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There is an emerging scholarly consensus that unprecedented access to information and lower barriers to political participation, ushered in by digitization and digital technologies, have not strengthened democracy. From mob lynchings in India to the 2021 US Capitol insurrections, social media recommendation algorithms have played a role in amplifying conspiracy theories, disinformation, and propaganda. Outside liberal democracies, the use of digital technologies in autocratic regimes has come to be seen as a mixed blessing. While digital technologies have assisted democratic activism in overthrowing dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, they have also evolved into powerful tools for regime entrenchment by strengthening, among others, state surveillance and censorship capabilities. How do we explain these outcomes, that is, the weakening of democracy and the strengthening of autocracy amid the digital changes taking place across political regimes? This cumulative dissertation locates these trends that belie the initial euphoria about the democratic potential of digital technologies in the center of a largely underregulated global digital sphere and socio-technical designs that leave internet users vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, as well as online harassment and abuse. It advances understandings about these patterns by weaving feature-based, regime-centric, and micro-level approaches into a unified synoptic framework that sheds a closer and more nuanced light on different dimensions of digitally-induced changes that drive the outcomes of my interest. Each approach inspired different theoretical lenses and cases employed to subject my/our arguments to empirical scrutiny.
The first article offers a new theoretical lens on how attitudinal and behavioral effects associated with the three key features of digital technologies, namely, the abundance of contradictory information, the decreasing ability of consumers to assess its truthfulness, and AI-assisted algorithmic targeting of users with personalized content, undermine democracy as a regime type. An empirical probe into the two case studies of COVID-19 demonstrations in Germany and the US Capitol attack in 2021 demonstrates that digital technologies can foster misbelief and, subsequently, anti-democratic behavior or agnosticism, which consequently translates into political apathy. The second article theoretically situates digital astroturfing at the center of autocratic regime threat perception and adopts a mixed-methods approach to granularly examine 14,443 tweets linked to the Thai military in February 2020. The findings demonstrate that astroturfing constitutes an important legitimation tool – one that autocrats employ in response to offline events that spark online discourses with collective action potential. The third article goes beyond (and below) the regime-centric paradigm, examining how state-aligned countermovement actors support repertoires of repression. Leveraging a diachronic comparison of protests during Bahrain’s 2011 Pearl Roundabout uprising and Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, it shows that prominent state-aligned social media users exploited social media affordances to document posts with anti-regime leanings, publicize identities of dissident posters, and call on authorities to arrest the latter. Altogether, this cumulative dissertation contextualizes these dynamics within broader comparative political regimes that shape the participation and inclusion (or exclusion) of their citizens. While digital technologies amplify socio-political processes that weaken democracy’s institutional guardrails, their use in autocracies has further contributed to the deepening of authoritarian traits in these regimes. These insights not only extend the frontiers of digitally-adjacent political science research but also signal the need to incorporate more technical understandings of current and emerging digital tools into the research agenda amid the ever-increasing pervasiveness of digital capital in authoritarianism research. |
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