Theocharis and Lowe (2016) even suggests negative consequences of Facebook use for participation because it can distract from politics. So taken together, only a few studies looked into the effects of non-political social media use on participation, some suggest that entertainment activities on social media may serve as a gateway to participation ( Kahne and Bowyer 2018 ), others speak of distraction from politics ( Bakker and de Vreese 2011 ; Boukes 2019 ; Chan et al. 2012 ; Theocharis and Lowe 2016 ).

Besides adding entertainment-oriented exposure as a predictor, it is also important to understand how entertainment-oriented and political uses of social media interact. If we accept both types of uses as separate dimensions, we arrive at four different types of audience members: “the Avoiders” (political use: low and entertainment-oriented use: high), “the Inactive” (political use: low and entertainment-oriented use: low), “the Distracted” (political use: high and entertainment-oriented use: high), and “the Focused” (political use: high and entertainment-oriented use: low). This typology of ideal groups is depicted in Figure 3 (see Matthes et al. 2021 ).

A typology of users based on the two dimensions entertainment-oriented use and political use of social media.

For the purposes of the present paper, the theoretically most relevant group are “the Distracted”. I use this term because I theorize that high loads of entertainment content may potentially distract the processing of political content. There are several theoretical reasons for that. As suggested by the priming literature ( Higgins 1996 ), the accessibility of concepts can drive cognitions and behaviors. Thus, when young adults evaluate the importance of concepts, they do not use all of the information they have available in memory. Instead, they often rely highly accessible information ( Iyengar and Kinder 1987 ). Here, accessibility refers to the ease or speed with which available information can be retrieved from memory. Information that is recently and frequency activated, is more likely to be temporary accessible ( Arendt and Matthes 2014 ). At the same time, of course, individuals’ cognitions are also driven by their basic political and social orientations which are be chronically accessible. But the influence of chronically accessible concepts can be weakened when individuals are frequently and recently exposed to other considerations. When, for instance, people are exposed to entertainment-oriented content, these non-political considerations become cognitively accessible. That is, when young adults are permanently confronted with non-political content, as for instance, about friends, family, movies, or sports, this content gets situated at the top of the head, making it more cognitively accessible when making judgments about political matters, including engagement.

That means, non-political content on social media competes with (and may even impede) the accessibility of political content. The Social Media Political Participation model ( Knoll et al. 2020 ) holds that political content on social media can only affect offline political participation when the content is appraised as relevant. However, when young adults are primarily exposed to non-political content, this may shift the perceived relevance of political considerations. In other words, when there is an abundance of entertaining, non-political news, the current political issues may appear less severe, and therefore, also less personally relevant. As a consequence, young adults may engage less with political content, which is a prerequisite to political participation. By the same token, the model holds that the goal to vote needs to be dominant in a real behavioral situation. When other goals are present as well, such as visiting friends or going shopping, then young adults will only cast their vote when this goal is dominant, that is, more important than other goals. So again, the argument is that non-political content on social media can shift the appraisal of goals.

What is more, we know from entertainment research that particularly hedonic entertainment content has a high absorption potential, and based on that, it can interfere with the cognitive elaboration of political content, “because it absorbs attentional resources to a degree that interferes with further elaboration” ( Bartsch and Schneider 2014 , p. 376). Also, on a perceptual level, non-political content is often perceived as more eye-catching as compared to political content. The reason is that the former typically relates to close ties such as friends and family and it is often associated with immediate positive gratifications.

Moreover, not all individuals may be exposed to political and non-political content on social media simultaneously. “The Avoiders”, albeit high in general social media use, may try to bypass exposure to political content, as for instance when an “individual exposes him- or herself to a limited amount of news because other content has more appeal to him or her, many algorithms will make future content decisions in favor of other content, e.g., entertainment, and give news stories a lower priority” ( Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020 , p. 466). Young adults interested in non-political contents may curate their newsfeed on SNS platforms in ways which exposes them to high degrees of entertainment-oriented content with low likelihood of exposure to political contents. This may lead to low-effort, feel-good types of engagement at best, making high-effort, offline political participation less likely.

But still, but even for news avoiders, scholars have argued that social media has the potential to foster participation because people can be accidentally exposed to political information in their newsfeeds. So even though young adults may not want to see political information, they may see it based on their social environments and networks ( Matthes et al. 2020 ). This exposure to political information may then lead to learning, and ultimately, participation. While scholars agree on the importance of incidental exposure for participatory outcomes, they have, at the same time, entirely ignored the opposite logic: Social media also exposed individuals accidentally to non-political information. Such incidental exposure to non-political content “can have important effects on political outcomes such as learning or participation. The more people are confronted with non-political content (without actively looking for it), the more they are potentially distracted from their primary political processing goal” ( Matthes et al. 2020 , pp. 1137–1038). So as much as incidental exposure to political content can engage, so can incidental exposure to non-political content distract and disengage. Unfortunately, while there are dozens of studies on the former phenomenon, we lack studies on the latter.

3.3 Testing the Paradox

The paradox described here is situated at the aggregate level. However, additional evidence is needed to explain why this paradox occurs. For this, it is therefore important to look at the outcomes of entertainment-oriented content at the individual level. That is, we should not only model political media use as a predictor of participatory outcomes, but simultaneously access (or at least control) exposure to non-political content. These two dimensions can then not only be used as focal predictors, they may also interact in a regression model (see Figure 3 ). High levels of entertainment-oriented non-political content on social media may have a “vampire” effect, when young adults are simultaneously exposed to political content on social media as well. Some young adults, those with high levels of political interest and sophistication, may primarily be exposed to political content on social media, which in fact, can be theorized to increase levels of online and offline political participation ( Knoll et al. 2020 ). These conjectures suggest that social media use, as a generic category, is of limited use in global research on digital media.

A similar argument can be made for the measurement of political participation. Oftentimes, scholars create participation indices by averaging several, distinct acts, such as wearing buttons of a party, sharing personal political experiences on social media, signing a petition, or voting in an election (see for a discussion, Theocharis and van Deth 2018 ). These measures blur the differences between institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of participation. Differentiating between these forms beyond the classic online versus offline notion, however, is crucial to understand the political consequences of social media use.

In addition to that, it is important to note that the typical survey approach used in political communication scholarship has its limitations as well. The reason is that self-report measures of social media use are largely biased ( Scharkow 2019 ). Also, typical experiments use forced-exposure settings, which cannot be compared to news reception situations in the real world ( Wojcieszak et al. 2021 ) Thus, to empirically examine the paradox, future studies need to rely on more naturalistic settings, such as web-tracking data or mobile experience sampling. With such measures, we can more precisely estimate the amount of exposure to political and non-political content.

4 Conclusion

With the emergence of social media, great hopes have been expressed across the globe that young adults may reengage into traditional politics, directly due to the various activities happening on social media, and indirectly by shaping low-effort forms of online-engagement in the first place, which is then assumed to shape offline participation in a second step. In fact, the available evidence clearly suggests that social media use, particularly political one, has an impact on offline forms of participation ( Boulianne and Theocharis 2020 ). However, aggregate level data from Germany, the U.S., Switzerland, and Japan indicate that generational gaps between younger and older adults have not or only marginally decreased. Although there was an unprecedented up rise of social media use over the past decades (including an increase in political uses), voter turnout did not change significantly, and was substantially lower as compared to the older generation. At the same time, the entire body of research on social media and political participation would suggest an increase in participatory activities of young adults. In explaining this paradox, this paper pointed to the potentially distracting functions of social media, mainly due to non-political, entertainment-oriented content. Such content can make non-political information more accessible, ultimately impeding the processing and salience of political considerations, dampening the activation and execution of participatory goals. In order to test these conjectures, future research needs to carefully distinguish several types of content on social media, on several platforms and channels, and access motivations, gratifications of usage as well as contents. This may lead to a more nuanced picture about the social media based political engagement of young adults, particularly when it comes to the democratically most relevant outcome: voting in an election.

Article Note: This article underwent single-blind peer review.

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• The Future of Digital Spaces and Their Role in Democracy

Many experts say public online spaces will significantly improve by 2035 if reformers, big technology firms, governments and activists tackle the problems created by misinformation, disinformation and toxic discourse. Others expect continuing troubles as digital tools and forums are used to exploit people’s frailties, stoke their rage and drive them apart

Table of contents.

• 1. A sampling of some of the key overarching views
• 2. Public digital spaces will be improved: Tech can be fixed, governments and corporations can reorient incentives and people can band together to work for reform
• 3. Large improvement of digital spaces is unlikely by 2035: Human frailties will remain the same; corporations, governments and the public will not be able to make reforms
• 4. Work is needed now to prepare for a mind-bending future
• 5. Closing thoughts
• 6. About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

This is the 13th “ Future of the Internet ” canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to gather expert views about important digital issues. In this report, the questions focused on the prospects for improvements in the tone and activities of the digital public sphere by 2035. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next decade represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research Center and Elon’s Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, inviting professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses and think tanks, as well as interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 29 and Aug. 2, 2021. In all, 862 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the section titled “ About this canvassing of experts .”

Those who worry about the future of democracy focus a lot of their anxiety on the way that the things that happen in online public spaces are harming deliberation and the fabric of society. To be sure, billions of users appreciate what the internet does for them. But the climate in some segments of social media and other online spaces has been called a “ dumpster fire ” of venom, misinformation, conspiracy theories and goads to violence.

Social media platforms are drawing fire for their role in all of this. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a congressional panel requested that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Parler, 4chan, Twitch and TikTok release all records related to misinformation around the 2020 election, including efforts to influence or overturn the presidential election results. In September 2021, a five-part series in The Wall Street Journal exposed details that seem to show that Facebook has allowed the diffusion of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity that has resulted in ethnic violence and harm to teenage girls and has undermined COVID-19 vaccination efforts. And The Journal’s source, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, followed up by telling the U.S. Senate that she had gone public with her explosive material “because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.”

Worries over the rise in the acrid tone and harmful and manipulative interactions in some online spaces, and concerns over the role of technology firms in all of this, have spawned efforts by tech activists to try to redesign online spaces in ways that facilitate debate, enhance civility and provide personal security. A selection of these initiatives were described in a spring 2021 article in The Atlantic Monthly by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev. Among the suggested solutions documented in the piece:

• The creation of an internet version of public media along the lines of PBS and NPR;
• “ Middleware ” that could allow people to set an algorithm to give them the kind of internet experience they want, perhaps without the dystopian side effects;
• Online upvoting systems that favor content that could push partisans toward consensus, rather than polarizing them;
• An internet “bill of rights” allowing “self-sovereign identity” that lets people stay anonymous online, but weeds out bots; and
• “ Constructive communication ” systems set up to dial down anger and bridge divides.

In light of the current conversations about the need to rethink and redesign online public spaces, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts how they expect the digital public sphere to evolve by 2035. Some 862 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to this specific question:

Looking ahead to 2035, will digital spaces and people’s use of them be changed in ways that significantly serve the public good?

Some 61% chose the option declaring that, “yes,” by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them will change in ways that significantly serve the public good; 39% chose the “no” option, positing that by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them will not change in ways that significantly serve the public good.

It is important to note that a large share of who chose “yes” – that online public spaces would improve by 2035 – also wrote in their answers that the changes between now and then could go either way. They often listed one or more difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved. Thus, the numeric findings reported here are not fully indicative of the troubles that they think lie between now and 2035.

In fact, in answer to a separate question in which they were asked how they see digital spaces generally evolving now, a majority ( 70% ), said current technological evolution has both positives and negatives , 18% said digital spaces are evolving in a mostly negative way that is likely to lead to a worse future for society, 10% said the online world is evolving in a mostly positive way that is likely to lead to a better society, and about 3% said digital spaces are not evolving in one direction or another .

It is also worth noting that the responses were gathered in mid-summer of 2021. People’s responses came in the cultural context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and at a time when rising concerns over climate change , racial justice and social inequality were particularly prominent – and half a year after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol in the aftermath of one of the most highly contentious U.S. presidential elections in recent history.

This is a nonscientific canvassing, based on a nonrandom sample. The results represent only the opinions of the individuals who responded to the queries and are not projectable to any other population.

The bulk of this report covers these experts’ written answers explaining their responses to our questions. They sounded many broad themes in sharing their insights about the evolution of the digital “town squares” most people frequent.

The themes are outlined in the tables that follow below:

As they considered these questions, some of these experts predicted that changes of a different order of magnitude are also in store by 2035. Some of the most compelling ideas include:

• Brad Templeton advanced a “new moral theory [that] it is wrong to exploit known flaws in the human psyche.” He argues that the embrace of “psyche-exploitation avoidance” would lead to a new design of online spaces.
• Mike Liebhold outlined a future with applied machine intelligence everywhere, continuous pervasive cybersecurity vulnerabilities, ubiquitous conversational bot agents, holographic media and telepresence and cobotics (collaborative robotics), among other things.
• Carolina Rossini predicted that a regulatory agency to monitor technology’s impact on health – a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for algorithms – will arise as increasing numbers of digital technology tools are placed in people’s bodies.
• Raashi Saxena urged, “We do not have a global, agreed-upon list of digital harms that can be inflicted upon us … We first need to define the rights to be protected.”
• Jerome Glenn said a new civilization will emerge as the “Information Age” gives way to the “Conscious-Technology Age” through the force of two megatrends: “First, humans will become cyborgs, as our biology becomes integrated with technology. Second, our built environment will incorporate more artificial intelligence.”
• Cory Doctorow said the “tyranny of network effects” will be broken if interoperability is imposed on tech companies so that, for instance, people could move their social media networks from one platform to another and easily abandon online spaces they do not like.
• Robin Raskin predicted, “The metaverse – digital twins of real worlds or entirely fabricated worlds – will be a large presence by 2035, unfortunately with some of the same bad practices on the internet today such as personal-identity infringements.”
• Beth Simone Noveck expects new “governance models” for public online spaces that allow citizens and groups to participate directly in policymaking and provision of services.
• James Hendler believes there will be tech advances that allow people to control their online identities and privacy preferences in ways that thwart omnipresent surveillance schemes.
• Barry Chudakov predicts “the self will go digital” and exist in the flesh and in its digital avatar. “Identity is thereby multiple and fluid: Roles, sexual orientation and self-presentation evolve from solely in-person to in-space.”

In the next chapter, there is a collection of responses from technology and academic experts that cover a range of issues tied to online public spaces and are noteworthy for their insights, and for the prominence of the respondents. It closes with two essay-style responses to these questions from internet sages Barry Chudakov and Judith Donath .

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• Published: 15 May 2024

More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data

• Lisa Oswald   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8418-282X 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  629 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Does the internet facilitate everyday public deliberation? Previous research on this question has largely focused on specific aspects, such as online news media diets or political discussions on social media. However, increasingly complex media environments are composed of different arenas with different respective potential for democracy. While previous work extensively dealt with the quality of political discussion online, it is a necessary but overlooked step, to consider the upstream features of digital infrastructure and usage. Using digital trace data from Germany, this study maps out which websites are relevant for online public discourse, introduces a measure of deliberative potential along six dimensions (information, communication, participation, connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity), and explores different types of websites alongside high level usage patterns. Besides a class of mainstream informational hubs, a class of quality information providers that includes most established public broadcasting sites was found. A third class of niche online forums hosts political discussions among more tightly-knit online communities, supporting previous findings of incidental exposure to political content online. While the mainstream information hubs in the sample attract a much larger volume of clicks, users spend relatively more time consuming political information on quality information sites as well as on niche online forums to engage with politics online. This project takes a more holistic perspective of the diverse ecosystem of online deliberation, while presenting a first quantitative exploration of a deliberative system.

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Introduction.

The question as to what extent the internet enables (or hinders) public deliberation is a much disputed issue that has, so far, only partially been addressed and from rather specific angles. Researchers with a focus on social media platforms have considered active user communication by analyzing online discussion threads (e.g., Esau et al. 2021 ; Halpern and Gibbs 2013 ), whereas researchers with an interest in online news media diets, for example, have examined web browsing histories with a distinct news media frame (Guess 2021 ).

This study takes a step back and focuses on the concept of deliberative potential , examining the infrastructural affordances and audiences of different politically relevant websites in the German political online ecosystem. In order to allow claims about the well researched deliberative quality and the substance of discussions, a much more indepth analysis of the communicative acts would be necessary and is nothing this paper speak to (e.g., Steenbergen et al. 2003 ; Esau et al. 2021 ). The infrastructural elements of a website, such as the provision of political information, comment sections, petitions, etc. as well as the empirical mapping of political usage are features necessary to examine upstream. For example, a discrepancy between the deliberative potential given affordances and usage and the actual quality of discussions may eventually indicate a form of unused potential of online environments for public deliberation – directly implying the next question of why this is.

In other words, an exclusive focus on deliberative quality and relatedly, toxicity in online public discourse, overlooks important selection effects resulting in skewed participation that is central to public discourse in online environments (Kim et al. 2021 ). While the communicative acts available for analysis on social media or the comment sections of news outlets are predominantly produced by a highly active minority of users, the majority of those reading along while also forming political opinion remains invisible to the researcher and the public (Bright et al. 2019 ). An exclusive focus on digital traces of communication also risks overemphasizing policies to limit the impact of a skewed highly active minority while overlooking the unused potential of the silent majority for public discourse online. For a comprehensive understanding of the structural transformation of the public sphere in the digital age, one must go beyond the apparent usage behavior of few, but consider the largely invisible behavior of the majority of the public (Habermas 2021 ). Instead, the examination of web browsing histories across the broader public offers new perspectives to address these methodological challenges.

Furthermore, the academic discourse concerning the extent of homophily and selective exposure in so-called online ‘echo chambers’ considerably diverges between disciplines and methodological approaches (Pariser 2011 ; Sunstein 2002 ). Studies examining data within one specific platform find robust evidence for homophily in social networks (Cinelli et al., 2021 ; Cota et al. 2019 ; Guerrero-Solé and Lopez-Gonzalez 2019 ; Koiranen et al. 2019 ; Rivero 2019 ). However, studies considering data across multiple platforms and media types find evidence of a diversity of exposure (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018 ; Guess 2021 ; Lelkes 2020 ; Strauss et al. 2020 ; Yang et al. 2020 ). Facing this dispute, a more holistic and data-driven systematic consideration of online arenas for public discourse can help avoid the underestimation of exposure while, at the same time, avoiding the overestimation of siloed information. In line with theorists of deliberative democracy (e.g., Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ), this study demonstrates that the political usage of the internet or the engagement with political topics online goes far beyond the categories of news media consumption and social media discussion but should be measured more holistically, by mapping the diverse ecosystem of online deliberation.

This project links and expands upon existing streams of research on online communication and information, and focuses on the deliberative potential of websites as the structural basis for a constructive online public discourse. Bridging those streams of research are a necessary condition for a systematic and systemic assessment of the online public sphere (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ). The following three research questions are addressed:

Which websites hold potential for online public discourse, including political information consumption and discussion online?

How is the political online ecosystem structured along infrastructural and usage characteristics?

How does the interplay between user demographics and different classes of websites look like?

Using digital trace data from Germany in combination with survey data and manual content coding to characterize a wide range of politically relevant websites, this study empirically tackles various questions of the online public sphere for the first time. With passive web tracking, the data collection is not geared towards one specific platform or website type (e.g. news media), but provides a more complete picture of online behavior, which is crucial for gaining a more holistic and realistic perspective of the online public sphere. The deliberative potential of websites is considered as a latent construct which is in line with an understanding of deliberation as the summative quality of a deliberative system in which different sites fulfill different democratic functions (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ; Elstub et al. 2019 ; Esau et al. 2021 ). Furthermore, a latent classification of websites goes beyond a xylographic distinction between news sites and social media platforms. Using a broad initial scope together with a latent approach, one does not risk overlooking important, potentially overlapping arenas in which political communication is taking place and where people receive their information online.

Overall, this study shows that only a small proportion of online activity (1%) is concerned with politics. To the disappointment of social scientists, the majority of people spend most of their time accessing various forms of entertainment, shopping and work-related URLs. However, the vast majority of users in the sample (1190 out of 1282 individuals) engaged with some political content during the six-month observation period that included the 2017 national elections in Germany. Originally starting with a web tracking dataset of more than 56 million website visits, without setting a predefined exclusion frame for the type of website and using automated approaches together with manual cross validation, the analysis is narrowed down to a set of 69 central domains featuring content on a wide range of political topics relevant to the German public discourse.

Besides a cluster of highly-popular ‘mainstream’ sites that are visited by a broad range of users to read and discuss political information, a cluster of public broadcasting and journalistic news outlets was found, the ‘quality information providers’ that cover the highest density of political information. However, they are not characterized by a diverse user base. A third cluster of niche online forums was identified, often dedicated to specific topics or communities, that are mostly neglected in current analyses of the online public sphere. Manual cross checking confirmed that they host in-depth political discussions among sometimes tightly knit online communities such as fan forums. While the mainstream sites in the sample attract a much larger volume of clicks, users spend relatively more time consuming political information via public broadcasting and online news outlets as well as on niche online forums to discuss politics online.

In other words, while the German deliberative system seems to be a rather small fraction of the wider online environment, the consumption of political content is not as exclusive as the visible discussion patterns of few very active users on social media may imply. While mainstream platforms are most central to the topical flow of political information consumption within the system, the latent structure of deliberative potential highlights the persisting relevance of high quality public broadcasting as the backbone for democratic deliberation in Germany. Niche online forums provide particular potential for interpersonal trust building through prior exchanges about shared a-political interests as potential basis for the deliberation of conflicting political views among citizens.

Deliberation in online environments

Online communication has often been connected to an increase in affective political polarization, the spread of misinformation and the rise of radical counter publics (Bail 2021 ; Rathje et al. 2021 ; Bright 2018 ; Douglas et al. 2017 ; LorenzSpreen et al. 2021 ; Vosoughi et al. 2018 ).

However, in theory, constructive discussions among informed citizens should help to identify the best arguments for complex societal questions and therefore mitigate opinion polarization (Grönlund et al. 2015 ; Habermas 1984 ; Ugarriza and Caluwaerts 2014 ). While more and more deliberation researchers are concentrating their research efforts in the area of online discussions (Strandberg and Grönlund 2018 ), contradicting evidence is emerging on the quality of online discussions. While this evidence appears negative in many regards (Anderson et al. 2014 ; Coe et al. 2014 ; Sunstein 2002 ; Ziegele et al. 2020 ), there are positive exceptions, for example when it comes to discussions in the comments section of online newspapers (Manosevitch and Walker 2009 ; Rowe 2015 ).

There is a nuanced empirical discourse around the measurement of deliberative quality, including some widely-established coding schemes and the development of novel, more inclusive criteria of deliberative quality (Steenbergen et al. 2003 ; Graham, 2008 , 2012 ). Additional concepts discussed in the field are for example story-telling, humor, emotions, power, and the role of non-verbal communication for deliberative democracy (Esau et al. 2021 ; Gerber et al. 2018 ; Basu, 1999 ; Coleman and Moss, 2012 ; Krause, 2008 ; Follesdal, 2010 ; Mendonça et al. 2020 ). However, there is little empirical investigation of the infrastructural foundation of online deliberation—the potential for deliberation supplied online by websites providing political information and discussion spaces.

A promising but today mostly theoretical development in the field are systemic perspectives on deliberation. Deliberative systems theory, that appears particularly applicable in the digital domain, argues that different arenas fulfill different functions for democracy (Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019 ; Ercan et al. 2017 ; Mansbridge et al. 2012 ). However, the empirical conceptualization of the deliberative potential of websites as the basis for a constructive public discourse remains largely unresolved. Even though online political deliberation might be a niche phenomenon rather than mainstream behavior, it is crucial to understand its structural foundation. Beauchamp ( 2020 ) describes the deliberativeness of discussions in online environments as a function of membership and structure. This project empirically maps these structures, an ecosystem of politically relevant websites, as the foundation of a deliberative system and the necessary condition for deliberation to occur in online environments.

Deliberative potential of websites

While the theoretical term ‘deliberative potential’ is not a novel concept in the field, the deliberative potential of websites has, so far, only been explored theoretically or with regard to specific domains (Conover et al. 2002 ; Mendonça and Ercan 2015 ). For example, Wiklund ( 2005 ) analyzed different municipal websites in Sweden with a focus on two dimensions, information services and communication services provided by the websites. In contrast, Richardson and Stanyer ( 2011 ) examined British online news outlets. They consider manifest characteristics of websites while still keeping a focus on communicative features such as online forums and the deliberative quality of communication.

In this study, the assessment of deliberative potential is rooted in the theory of deliberative democracy; the six dimensions of the concept are described in detail below. The notion that ‘different types of public deliberation online can be expected to display different characteristics and fulfill different functions in democratic opinion and will formation, as well as in decision making.’ (Esau et al. 2021 , p. 2) has especially influenced the definition of deliberative potential used throughout this project. While different types of deliberation, ranging from intimate personal discussion to anonymous public communication fulfil different functions, they are also likely to occur in entirely different arenas that come with distinct infrastructural setups and user constellations. In turn, these arenas are not just the playing field for political discussion but shape discussions with their respective potential (Beauchamp 2020 ).

The dimensions of deliberative potential are structured along three core functional dimensions that are determined by the infrastructure of the website as the basis for deliberation (see Table 1 ). Three additional higher-level dimensions are defined by the respective usage patterns or demand-side characteristics. For example, a forum that enables reciprocity in communication is regarded as necessary basis for online deliberation. However, in line with theories of deliberative democracy (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ; Habermas et al. 1974 ) only the consideration of heterogeneous arguments within an inclusive debate that is accessible for a diverse citizenship can make a discussion truly deliberative. This conception is not particular to the online sphere. Already in face-to-face citizen assemblies, the deliberative quality as well as the outcomes of deliberation depended on who is deliberating, regardless of the venue’s infrastructure (Warren 2021 ). While from a normative point of view, the combination of certain characteristics is favored, the systemic notion of deliberation does not require all arenas to fulfill all characteristics at the same time (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ).

Therefore, in this project maps different structural preconditions for deliberative discourse, including both infrastructural aspects and patterns of how this infrastructure is used. In doing so, this project focuses on the description of the deliberative potential of online environments, rather than assessing the quality or issues of the discourse.

Information

The first dimension in the assessment of the deliberative potential of websites is the provision of relevant information. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson had already concluded that well informed citizens are the key to a healthy democracy (Jefferson 1789 ), a notion that still constitutes a core feature of deliberative democracy (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ; Fishkin 2018 ). Information on parties, policies, institutions and procedures are the building blocks of political knowledge and are extensively researched concepts in the social sciences for good reason (Carpini and Keeter 1993 ; Prior 2005 ). Civic knowledge about institutions and processes can help citizens to better understand their interests as individuals and members of a group, it increases the consistency of views across issues and over time, and it increases trust, political participation and support for democratic values, such as tolerance for the needs of minorities (e.g. Galston 2001 ). Moving the perspective to the digital era, in the context of online deliberation, websites on which users find political information can serve as a resource for opinion and will formation (Esau et al. 2021 ). While information on political parties and issues potentially influence political opinions and inform vote choices, administrative information help citizens to understand democratic structures and procedures (Döring 2021 ).

Drawing upon both empirical findings on political and civic knowledge (Carpini and Keeter 1993 ; Munzert and Selb 2017 ) as well as previous research on the role of political information for deliberation (Wiklund 2005 ), three distinct criteria are included for the assessment to what extent a site provides relevant political information. This study assesses whether the site provides (1) information on political actors, institutions and political issues, (2) information on administrative procedures and local information, and (3) whether information provided by the site is journalistically curated or has, at least, undergone some other form of fact checking (such as e.g. on Wikipedia). Local information, for example on local initiatives and regulations is integrated into the category with administrative information, because they have the similarly enabling potential for civic engagement and political participation. The third information criterion serves as a basic manifest proxy for information quality.

Measuring the exposure to diverse news media is one important component to assess the informative potential of the online sphere for a functioning democracy. Previous projects focused on news access through social media sites which, however, risks neglecting less mainstream media outlets (Bakshy et al. 2015 ; Barberá et al. 2015 ; Eady et al. 2019 ). Other studies that collect data from the user perspective risk biased self-reports in surveys (Boxell et al. 2017 ; Lelkes, 2016 ). Facing these methodological challenges, web tracking data provide unique insights into real-life media diets. While Guess ( 2021 ) illuminates important aspects of online news media diets, for example, this study aims to capture the overall deliberative potential of the complex online public sphere using an even more inclusive scope.

Communication

It is important to note that this project does not consider the deliberative quality or the content of discussions taking place on a certain website, when looking at the communication dimension of deliberative potential. Instead, this study assesses whether the website provides users with the possibility to express and/or exchange political opinions with other users (Wiklund 2005 ). Such sites can serve as communicative spaces for interactional opinion and will formation (Esau et al. 2021 ). The dimension splits into two levels of communication. First, it is measured whether the website enables the expression of political opinions through the provision of comment sections, for example. In a second step, it is assessed whether the site fulfills the deliberative core criterion of potential reciprocity (Steenbergen et al. 2003 ). Communicative situations can only be characterized by reciprocity, if users have the option to reply to each other. Therefore, websites only fulfill the second criterion if a reference to previous comments is enabled, for example in online forums and on social media platforms, but also in comment sections of online news papers where ‘reply’ functions are enabled. The sole possibility to up-vote or down-vote comments, or to react to comments through ‘likes’ is not regarded as reciprocity. Following this approach, this study does not assess actual communication or specific elements such as listening to the arguments of others (Kriplean et al. 2012 ; Scudder 2020 ), but it assesses the structural foundation as preconditions for deliberative communication.

Participation

Websites that provide users with the possibility of online political participation can have a more or less direct impact on political decision-making or, at least, serve as a platform for the aggregation of interests (Esau et al. 2021 ).

It is a disputed issue, whether a link to decision-making is necessary to consider political communication as deliberation. While Thompson ( 2008 ) insists on the link to decision-making, the idea of deliberative polls (Fishkin et al. 2018 ), the Habermasian idea of diffuse communication in the public sphere as well as the deliberative systems approach adopt a broader definition of deliberation. By mapping the deliberative potential of the online ecosystem, this study includes opportunities for online political participation as desirable features of online political ecosystems without making a judgment about the definition of deliberation itself.

To assess the structural foundation of the link to decision-making, three distinct criteria are examined: (1) whether the website hosts petitions and/or opinion polls to collect, aggregate or organize public opinion (Richardson and Stanyer 2011 ), (2) whether the website enables citizens to get in contact with political actors (Wiklund, 2005 ), and (3) whether the website enables the political organization of citizens, for example by the formation of political interest groups or events such as discussion forums, demonstrations and other forms of political protest. Wiklund ( 2005 ) considered some of these criteria under the framework of the communicative services of a website. However, it might be worth distinguishing between forums for discussions among citizens and communicative acts that can have a more direct influence on political decision-making.

While this study considers the first three dimensions: information, communication and participation, as core dimensions of the deliberative potential of a platform, three additional criteria are assessed: connectivity, inclusiveness and heterogeneity that are defined through usage patterns and user characteristics.

Connectivity

The dimension of connectivity considers whether the website is connected to other politically relevant websites. These connections can, for example, enable further research by citizens on political issues or facilitate the implementation of intention to participate in the political process. Following the conceptualization of deliberative systems, an understanding of the links and flows between different sites is crucial for a systemic understanding of online public discourse (Dryzek 2012 ; Esau et al. 2021 ; Fleuß et al. 2018 ). For example, Fleuß et al. ( 2018 ) emphasized the transmissions between different loci as being an important aspect to measure deliberation in a systemic way. They proposed tracking the transmission of topics as they evolve within the system as well as tracking individuals who transmit ideas from one locus to another. While the analysis mainly operates within the arena of informal deliberation, the approach to operationalize connectivity, by tracking users’ subsequent visits to different websites featuring the same topics, gets very close to their theoretical idea of formalizing transmissions.

A body of literature outside the field of deliberation research that examines those links and flows between different online sites can be found in the field of inter-media agendasetting research. For example, media researchers have analyzed to what extent certain online publics are able to stimulate mass media publics, others have examined news diffusion processes from a temporal perspective or the Twitter networks of journalists as important nodes between digital and mass media (Messner and Distaso 2008 ; Wallsten 2007 ; Buhl et al. 2018 ; Neuberger et al. 2019 ).

In this course, digital trace data provides a unique opportunity to explore linkages between websites through the observation of real-life online behavior with network-analytical quantities. At the time of writing, this project is the first to formalize the connectivity of the different arenas of an online deliberative system empirically.

Inclusivity

The dimension of inclusivity appears to be an increasingly prominent aspect in the scientific discourse on deliberation. Mansbridge et al. ( 2012 ) describe three overall functions of a deliberative system: (1) an epistemic function to produce appropriately informed preferences and opinions, in this study, considered under the dimension of information, (2) an ethical function that creates respect between experts and citizens – these aspects could, for example, be a consequence of communication among citizens and contact between citizens and political actors, both captured in the dimensions of communication and participation –, and (3) a democratic function. Mansbridge et al. ( 2012 ) conceptualize the democratic function as promoting ‘an inclusive political process in terms of equality’ (p. 12), which implies the inclusion of multiple and plural voices.

This study explicitly considers the demographic variables of gender, age and educational Footnote 1 background in the assessment of inclusivity, to answer the question whether a website is used by a diverse set of individuals. This dimension, with a focus on demographic aspects, features of social groups, corresponds to Young’s ( 2002 ) concept of diverse perspectives for democratic representation. In the digital context, this dimension can further serve as indicator for low barriers of access. The unique combination of digital trace data with high-quality survey data allows a precise measurement of this dimension of deliberative potential.

Heterogeneity

One final important aspect, also implied in the conceptualization of the democratic functions of a deliberative system by Parkinson and Mansbridge ( 2012 ) is the inclusion of a variety of interests, concerns and claims. Furthermore, Young ( 2002 ) emphasizes the representation of diverse opinions, “any judgements or belief about how things are or ought to be” (p. 135) for a pluralistic democracy. This aspect is considered under the dimension of heterogeneity and assesses whether the website connects people holding diverse political opinions. This concept stands in contrast to the notion of ideological online ‘echo chambers’ in which users are argued to be mainly surrounded by similar others, holding opinion-reinforcing views (Pariser 2011 ; Sunstein 2002 ). In contrast to other researchers, who focused on the heterogeneity of information diets in online environments, this study considers the composition of users that visit a website (Bright et al. 2020 ; Dubois and Blank 2018 ; Guess 2021 ). More specifically, the approach taken in this study captures the heterogeneity of political orientations of users within a website through their explicit indication of political orientation on a left-to-right scale and their expressed party preferences in the context of the German federal election in 2017.

Both dimensions, inclusivity and heterogeneity are rooted in representation literature (Warren 2021 ). Random sampling would, under ideal experimental conditions with high compliance, ensure inclusivity and heterogeneity. Under natural conditions in online environments, the issues of inclusivity and heterogeneity as basis for discursive representation are more complex. This study considers the concepts of inclusivity and heterogeneity as theoretically distinct, as inclusivity builds on manifest demographic variables of the user whereas heterogeneity is a more latent construct of political attitudes and party preferences that possibly links more closely to political content featured online.

Methodological challenges

Around the beginning of the millennium, Steyaert ( 2000 ) had already emphasized the need for analytical tools that enable a systematic empirical analysis of digital democracy. However, most research in the field is still being conducted as explorative case studies, mostly with a focus on the content or the deliberative quality of communicative acts online (Felicetti et al. 2016 ; Jensen 2003 ; Jonsson 2015 ; Pedrini 2014 ). Also the rooting theorist of deliberative democracy and the concept of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas, explicitly emphasized the methodological challenge of empirically examining online deliberation in a recent piece on the restructuring of the public sphere in the digital age (Habermas 2021 ). The conceptualization of deliberation as the emergent property of a system, involving the dynamics of contexts and platform design elements with different functions for democracy, comes with serious questions for empirical research (Esau et al. 2017 ; Boswell and Corbett 2017 ; Fleuß et al. 2018 ; Niemeyer et al. 2015 ).

Based on the current state of the empirical literature, this study identifies two key method-ological challenges in the analysis of online deliberation. First, given the ever-growing online landscape, it is crucial to know where on the web different branches of public discourse are taking place in order to make assumptions about their content and quality. The question as to which websites are used for political issues is not trivial as deliberation in online environments is getting increasingly pluralistic and incidental news exposure occurs regularly (Esau et al. 2017 ; Janssen and Kies 2005 ; Feezell 2018 ; Kim et al. 2013 ; Tewksbury et al. 2001 ; Yadamsuren and Erdelez 2010 ).

Second, most empirical research in the field of online deliberation, especially the assessment of the deliberative quality of communication, is researched on individual (active) behavior. However, most people on the web are passive consumers of content, also called ‘lurkers’ (Nonnecke and Preece 1999 ; Sun et al. 2014 ). This passive majority does not leave obvious digital traces in online forums and comment sections but they certainly do obtain political information from the web that shape their political opinions and actions. In the context of social media platforms, for example, passive users also experience social learning and constantly adapt their understandings of social norms by observing other people’s communication, while a highly active minority, also called ‘power users’, creates the majority of content online (Bright et al. 2019 ). This distinction between passive and active engagement in online public discourse has, with a slightly different angle, already been reflected in Habermas’ notion of a ‘two-track model’ of deliberation, emphasizing that most political deliberation happens in institutionalized form with the majority of citizens taking a pure spectator role (Habermas 1996 ).

In consequence, it remains largely unclear how this silent majority uses the web for political issues facing a heavy focus on communication data. It would be important to also examine passive exposure instead, to meaningfully define the boundaries of the public arena online. The question as to what extent websites enable public deliberation, under the further consideration of a systemic perspective, is what this study aims to answer with the assessment of the deliberative potential of websites.

Of course, deliberative potential does not directly imply deliberation. Online environments may provide accurate political information but also misinformation, they may enable deliberative discussion but also host toxic exchanges, they may provide platforms for civic engagement but also hostile participation (Freudenthaler and Wessler 2022 ; Quandt 2018 ). However, if the fundamental conditions of deliberative potential are not met in the infrastructure and usage of online environments, deliberation itself is impossible.

Methodology

The analysis is based on web tracking data that was collected within a six-month period in Germany, including the national elections in September 2017. The data is linked to rich survey data, including users’ demographics, political attitudes and other relevant political variables. This unique combination of two data sources allows the assessment of the deliberative potential of websites enriched by components that only become measurable in the interaction of user characteristics and usage behavior (connectivity and especially, inclusivity and heterogeneity).

The survey data was collected via the German YouGov Pulse panel with survey questions originally fielded to 1500 respondents in five waves. Using a quota-sampling procedure on the basis of the marginals from Best for Planning ( 2017 ), the sample mirrors the German online population with respect to gender, age and, to some degree, education. Respondents were asked to install a URL tracking software that uses passive metering technology to record detailed browser histories on an opt-in basis. Tracking could be paused for 15 min and respondents could end their participation at any time. This digital trace data includes more than 56 million website visits to almost 200,000 different domains by 1282 different individuals between July 2017 and December 2017. As this paper draws on data collected in a prior research project, details on the sampling procedure, the deployment of the passive metering software as well as privacy and ethical considerations can be found in part B of the supplementary information.

In a first step, the top 1000 domains were manually classified into categories (see Table C12 ). Those 1000 domains account for about 83% of website visits. This distribution is characteristic for web browsing data, in which central websites accumulate most activity while the majority of sites are only visited by very few users. The pre-labelled web tracking data was then merged with the survey data to allow for the description of the demographic profile of the sample Footnote 2 .

To develop a measurement for the deliberative potential of websites, the set of websites in scope had to be identified first. Considering the context of deliberative democracy, a focus on websites that, in the wider sense, play a role in the German online public discourse or feature political content appeared the most appropriate. Through this empirical approach, the notion of deliberation underlying the concept of deliberative potential is focused on political topics and set apart from everyday conversation or everyday deliberation that may only implicitly regard political issues (e.g., Maia 2017 ). The approach to be particularly inclusive in the first step sets this project apart from previous research, for example on online news media diets (Guess 2021 ), that also uses web tracking data but focuses exclusively on news websites. In order to gain a realistic picture of the online public sphere, it is important to consider all possible channels through which political information, communication and participation is enabled, especially because the exposure to political information makes up only a small proportion of users’ total online engagement.

Exploiting the fact that the data almost mirror the German online public demographically and include individuals’ browser histories for a period of about six months around the federal elections in Germany, websites accessed in a ‘political context’ were selected with a combination of automated keyword search, matching political keywords to the URL strings of tracked website visits, and manual cross checking by browsing the websites for instances of clearly political content (see Fig. 1 ). The relevance of these websites for the online public discourse in Germany in 2017 was then approximated using the number of website visits on the respective domain, aggregated across the sample, as a measure of engagement. The process of political website identification is described in detail in SI A .

Top: Manual construction of dictionary consisting of political topics in the Germany public discourse of 2017. Center: Mapping topic dictionary onto full URLs of website visits as automated selection step. Bottom: Manual cross-validation of automated selection and refinement of dictionary for systematic mismatches.

In a second step, the deliberative potential of those politically relevant websites was determined. To this end, the outlined six dimensions of deliberative potential were assessed: information, communication, participation, connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity (see Table 1 ). While the first three dimensions were evaluated with manual content coding only, the latter three were determined through a consideration of digital trace data in combination with linked survey data.

Content coding

In order to assess the first three core dimensions of the concept of deliberative potential, the full sample of relevant websites was assessed using quantitative content analysis on the websites’ infrastructure. The theoretical definitions of the dimensions were translated into operational definitions including concrete criteria that could be assessed using a binary rating system (0 representing ‘not present’, 1 representing ‘present’). The unit of analysis were website domains and the coding was conducted after manually visiting the website and assessing the overall structure of the page, posts, articles, and comment sections. A standardized code book (see Table 1 ), including all dimensions and sub-criteria was used to streamline the coding process.

Digital trace data

The availability of web tracking data in combination with survey data allows the enrichment of the manual assessment of deliberative potential with granular quantitative measures of online behavior. This micro-level behavioral data was used to assess criteria on a more macro level, the unit being websites rather than single users. The connectivity measure was constructed through network analytical measures of in-going and out-going traffic (Csardi et al., 2006 ). The measure of inclusivity was added based on demographic variables; heterogeneity based on the political preferences of users.

More specifically, in order to exploit the benefits of digital trace data to build the connectivity measure, a network of website visits was constructed with websites represented as nodes, and temporally subsequent website visits for one user, featuring the same topic, represented as edges. For example, if a user reads an online newspaper article featuring the name ‘Merkel’ in the URL and, following this, visits a social media discussion featuring ‘Merkel’, an edge was created between the nodes of the online newpaper and the social media platform. Only subsequent visits to different websites were counted, while self-loops were excluded from the network. This way, instead of considering the ‘dead’ hyperlink-infrastructure from the html text of the websites, a measure of actual in-going and out-going politically-relevant traffic was created for each website. These traffic flows can be quantified using the network analytical measures of in-degrees (in-going traffic) and out-degrees (out-going traffic) (see Fig. C4 in the SI ).

To assess the degree of inclusivity of a website, three distinct diversity indicators were calculated for each website for the variables age, gender and education. The widely-used entropy-based Shannon-Wiener diversity index was used as it is implemented in R (see SI A ; Dixon 2003 ; Grafton et al. 2012 ; Kiernan 2014 ; Oksanen 2013 ). A high inclusivity means that a website is accessed by individuals from different age groups, education levels or genders. The more different categories (for example age groups) and the more similar the engagement levels across those different groups, the higher the estimated inclusivity value of a particular website.

For the construction of heterogeneity criteria, a similar approach was used. The diversity assessment was applied to a variable measuring the political orientation of participants on a left-to-right scale and to their reported first votes in the 2017 federal election in Germany. According to the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, the heterogeneity of a website is comparably high if it is visited equally by individuals with different political orientation.

The dataset of individual websites, labeled with regard to the six criteria of deliberative potential, is one outcome of this study which is published along this manuscript. However, this dataset needs to be structured and summarised to be digestible and informative. The reduction of complexity by structuring data is the core purpose of clustering approaches, including latent class analysis, which is why it was used in this manuscript in a second step, after the rich classification of each website along six deliberative criteria.

Clustering websites with latent class analysis

After the assessment of all six dimensions of deliberative potential of websites, patterns of commonalities and differences were considered between websites to explore different ‘profiles’ of deliberative potential. In line with the latent understanding of deliberative potential, a latent class approach was used to identify groups of websites according to their deliberative potential. Besides this theoretical reason, an examination of the empirical relationships between different criteria, suggests the use of a latent composite measure as there are both, correlations within, but also between different dimensions of deliberative potential (see Fig. C5 ). More details on the latent class modeling approach can be found in SI A . Finally, after the identification of classes, an individual class membership prediction value was assigned to each website, allowing the categorization of websites into latent classes.

Politically relevant sites in Germany in 2017

Applying the two-stage process of website selection, consisting of the automated dictionary-based classification of websites as ‘politically relevant’ and the following manual cross validation, 69 central domains were identified in the sample that have played a role in the online public discourse in Germany in the second half of 2017. Those websites were visited by 1190 unique users, which included a large proportion of the original sample ( N  = 1282). It is important to note that this does not mean that, for example because highly frequented websites such as ‘Google’ and ‘Facebook’ are part of this set of 69 websites, those 1190 individuals simply used those platforms at least once in the six-month period. Instead, it means that they ‘googled’ some political keyword or visited political content on Facebook because the political filtering step took place before the compression of website visits into domains.

Starting from the original sample of more than 56 million tracked website visits, less than 1% (493,714 clicks) were politically relevant visits to those 69 domains. Table C12 summarizes the big picture of the overall online activity of the sample, illustrating that the engagement with political issues is not the dominant motive for many users to use the web. In contrast, the most frequented websites were social media platforms and search engines (mostly for apolitical content), email providers, online shopping, gaming, streaming, porn and online banking.

Furthermore, only slightly more than half of the politically relevant websites (52%) in the sample are explicitly labeled as news websites, and only 12% of the websites featuring political discussions are social media platforms.

Figure 2 summarizes the descriptives on the prevalence of deliberative potential criteria across the sample of politically relevant websites. While the majority of websites fulfills two out of three information criteria (most provide political information that underlie some form of journalistic curation or fact checking), only very few websites fulfill the criteria of participation. When it comes to the potential to host political discussions, about half of the platforms provide the possibility to express and discuss political opinions online while the other half neither enables expression nor reciprocity in communication. Only very few platforms enable the expression of political opinions in the form of comment sections without the possibility to reply to other comments. Considering the ‘demand side’ characteristics of demographic inclusivity and political opinion heterogeneity within websites’ user bases, both measured with the entropy-based Shannon-Wiener diversity index (more details see SI A ), there is a considerable overlap of density distributions. Websites attracting users of diverse age groups, genders and education levels appear to also attract users of diverse political orientations and party preferences. The distributions of both measures, though highly correlated with the overall engagement on a website, does not mirror the rather leftskewed metric of connectivity that reflects engagement links and flows between politically relevant platforms.

Left: How many of the 69 websites fulfill criteria? Center: How does the cumulative feature presence look like for the three infrastructural criteria? E.g. most websites fulfill 0 out of 4 participation criteria, 2 out of 3 information criteria and either 2/2 or 0/2 communication criteria. Right: How does the cumulative feature presence look like for the three usage-based criteria? Metrics scaled for better comparability.

To structure the political online environment along the complex set of deliberative potential criteria, a latent class analysis was conducted. Considering various model fit criteria and rounds of validation, a model with three latent classes was selected (see Fig. C6 , Table C2 and more description in the SI).

Latent class structure of the online ecosystem

Figure 3 summarizes the conditional probabilities of websites belonging to each of the three latent classes dependent on their fulfillment of each of the deliberative potential criteria. It also present exemplary sets of websites that were previously identified as politically relevant and sorted into the three estimated latent classes based on their respective predicted probabilities of class membership (See SI Table C1 for the full lists).

Based on response probability patterns and class membership, class 1 was named ‘mainstream hubs’, class 2 was named ‘quality information providers’ and class 3 was named ‘niche forums’. Full list of domains provided in SI Table C1 .

In summary, websites in class 1, from now on referred to as the ‘mainstream hubs’, show especially high class-conditional probabilities of fulfilling the dimensions of connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity, while websites assigned to class 2, the ‘quality information providers’ appear strong with regard to information criteria. Websites assigned to class 3, the ‘niche forums’ show rather low class-conditional probabilities for most criteria of deliberative potential, except for the communication dimension and political organization.

More specifically, the class of mainstream hubs (class 1) is composed of a diverse set of websites that fulfill the core criteria of information, communication and participation to some extent but which are especially characterized by a high degree of connectivity, demographic inclusivity and political opinion heterogeneity. Overall, those websites have the highest level of engagement measured by the number of website visits in the sample. Such sites are, for example, prominent high quality national newspapers like ‘Zeit’ and ‘Spiegel’, more tabloid outlets like ‘Bild’, social media platforms like ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’, but also sites with particular functions, such as the online petitioning platform ‘Change’ or the voting advice application ‘Wahl-O-Mat’. What most of the websites in this class have in common is that they are highly-frequented websites that are nationally well known and relevant for political content across diverse German-speaking audiences.

The quality information providers (class 2) include almost exclusively established local, regional and national online news outlets and informative TV channels hosted by public service broadcasting with the exception of ‘RTL’ and ‘Sat1’, two private TV channels with broad online news sections. While ‘ARD’ is the leading national public service broadcasting channel in Germany, ‘MDR’, ‘WDR’, ‘SWR’ and ‘NDR’ are their regional channels. Websites like ‘Südkurier’ and ‘KStA’ (Kölner Stadtanzeiger) are examples of large regional and local news outlets, while ‘Berlin’ is the information platform hosted by the Berlin municipal government. All of those sites provide high quality, journalistically-curated information, often with specific local focus, but apparently, neither do they offer extensive possibilities for political discussion, nor do they attract attention from diverse audiences.

Finally, the class of niche forums (class 3) contains websites with rather low conditional probabilities of fulfilling explicit criteria of deliberative potential, except for the potential of political expression and reciprocity in communication, and potential for political organization. In this class, rather niche online forums for specific communities, as well as forums that are dedicated to specific topics like gaming, cooking or anime content were found. While many domains in this class do not appear politically relevant at first glance, it is important to note that a manual validation step was taken to establish whether political discussion were indeed taking place on those websites. Examples of websites in class 3 are an esoteric forum that vividly discussed the upcoming federal elections, computer forums in which discussions on the military intervention in Afghanistan were found, a forum for children’s second hand clothing (‘Mamikreisel’) and a forum dealing with issues of unemployment (‘Eloforum’) that hosted, partly in-depth, political discussions in niches of the forum.

In total, 34 websites were assigned to the mainstream hubs (class 1), 20 belong to the quality information providers (class 2) and 25 to the class of niche forums (class 3) Footnote 3 . The estimated mixing proportions corresponding to the share of observations belonging to each latent class are 49% for the mainstream hubs, 22% for the information providers and 29% for the niche forums.

The input criteria of deliberative potential form two natural groups: information, communication and participation are criteria that were coded manually and belong to the supply side of a website whereas connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity are coded computationally based on usage characteristics. This fundamental distinction is also reflected in the correlation-matrix between criteria. Therefore, the clustering process was repeated separately for the two groups of criteria (see SI C9 and C11 ). For the computationally-coded, demand-side criteria, a simple two factor solution was suggested with one class including all websites with high probabilities of fulfilling each criterion and one class with overall very low scores for connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity – in other words, high and low engagement websites. The model including only the manually-coded infrastructural criteria of information, communication and participation possibilities suggested a more interesting pattern that is in line with the findings from the main model including all criteria. A first class contains websites with an strong information profile, including all public broadcasting pages. A second class contains websites with an especially strong forum component or communication profile with pages that also enable participation to some extent. The last class is rather a residual class including websites with overall low probabilities of fulfilling any criteria. The overall pattern largely mirrors the findings from the main model, the difference being that the two meaningful classes of the infrastructural model also contain the highly popular mainstream hubs that are, in the main model, separated through distinct patterns in the engagement based metrics. The latent class structure of the main model using all criteria was robust to the inclusion of alternative input variables, such as users’ household income as feature of inclusivity and the size of the website, measured by the number of clicks as separate variable (see SI Fig. C12 and C13 ).

Engagement with different classes of sites

The measurement framework for the assessment of the deliberative potential of websites could, of course, be applied to various contexts for analytical and practical purposes. As one application, simple user-level engagement patterns, measured in the number of website visits as well as the duration of engagement is considered.

Given the underlying latent structure of deliberative potential dimensions, it does not surprise that the mainstream hubs are more frequently Footnote 4 accessed than quality information providers and niche forums (see Fig. C1a ). However, if engagement is measured as duration instead of clicks, the engagement distributions become more similar (see Fig. C1b ). This implies that people often access prominent websites like Google and Facebook in political contexts but that they tend to spend more time on public broadcasting platforms as well as small online forums to read news more carefully and, potentially, discuss political issues in depth within more tightly-knit communities compared to major social media platforms. More specifically, the duration per click ratio is only 35 s for mainstream hubs, on average, but 48 s for niche forums and almost a minute (59 s) for quality information providers. If the data were to be split, for example, just into news websites and social media platforms, this pattern would not have been observed (see Fig. C2a and C2b ).

Another application is to switch from the perspective of the ‘supply side’ characteristics to the ‘demand side’ characteristics, namely the demographics of users engaging with different classes of sites. Figure 4 and C3 summarize the engagement with different classes of sites for different genders, age groups and levels of formal education. Despite some minor, though intuitive tendencies (e.g., the engagement with quality information providers is stronger than the engagement with niche online forums in the subgroup with the highest level of formal education (Abitur) in Germany) there is no clear pattern of selection visible within subgroups according to those three rough demographic indicators. The exploration of more sophisticated variables such as political orientation, political efficacy or political knowledge as possible driving factors for the selection into engaging with political content online remains subject to a subsequent project.

Class 1: ‘mainstream hubs’, class 2: ‘quality information providers’ and class 3: ‘niche forums’. ‘Online’ includes engagement with any websites recorded by the browser plug-in, including any political and a-political website visits.

The deliberative nature of an online environment is, as Beauchamp ( 2020 ) puts it, a function of membership and structures. In order to examine this function empirically, as a first step, this project systematically mapped the deliberative potential of those structures for the online public sphere in Germany. While this study is descriptive in nature, it is important to understand how increasingly complex media environments are composed of different arenas with different potential functions for democracy. While most of the previous research focused on specific aspects, such as online news media diets or the content of discussions on social media platforms (e.g., Esau et al. 2021 ; Guess 2021 ), this study took a step back and examined the infrastructure and usage patterns as the basis for online deliberation.

This study is one attempt - of probably many imaginable strategies - to map characteristics of a deliberative system empirically, that aimed to build closely onto the literature, by selecting and operationalising six deliberative criteria, in one political context, the German political online ecosystem. The resulting latent class structure is the result of this analytical strategy taken but not the ‘ground truth’ structure of a deliberative system that should from now on be applied to other media systems or even to the German political online ecosystem captured at another point in time. It is an empirical snapshot with the purpose to complement theoretical advancements with empirical observations. While the criteria structure is theoretically informed and could be applied to other contexts, the latent class structure, together with its engagement structure will look different across time and political context, for example, more partisan media systems like the United States.

While political online engagement only makes up a small proportion (about 1% of website visits) of the overall online engagement in Germany, a large part of the sample (1190 out of 1282) did engage with some political topics at least at some point around the federal elections in 2017. It is worth noting that the website selection approach, including a strict manual cross validation of whether a website actually featured political content, focuses on the minimization of false positives rather than false negatives. This implies quite a strict definition of ‘politically relevant’ and tends to rather underestimate the prevalence of political engagement online. However, possibly to the disappointment of many social scientists, engagement with political content online is by no means the dominant form of engagement.

The results of the study clearly align with Guess ( 2021 ) who found a considerable overlap of news media diets within a US sample that goes against the common notion of selective exposure in online ‘echo chambers’. According to Guess ( 2021 ), this overlap originates from individuals’ common use of large mainstream hubs for political information. Correspondingly, in this German sample, the largest cluster of websites are highly-frequented sites that are commonly visited by a large proportion of users. These informational hubs can be understood to be a kind of general-interest intermediary that may indeed facilitate a common arena within the digital public sphere that offers shared experiences and the possibility of incidental encounters with diverse perspectives (Sunstein 2018 ).

The results of the latent class analysis further suggest that public service broadcasting still plays a major role in the German online public discourse even though these websites did not reach a particularly diverse audience within the sample. This finding aligns with previous work on deliberative democracy that, when mapping the television news ecosystem, identified an elite focused coverage within German public broadcasting (Wessler and Rinke 2014 ) which, however, speaks against the often implied view that public broadcasting is in itself lowering audience polarization through broad appeal. Furthermore, the reference to local or regional issues and information is a commonality of many websites assigned to the class of quality information providers. The local nature of political issues is often neglected when studying political online communication or when using digital trace data that do not have a geospatial component. However, on an interesting side note, Ellger et al. ( 2021 ) find that the decline of local newspapers can be related to an increase in political polarization, a relationship that could be given more attention in the study of online politics. While digital technology lets information flows transcend physical constraints, people still live in specific local contexts.

Furthermore, the analysis highlights a latent class of websites that is only mentioned in a small proportion of empirical studies on online deliberation. Wright ( 2012 ) coined the term ‘third spaces’ for non-political online spaces where political talk emerges based on case studies, similar to Graham ( 2012 ). This study demonstrates the importance of their early observations on a much larger basis. The class contains mostly niche forums dedicated to specific topics and communities which points to the phenomenon of incidental exposure to political issues online (Valeriani and Vaccari 2016 ; Yadamsuren and Erdelez 2010 ). Furthermore, these online communities might be comparably more tightly knit because of shared (apolitical) interests and fewer overall user numbers, which allows individuals to recognize each other (despite usually being pseudonymous, Moore et al. 2020 ). These forums, which, in comparison to large social media platforms, might be closer to offline social groups in which a basic form of trust can be established between members, can provide interesting possibilities for informal political discussions among citizens and might operate as important ‘weak ties’ between large online information and communication platforms within a deliberative online system (Esau et al. 2017 ; Granovetter 1973 ; S. W. Rosenberg 2014 ).

As visible among the mainstream hubs, website popularity is heavily ensconced in the three additional dimensions of deliberative potential (connectivity, inclusivity and heterogeneity). One obvious reason for this finding is that the degree of centrality of a node in a social network increases with the frequency of its interactions. Another measurement related explanation could be that the Shannon-Wiener diversity index puts more weight on richness than on evenness (Zeleny 2021 ), implying a rising index with more users. Therefore, caution must be taken against a substantive interpretation of the finding that the most heavily used platforms in the sample are, according to the measures, also the most ‘inclusive’ and ‘heterogeneous’. While they are indeed a common source of information and a common arena of political communication for citizens with different demographic profiles and heterogeneous political attitudes, it is still important to keep in mind that this does not prevent the formation of niche corners and sub-groups that might not speak to each other.

Another limitation to consider is that when classifying the content of the sites as political or not, the full URL-string was considered. While this often features the most important keywords of the page accessed, scraping the entire HTML text of the site might have been helpful in some cases Footnote 5 .

The manually selected set of keywords naturally comes with certain boundary conditions. It is systematically easier to rigorously identify specific political terms, such as the names of politicians and terms referring to party politics and administrative processes in comparison to political issues like education and social policy because terms like ‘family’ or ‘housing’ appear in many different political and apolitical contexts. Various efforts were taken to reduce this imbalance as much as possible (see SI D ).

Finally, the web tracking data is based on desktop use and does not include mobile devices. This certainly overlooks parts of users’ political online engagement and may even introduce non-random blind spots. Furthermore, due to the temporal asymmetry between the browser histories (collected in 2017) and the content analysis on the respective websites (conducted in 2021), one cannot rule out the possibility that some websites might have changed in terms of structure, content and function for online public discourse.

One may ask which websites show the highest deliberative potential but this study explicitly avoids a summative ranking as the core of a systemic understanding implies that different arenas can fulfill different functions for public discourse (Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019 ). This study suggests that the empirical reality maps this normative account. Given that deliberative theory is fundamentally normative, one may consider possible normative implications for online public discourse that follow from this empirical mapping of a deliberative system. Certain combinations of deliberative potential criteria, such as the provision of communicative spaces that are characterized as inclusive and heterogeneous or the provision of high-quality political information in spaces with high connectivity to other relevant sources, clearly appear as normatively desirable (Mansbridge et al. 2012 ). However, a distinction between websites that primarily provide information and other websites that specialize on discussions, seems hardly detrimental to public discourse. On the contrary, this distinction could reflect the ideal of a shared factual baseline that is built by quality information providers on which basis then conflicting discussions can safely occur in other arenas (Habermas 2021 ; Krause 2008 ).

Accordingly, this study shows that few websites fulfill all criteria and some combinations of deliberative criteria are more frequent than others: information providing infrastructure often comes with high usage, reflected in heterogeneity and inclusivity, while communication also occurs in niches. Furthermore, in previous accounts theoretically distinct classes of websites, such as major newspapers and social media platforms, empirically sort into the same class when focusing on affordances and usage. However, the outlined systemic understanding that one website does not have to serve all criteria and the empirical findings about skewed participation in public discourse may allow a hypothesis about the critical state of the online media system: perhaps one website should also not try to serve all criteria. For example, public broadcasting and established newspapers are the backbone of quality information providence in Germany. Their increasing presence on social media, on the one hand, perhaps reaches otherwise lost audiences but on the other hand, risks eroding their core function of quality information providence that serves as common factual baseline for deliberation (Habermas 2021 ) through constraints imposed by the structure of social media. Visible engagement in the comment sections showcases the opinions and rhetoric of a skewed minority while for the largely silent majority that becomes visible in this study, public broadcasting remains a core provider of quality political information. Moreover, entering the market of digital content creators and advertisers is a competition that public broadcasting in Germany would not even have to play, given public funding combined with independent agenda setting.

This project illustrates that the internet provides a plethora of sources for political information, arenas for political communication and some opportunities for online participation. This study clearly found potential for public deliberation in the German speaking web in 2017. Even though political content is only a small proportion of the overall content accessed online—the German deliberative system seems to be a rather small fraction of the wider online environment—almost everyone in the sample engaged with some political content around the federal election in 2017. This implies that the consumption of political content is not as exclusive as the visible discussion patterns of few very active users on social media may imply.

The infrastructure of a deliberative system goes far beyond news websites and social media platforms but includes a wide range of different types of popular and niche platforms with different primary functions. On some platforms, users get political information. However, it is not clear if those are accurate or misinformation. On other platforms, they can discuss political issues, deliberatively or not. While only very few websites in the sample offer possibilities for participation, the demand also seemed limited.

Mainstream hubs are most central in the network of topical links, whereas public broadcasting outlets and especially the niche forums are more at the periphery of the network. Considering the definition of links within the connectivity measure, this implies that users move beyond the quick bites of political information on mainstream platforms but read more on the topic elsewhere. Those platforms appear to act as general-interest intermediary that may indeed facilitate a common arena within the digital public sphere that, against the notion of online ‘echo chambers’, offers shared experiences and the possibility of encounters with diverse perspectives. This finding aligns with the current state of the literature, finding limited empirical support for the prevalence and impact of online ‘echo chambers’ (e.g. Flaxman et al. 2016 ; Guess et al. 2023 ; Guess et al., 2021; Dubois and Blank 2018 ). The class of information providers can be interpreted as evidence for the persisting centrality of high quality public broadcasting as the backbone for democratic deliberation in Germany. The question as to whether we stand at the beginning or the end of the public broadcasting era online could be determined using detailed information on the user base. This project demonstrated the presence of a-political spaces in which political discussion emerges on a large empirical basis. While niche online forums are especially characteristic for the earlier years of the internet, it will be interesting to see in which spaces more tightly knit online communities will form in the future as previous exchange around a-political shared interests may build mutual trust as important basis for the discussion of conflicting political views.

Even though the found latent class structure appears intuitive, this structure was war from obvious as previous theoretical accounts have rarely moved beyond an assumed a split between news media and social media, a cyclographic split that was fed forward into empirical studies. Furthermore, the results of this study do reveal several surprising aspects. First, negative findings on the deliberative quality online are contrasted by findings about the potential of the political online ecosystem when examining passive audiences in contrast to digital traces of active social media commenters. Second, the absence of central websites with low heterogeneity aligns with Guess et al. (2021) but provides more evidence against the otherwise common notion of online “echo chambers” (Sunstein 2002 ). Third, public broadcasting stood out as distinct class in a data driven, bottom-up approach, even with a sole focus on infrastructural elements and usage characteristics.

While this project empirically mapped the online media structures underlying online deliberation for the first time, the logical next step in the research agenda is the quantitative description of membership, the profiles of internet users engaging with political information and communication online. In particular because online political deliberation itself may not be a mainstream behavior, the mechanisms of selection into the online public discourse need to be determined.

Data availability

Extensive supplementary material, including all R scripts and publicly available data, supporting tables and figures, the dictionary used for website selection and a software statement can be found in the project’s repository on OSF under https://osf.io/atj5u/ .

An alternative model including participants’ household income as additional input criterion for inclusivity is reported in SI C13. In this German survey, ethnicity as another statistical marker of minority status was not asked.

The distribution of the self-reported political orientation of the sample approaches a normal distribution and also geographically, online activity patterns in the sample distribute about evenly across Germany.

The order of classes has no deeper meaning but is determined by configurations in the estimation process.

Cumulative engagement measures are baseline corrected, meaning that they show the share of website visits that users spend on e.g. quality information providers in relation to their total number of website visits in the measurement time frame.

However, an extremely robust scraper would have to be built in order to process hundreds of thousands of different domain structures (in the original full dataset). Future projects may try to build such a scraper, web-scrape all the sites and search for political topics in the full HTML text of websites instead of the URL-strings. The reference body (sites explicitly dealing with the 2017 German public discourse that I selected to generate keywords, see SI D) would then be similar enough to the target body (now being the full-text of websites instead of URL-text only) to use the semi-automated keyword extraction method proposed by King et al. ( 2017 ).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Simon Munzert, Pablo Barberá, Andrew Guess and JungHwan Yang for the provision of the data and the inspiring and constructive discussions during the 2022 MEOF workshop in Princeton. I thank Simon Munzert for his continuous guidance and supervision on the project, as well as André Bächtiger and all anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to the manuscript. The collection of data used in this study was generously funded by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation Computational Social Science Initiative, reference 92 143. I acknowledge funding from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation in the form of a PhD stipend.

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Oswald, L. More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 629 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03115-0

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Digital Democracy: Social Media and Public Participation

• Maleeha Sattar
• August 26, 2023
• CSS , CSS Essays , CSS Solved Essays , Current Affairs , Pakistan's Domestic Affairs , Pakistan's External Affairs , PMS , PMS Essays
• 43446 Views

CSS 2022 Solved Essay | Digital Democracy: Social Media and Public Participation | CSS and PMS Solved Essays by Sir Syed Kazim Ali Students

Maleeha Sattar has attempted the essay “ Digital Democracy: Social Media and Public Participation ” on the given pattern, which Sir  Syed Kazim Ali  teaches his students. Sir Syed Kazim Ali has been Pakistan’s top English writing and CSS, PMS essay and precis coach with the highest success rate of his students. The essay is uploaded to help other competitive aspirants learn and practice essay writing techniques and patterns.

1- Introduction

• ✓Technology, indeed, advancing and improving worldwide with its diverse field of novelty
• ✓Forming digital spaces, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc., broadly encouraging the politically aware public to articulate their views openly while experiencing their freedom of expression right
• ✓Public participation changing the picture of democracy by making it more digital and strengthening it via using social media platforms across the globe
• ✓Therefore, the leader-voter bond formation, youth’s indulgence in welfare activities lessening leaders’ burden, and promulgation of transparency via e-governance initiatives by using digital tools, conjointly giving rise to digital democracy across the boards

2- Debunking the term ‘Digital Democracy’ from the broader perspective

3- How has public participation strengthened digital democracy via social media?

• Case in point:   According to the PEW Research Center, “74pc of the adults in the United States (US) who use social media platforms get news from them”, highlighting the role of social media in disseminating information
• Case in point: The mobilization and activism by people, physically and digitally, to support social causes in the form of movements, like the Arab Spring, Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, to flourish digital democracy at all fronts is a glaring example of the case
• Case in point: The hashtag “MyCultureMyPride” has aided people on social media platforms, like YouTube and Instagram, to represent their cultures by sharing their cultural videos and pictures, further strengthening pluralism across the boards
• Case in point: According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “White House utilizes social media platforms to engage citizens in discussions and gathers public input on policy issues.”
• Case in point: The online campaigns on social media platforms by infuriated public in the Zainab rape case, helping in the formation of the child abuse and rape-related laws in Pakistan, bolstering the power of digital democracy in the country
• Case in point: The enhanced usage of Twitter accounts by the leaders, like all Pakistan’s political parties’ prominent leaders, showing their online presence, helping them disseminate their parties’ ideology among the masses
• Case in point: According to the United Nations, Coronavirus related updates, the organization has highlighted ten young people’s names from all over the world led the coronavirus response by developing their digital communities to tackle and control the spread of the pandemic at that time
• Case in point: According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, “Those countries that focus on e-governance initiatives for development projects have seen improvement in their democracy indexes, along with the enhanced public participation.”

4- Case studies of different countries where public participation has strengthened digital democracy via social media

• ✓ Case study of Taiwan
• ✓ Case study of the US
• ✓ Case study of Pakistan

5- Critical Analysis

6- Conclusion

 Technology has advanced and improved worldwide with its diverse field of novelty. Additionally, the revolutionization of the modes of communication and masses’ interaction in the digital age with the advancements in social media platforms has changed the landscape of countries’ democratic processes and, thus, governing patterns. Indeed, forming digital spaces like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc., has encouraged the politically aware public to articulate their views openly while experiencing their freedom of expression broadly. Consequently, public participation has changed the picture of democracy by making it more digital and strengthening it via using social media platforms across the globe. Looking at the intense magnitude of digital democracy in today’s world, civic engagement by using social media has enlarged the information pool for the masses, shaped their opinion towards their leaders and promulgated digital democracy, particularly. Besides this, social media’s activism and cultural assimilation practices, by people, have also contributed to the flourishing digital democracy on all fronts. Despite engaging citizens in decision-making procedures, political accountability via online campaigns has also lessened the trust deficit between the public and stakeholders, fostering digital democracy in societies. Therefore, the leader-voter bond formation, youth’s indulgence in welfare activities reducing leaders’ burden, and promulgation of transparency via e-governance initiatives by using digital tools, conjointly, have given rise to digital democracy across the boards. This essay highlights how public participation has strengthened digital democracy via social media.

Before jumping towards the maxim of how public participation has strengthened digital democracy via social media, the understanding of the term ‘Digital Democracy’ in the broader perspective holds the greatest importance. Indeed, the jargon encapsulates the concept denoting the introduction of digital infrastructures in the organizations’ structure via reforms to establish a more effective and unrestricted democratic setup, building the collective government body best suited for the efficient conduct of the current state of affairs. Speaking in a neutral vein, digital democracy has become a significant factor in the social media age, as it promulgates transparency in the institutions by empowering the citizen-to-citizen contact at large. Moreover, it helps incorporation and inclusion of different ideas and viewpoints in the overall functioning of the government system and gives rise to a new form of business-oriented teamwork-based environment in the system, along with technology-led public management skills of the leaders at length.

Talking about the maxim of how public participation has strengthened digital democracy via social media, it, in fact, has increased civic engagement for access to information on social media platforms, greatly influencing and shaping public opinion. For instance, according to the PEW Research Center, “74 per cent of the adults in the United States (US) who use social media platforms get news from them”, highlighting the role of social media in the dissemination of information related to the ongoing events at the global front. As a result, they build their opinion and act accordingly for the promulgation of democracy in their respective domains on the basis of that information. Thus, the elevated level of public participation has helped foster digital democracy in the countries through the productive use of social media.

In addition, creating awareness among the masses for the achievement of basic human rights also strengthens digital democracy via the use of social media. Indeed, it has shown in the mobilization and activism by people, physically and digitally too, to support social causes in the form of movements, like the Arab Spring, Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, to flourish digital democracy at all fronts is a glaring example of the case. In this way, they could make public officials aware of the sentiments of the downtrodden segments of society. And via activism, they could seek social justice in all directions, which is necessary for the promotion of digital democracy worldwide.

Besides, the public actively participates in the fostering of cultural diversity via social media platforms, which is mandatory for flourishing digital democracy in all domains. For instance, the hashtag “MyCultureMyPride” has aided people on social media platforms, like YouTube and Instagram, to represent their cultures by sharing their cultural videos and pictures, further strengthening pluralism across the boards. By doing this, virtual people-to-people contact via social media enhances, and the public becomes a capable force that could overthrow power centralization in all political spheres. As a result, digital democracy takes its toll in full swing and negates all authoritative, feudal practices broadly.

Apart from it, active public participation with the productive use of social media platforms has compelled political heads of the states to engage citizens in discussions related to policymaking. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “The White House utilizes social media platforms to engage citizens in discussions and gathers public input on policy issues.” It clearly shows that government institutes, by following the general will principles, also contribute to the advancement of digital democracy by including active and responsible citizens in decision-making. Therefore, digital democracy has smoothened due to the social media platforms in today’s world.

Likewise, the public’s active participation through the usage of social media in the online campaign’s form has also reinforced the political accountability of the officials. Such as the online campaigns on social media platforms that infuriated the public in the Zainab rape case, helping in the formation of child abuse and rape-related laws in Pakistan, and bolstering the power of digital democracy in the country. After accomplishing this, child abuse has ceased for a longer period of time in Pakistan, and consequently, the incident has helped in bridging the gap between the public and stakeholders. Hence, public participation has helped maintain a transparency level in the country, furthering digital democracy with the help of social media.

Similarly, the zestful usage of social media by political leaders has boosted their one-on-one interaction with their vigilant voter diaspora . Illustratively, the enhanced usage of Twitter accounts by the leaders, like all of Pakistan’s political parties’ prominent leaders, shows their online presence, helping them disseminate their parties’ ideology among the masses. In return, the public, influenced by their views, supports them blindly in the electoral campaigns and rallies. In this manner, they openly demand them in office as their representative running the government functions for the effective development of digital democracy in the country.

 Moving ahead towards another justification proving the maxim, the augmented youth efforts during crisis situations using digital tools have kicked the digital democracy’s gradients upstairs. According to the United Nations coronavirus-related updates, the organization has highlighted ten young people’s names from all over the world who led the coronavirus response by developing their digital communities to tackle and control the spread of the pandemic at that time. Due to their diligent participation, the countries’ leaders were capable of tackling the birth of new evils and focusing on the achievement of Sustainable Development’s seventeen goals (17 SDGs) with a collective efforts strategy instead of a man show. Hence, vigilant public participation helps elevate the digital democracy rates via using social media.

Last but not least, the masses’ social involvement has stimulated the effectiveness of e-governance, giving rise to digital democracy in the contemporary world. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, “Those countries that focus on e-governance initiatives for their multidimensional development, along with the enhanced public participation, have seen improvement in their democracy indexes.” By analyzing the facts, the countries’ people actively participate and gain information from their governance portals and question the validity of the officials’ actions, too, as they have the right to information as an accountability card for the enhancement of their country’s institutional transparency. Therefore, public participation indeed aids in strengthening digital democracy via social media.

The above discussion could be emboldened by giving examples of some developing countries where public participation has strengthened digital democracy via social media. The very first one in the row is the case study of the country Taiwan. Without any doubt, the country’s officials have developed the e-petition platform to include its citizens in decision-making. As a result, the empowered youth have actively taken part in the resolution of the Uber, a ride-sharing app, issue , further enhancing their consensus and participation in the country’s legal working and app launching activities. Thus, Taiwan’s public involvement has invigorated the country’s digital democracy through social media platforms.

Second, the United States also explains the strength of civic engagement by proactively using social media platforms, which has augmented digital democracy in the country. Delineating their citizens’ activity, the masses have actively used social media platforms during the US’s 2016 elections . In fact, they have shown their sentiments via slogan raising and hashtag development on their Twitter accounts to dominate their allegiance to their leaders. Through their online voting system, they have also ensured transparency in the voter turnout rates. Therefore, digital democracy has been raised to its height via social media in the country by the public.

Lastly, Pakistan’s case study has significantly outlined the increasing support of digital democracy by the public’s social media using capacity in the current global environment, which can be gauged by the availability ratio of the internet in the country. According to the Digital Pakistan report (2022), “61 million people out of 220 million population are internet users.” It clearly shows that the public has enthusiastically used social media platforms to raise their concerns and get connected with their leaders, the necessary element in the promulgation of digital democracy in the country’s multiple domains. Hence, the public’s interest has compelled the officials to ensure democracy in the country in today’s social media age.

In a critical diagnosis, digital democracy, standing on the pillars of social media platforms, has undoubtedly been promulgated by productive public participation. Speaking in a positive manner, the concept has gained so much popularity among the masses that it helps foster diverse perspectives in societies and encourages people to work collectively in a win-win situation instead of relying on self-help. However, the enhanced public participation that has strengthened digital democracy via social media could be proved as a double-edged sword in the coming future in the form of propaganda games, further raising prisoner’s dilemma for the future world order. But for now, social engagement has always borne fruits for society by boosting digital democracy in a positive way, paving the countries’ way towards development.

In conclusion, using social media platforms actively by the global citizens in the global village has raised the standards of democracy in the twenty-first century. Surely, the inclusion of digital telecommunication tools in the government structure has raised the living standards of the masses and ensured the active accountability of the leaders holding public offices. Furthermore, it also helped the masses become well aware of their rights and their timely dispensation, boosting the levels of digital democracy and taking it to an advanced level. In the end, digital democracy by using social media has strengthened due to the continuous struggle of the public, seeking pluralism by accepting diversity at all fronts. 

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The Impact of the 26th Amendment on American Democracy

This essay about the 26th Amendment explores its significant impact on American democracy by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. It discusses the origins of the amendment, its immediate effects on the electoral landscape, the increase in youth political activism, and its broader implications for civil rights and inclusivity. The essay also examines challenges in youth voter turnout and the amendment’s lasting influence on policy-making and societal perceptions of young people.

How it works

The ratification of the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 1, 1971, signified a transformative moment in the trajectory of American democracy. This amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, fundamentally altered the nation’s political dynamics. Its implications for American democracy are extensive, affecting electoral processes, civic engagement, and the broader conversation on civil rights and inclusivity.

The origins of the 26th Amendment are rooted in the turbulent socio-political climate of the 1960s and early 1970s. This era was marked by vigorous civil rights movements, widespread anti-war demonstrations, and a burgeoning call for youth involvement in the political sphere.

A persuasive argument for lowering the voting age emerged in the phrase, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” This highlighted the paradox of 18-year-olds being eligible for military draft during the Vietnam War without the corresponding right to vote. Energized by this cause, student activists, civil rights advocates, and supportive politicians rallied together, leading to the rapid adoption of the amendment.

The immediate consequence of the 26th Amendment was the enfranchisement of millions of young Americans, significantly impacting the electoral landscape. Politicians and political parties had to adjust their approaches to engage this new voter base, which brought fresh perspectives and priorities into the political sphere. The inclusion of younger voters broadened the scope of public discourse to include issues such as education, environmental sustainability, and social justice, which had previously been underrepresented.

Additionally, the 26th Amendment ignited a surge of political activism among the youth. The new voting rights empowered young people to influence policy decisions and hold their representatives accountable. This empowerment fostered a more participatory democratic culture and encouraged the creation of youth-centric political organizations and advocacy groups, which played a crucial role in mobilizing and maintaining youth engagement in politics.

The amendment also significantly impacted the broader civil rights movement, underscoring the idea that age, like race and gender, should not impede full democratic participation. This extension of voting rights was part of a broader trend towards greater inclusivity and equality, reinforcing the concept that democracy is strengthened by the active involvement of all citizens. By lowering the voting age, the 26th Amendment contributed to the reduction of discriminatory practices and set a precedent for future efforts to expand democratic participation.

However, the impact of the 26th Amendment has been mixed. While it enfranchised millions of young voters, their turnout rates have historically been lower than those of older age groups. This discrepancy raises concerns about the amendment’s effectiveness in realizing its full potential. Various factors contribute to this low turnout, including political disillusionment, lack of awareness about the voting process, and obstacles like stringent voter ID laws and complex registration requirements.

Overcoming these challenges necessitates a dedicated effort to educate and engage young voters. Comprehensive civic education programs that emphasize the importance of voting and provide practical information about the electoral process are essential. Additionally, reforms aimed at making voting more accessible, such as same-day registration and expanded early voting, can help increase youth turnout. Encouragingly, recent elections have seen a resurgence in youth participation, driven by social media campaigns and grassroots organizing.

A crucial aspect of the 26th Amendment’s impact is its influence on policy-making. The inclusion of younger voters has compelled politicians to address issues particularly relevant to this demographic. For instance, policies related to higher education funding, student loan debt, climate change, and digital privacy have gained prominence in political discussions. This shift ensures that the concerns of young people are reflected in legislative agendas, leading to more comprehensive and representative governance.

Furthermore, the 26th Amendment has had a lasting effect on societal perceptions of young people. By acknowledging their right to vote, it affirmed their status as full citizens with a stake in the country’s future. This recognition has fostered a greater sense of responsibility and civic duty among young people, encouraging them to contribute to their communities in various ways beyond voting. From volunteering and community organizing to running for public office, young Americans have increasingly embraced their role as active participants in the democratic process.

In conclusion, the 26th Amendment has had a profound and enduring impact on American democracy. By lowering the voting age to 18, it expanded the electorate, invigorated political engagement, and reinforced the principles of equality and inclusivity. While challenges remain in ensuring high turnout among young voters, the amendment has undeniably reshaped the political landscape, bringing new issues to the forefront and fostering a more participatory democratic culture. As the United States continues to evolve, the legacy of the 26th Amendment stands as a testament to the power of inclusive voting rights and the importance of empowering all citizens to shape their nation’s future.

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