Introduction: democracy and digitization

Digital technologies are creating challenges and opportunities for established and new democracies. The past decade has seen a surprising and disturbing shift from optimism to pessimism in assessing the impact of digitization on democracy. A decade ago, digital technology was celebrated as a liberating tool, enriching participation in democracies and undermining authoritarian regimes, as in the Arab Spring (Diamond, 2010; Howard & Hussain, 2013; Khondker, 2011). In 2018, a Foreign Affairs survey of expert opinion's prevailing view was that technological changes favoured authoritarianism (Cole, 2018). Now, social media, big data, new forms of digital surveillance and control, and the spread of online misinformation, hate and political polarization are provoking alarm about the dangers that digitization poses to democracy (Bulovsky, 2019; Deibert, 2019; O’Neil, 2016; Shahbaz, 2018).

A challenge in understanding the impact of digitization on democracy is that digitization not only impacts conventional features of democracy such as election campaigns, the behaviours of elected officials, or the way in which citizens and other stakeholders interact with democratic governments – digitization can also profoundly transform the contexts, practices, institutions, and locations in which democracy can flourish or perish. We refer to this as the changing ontologies and contexts of democracy.

Similar to the impacts of the invention of writing, the printing press, or television (Deibert, 1997), we are in the midst of a historical transformation of societies and individual identities enabled by digital media and other technologies. We can think of digitization as co-produced by humans and our digital technologies (Mayer et al., 2014, p. 18). Digitization is entangled with globalization, another historical transformation, extending and intensifying cross-border linkages. Digitization has extended the rich varieties of personal identities that we interact with and that shape our own identities, including the political ones. Digitization transforms the relationship between public and private, with social media and other private firms sustaining or undermining public spheres, and individuals expressing themselves politically through digital networks that may be neither fully public or private (Papacharissi, 2010, 2015).

Digitization has created new concentrations of economic power in Big Tech, transforming modes of production with the emergence of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), platform capitalism (McMillan Cottom, 2020; Srnicek, 2017), and other such changes. Digitization can accelerate the shift from more centralized hierarchical forms of power to more decentralized networked forms (Slaughter, 2017), even as it can also enhance centralized authoritarian control (Freedom House, 2018). As Lessig comments, ‘code is law’, often far more effectively eliciting compliance than conventional law (2006). Algorithmic governance and other forms of rankings or benchmarking can be integrated with digital technologies in ways that obscure power relations that might otherwise be subject to conventional mechanisms of democratic accountability or oversight (Broome & Quirk, 2015; Hansen & Porter, 2012; O’Neil, 2016). Digitization creates new architectures and virtual spaces enabled by new physical infrastructures and resource flows, and new forms of governance for these (Bratton, 2015). Increasingly large swathes of daily life are governed in part by computer code.

All these changes interact with the promise and shortcomings of democracy. Democracy becomes relevant to all the new governance spaces that digitization enables. Policy and social justice concerns associated with these changes, such as the accountability of new forms of power, call for creative new ways of addressing these democratically. We need to better understand how new digitally-enabled forms of political identity interact with democracy. If democracy is to survive, we need to develop ways to distinguish between true and false information, when institutional foundations for sustaining trust in news media and scientific experts are undermined by digital architectures that proliferate conspiracy theories and misinformation. When we are threatened or manipulated by digital surveillance carried out by governments or businesses, our capacities to freely imagine, deliberate and choose, central to democracy are at risk (Zuboff, 2019). These issues go beyond how digital technologies affect electoral integrity to provoke troubling questions about the capacities of a digitizing society to be democratic and about the changing ontologies and contexts of democracy.

This special section brings together four articles that illuminate these challenges both in the particular issue that each article addresses individually and in the diversity of locations at which these issues are present.

The first article, ‘Governing through metrics in the digital age’ by Hans Krause Hansen, discusses the proliferation of technologies for measuring and ranking behaviours, but then asks: how do these processes of measuring and ranking create processes of valuation, where some of those measured are deemed to be worthy and others unworthy? Creatively drawing together insights from surveillance and valuation literatures, Hansen pays attention to the Chinese social credit system but discusses as well similar processes in liberal democracies, such as credit scoring systems in the United States. These valuations operate at the individual level, reshaping an individual's identities, powers, and entitlements, but also at the systems-architecture level, where they are designed and used without the required transparency or accountability for these governance systems to be democratic. They also raise questions about the tension between individual freedom and collective obligation that is central to the theory and practice of democracy. As Hansen discusses, the Chinese social credit system is not as integrated or effective and not as uniform in the service of the ruling communist authorities as some Western media accounts suggest. Citizens see some merit in having consequences for corrupt or fraudulent behaviours that are undetectable and ungovernable without digital measurement and valuation, even as others resisted and criticized these processes.

The second article, ‘Information disorder, fake news and the future of democracy’ by Linda Monsees goes beyond the simplistic way in which ‘fake news’ or disinformation is seen to threaten democracy, drawing on examples from the United States, Germany, and Czechia. Monsees contrasts deliberative or liberal theories of democracy to agonistic theories of democracy. The former emphasizes social cohesion and rational deliberation, and it is these properties of democracy that are often seen as threatened by disinformation. Agonistic theories instead emphasize the conflictual character of democracy. Monsees warns that treating fake news as a problem of individual failures to distinguish between truth and falsity to be solved by programmes promoting media literacy can have problematic consequences. Individuals may be circulating fake news for affectual reasons, for instance to signal identification with a particular group or to express opposition to elites, and patronizing criticisms of these individuals may create further polarization, limit conflicts that should be legitimate and valuable features of democracy, help shield traditional media from useful challenges from social media, and obscure the larger determinants of fake news such as the commercial interests of digital platforms in stoking controversies to retain users’ attention. Monsees notes how fake news labelled as coming from foreign adversaries and a security concern can also narrow democratic debate. This article thus challenges us to see beyond more simplistic approaches to fake news and elections and focus on larger meanings and contexts of this impact of digitization on democracy.

In the third article, ‘Data-caring in digital democracies: Brazilian politics and a pedagogical experience with conversations’, Isabel Rocha de Siqueira explores ways of countering the negative effects of digital technologies and datafication on our analogue human relationships and the implications for democracy, including the political polarization evident in the Brazilian presidential election of 2018 won by Jair Bolsonaro of the far-right Social Liberal Party. She highlights the multiple ways that digitized and datafied relationships work against meaningful conversations and narratives, the recognition of our unavoidable interdependencies, and our openness to others who think differently, all of which are vital for democracy to flourish. For instance, the speed and fragmentation of digital flows quickly create categories that amplify conflicts at the expense of the time needed for more shared experiences and understandings. Drawing on data feminism and feminist pedagogies, Rocha de Siqueira develops the concept of data-caring to recognize and address these issues. She discusses an experimental small undergraduate course that she designed in Rio de Janeiro in the wake of the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, where students reflected theoretically and personally on cases and situations in politics that caused discomfort, and where students reached out and engaged outside the course with others with sharply different views, including some with whom the student had a close personal connection. These interactions illustrated the difficulty but also the value of these conversations, and of data-caring, personally, and for the interactions and contexts that are needed if democracy is to be sustained amidst digitization.

The fourth article, ‘Norm conflict in the governance of transnational and distributed infrastructures: the case of Internet routing’, by Niels ten Oever, explores the role of norms in the technical protocols that govern the interconnections between the networks that make up the internet. Internet governance is a significant example of the ways in which digital architectures can create new spaces governed by technical rules and written in technical documents or computer code. These new governance spaces pose challenges for democracy, as is often the case in global governance. Norms, which articulate and guide the appropriateness of behaviours, may carry out governance functions in global spaces where formal democratic procedures such as elections are absent. The establishment and contestation of norms can be an aspect of deliberative democracy (Dryzek, 2006), a less formal conception of democracy that is relevant to global governance. In the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that he studies, ten Oever identifies a sense of community among the engineers and other technical experts organized around a voluntary interconnection norm, prioritizing procedures and code that enable the flow of information across the boundaries between different networks. When he draws upon his own experience as one of these experts to propose two objects to be added to the RIR's registry that would allow the compliance of networks with two human rights standards to be incorporated into routing choices, he experiences strong resistance from the community because these new norms are seen as challenging the voluntary interconnection norm. While there is a certain democratic quality in the emphasis of this community on the bottom-up voluntary coordination, the mechanisms for adjudicating norm contestations lack the formalized sources of legitimacy associated with electoral democracies, highlighting the challenges of new ontologies and contexts of democracy in internet architectures.

Overall, these four articles contribute to our understanding of the specific digital topics and issues that they explore, while also demonstrating the challenges for democracy of the social transformations that are accompanying digitization. These are taking place in multiple locations, reshaping the ontologies and contexts of democracy.

The special section has its origins in a workshop on ‘Digital Democracy: Global Dimensions’ held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, in March 2019, with funding and support from the International Studies Association and the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University. As co-organizers of that workshop and related panels at the 2019 International Studies Association convention in Toronto, we are grateful for all those who have contributed to the development of this project, including the authors of papers and this journal's referees who commented on the papers considered for inclusion in this special section. We know that the complex challenges for democracy of digitization will continue to be explored, as they must be if democracy is to be sustained and flourish in this time of digital transformation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2016-527].

Notes on contributors

Tony Porter

Tony Porter is Professor of Political Science, McMaster University. His research has focused on institutional changes in transnational governance, with particular emphasis on global business regulation, global finance, private governance, digitization, and technical systems. His most recent books include, Handbook of Business and Public Policy, Elgar, co-edited with Aynsley Kellow and Karsten Ronit (2021) and Time, Globalization and Human Experience: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Routledge, co-edited with Paul Huebener, Paul, Susie O'Brien, Liam Stockdale, and Rachel Zhou (2017).

Netina Tan

Netina Tan is University Scholar and Associate Professor of Political Science at McMaster University with research interests on authoritarianism, political representation of women and ethnic minorities and digital democracy. She has published more than 30 publications and edited several special journal issues on these themes in Representation, Politics and Gender and Pacific Affairs. She is also the co-editor of the Handbook of Women's Political Rights (Palgrave, 2019) and Electoral Malpractice in Asia (Lynne Rienner, forthcoming).