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ABSTRACT
The study of public opinion in nondemocratic states has found that people often say they support democracy, yet they show little demand for democratization or regime change. Given this paradox, recent scholarship has shown that these attitudes exist because people who live under the rule of non-democratic regimes often misunderstand what democracy is. Individuals in these societies often think that authoritarian ways of governance are fundamental aspects of democracy. In another strain of literature, research has shown that the internet can alter demands for democracy and increase protest activity in non-democracies. Given these findings, this study investigates what impact the internet has on understanding democracy in non-democracies. Using World Values Survey data and employing two different styles of empirical modelling, the study finds that consuming information from the internet leads to a better understanding of essential elements of democracy. The findings also show that the effects are more pronounced in autocracies than they are in illiberal regimes.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Gregory J. Love for his feedback on the project and previous drafts. I am also grateful to the Office of Sponsored Awards and Research Support at the University of South Carolina Upstate for partially supporting this work. Finally, I appreciate the comments from the anonymous reviewers and guidance of the editorial staff who contributed to make this a better paper. All remaining mistakes are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World.”
2 Breuer et al., “Social media and protest mobilization;” Bohdanova, “Unexpected Revolution;” Kyj, “Internet use in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution;” White and McAllister, “Did Russia (Nearly) have a Facebook Revolution in 2011?”
3 Jones, “The Mirage of the Arab Spring.”
4 Lynch, “After the Arab Spring.”
5 Nisbet et al., “Internet Use and Democratic Demands;” Placek, “Social Media and Regime Support in Russia;” Pearce and Kendzior, “Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan.”
6 Breuer et al., “Social media and protest mobilization;” Ruijgrok, “From the Web to the Streets.”
7 Rød and Weidmann, “Empowering Activists or Autocrats?”; Groshek, “A Time-Series, Multinational Analysis of Democratic Forecasts and Internet Diffusion.”
8 Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood;” Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy.”
9 Iyengar and Kinder, News That Matters; Zaller, Nature and Origins of Public Opinion.
10 Newton, “May the Weak Force Be with You;” Bennett and Iyengar, “A New Era of Minimal Effects?”
11 Kenski and Stroud, “Connections Between Internet Use and Political Efficacy, Knowledge, and Participation.”
12 Boulianne, “Does Internet Use Affect Engagement?”; Drew and Weaver, “Voter Learning in the 2004 Presidential Election;” Groshek and Dimitrova, “A Cross-Section of Voter Learning, Campaign Interest and Intention to Vote in the 2008 American Election.”
13 Dimitrova et al., “The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns.”
14 Bode, Leticia, “Political News in the News Feed”; Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy.
15 Dunaway and Soroka, “Smartphone-Size Screens Constrain Cognitive Access to Video News Stories.”
16 Nisbet, “Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy.” Kim, “Testing the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis in South Korea.”
17 Kim et al., “Stumbling upon News on the Internet;” Vraga et al., “Accidentally Attentive.”
18 Bailard, Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword; Reuter and Szakonyi, “Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes;” Gainous et al., “Digital Media and Political Opposition in Authoritarian Systems.”
19 Miner, “The Unintended Consequences of Internet Diffusion;” Tang and Huhe, “Alternative Framing”
20 Bailard, Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword.
21 Behrouzian et al., “Resisting Censorship;” Wojcieszak, “What Predicts Selective Exposure Online.”
22 Walker and Orttung, “Breaking the News;” Oates, “The Neo-Soviet Model of the Media.”
23 Oates, “The Neo-Soviet Model of the Media;” Rozenas and Stukal, “How Autocrats Manipulate Economic News.”
24 Mays and Groshek, “A Time-Series, Multinational Analysis of Democratic Forecasts and Emerging Media Diffusion, 1994–2014;” Rød and Weidmann, “Empowering Activists or Autocrats?”
25 Hellmeier, “The Dictator’s Digital Toolkit.”
26 Deibert, “Three Painful Truths About Social Media;” Sanovich, “Russia.”
27 Gainutdinov and Chikov, “Russia Internet Freedom 2016.”
28 Gohdes, “Repression Technology.”
29 Gunitsky, “Corrupting the Cyber-Commons.”
30 Barbera and Zeitzoff, “The New Public Address System.”
31 Geddes and Zaller, “Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes;” Gunitsky “Corrupting the Cyber-Commons.”
32 Huang, “Propaganda as Signaling.”
33 Deibert, Ronald, and Rafal Rohozinski, “Liberation vs. Control;” Pearce and Kendzior, “Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan.”
34 Sanovich et al., “Turning the Virtual Tables.”
35 Gohdes, “Repression Technology;” Weidmann and Rød, “The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies.”
36 Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Nisbet et al., “Internet Use and Democratic Demands;” Stoycheff and Nisbet, “What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy?”
37 Bailard, “A Field Experiment on the Internet’s Effect in an African Election;” Reuter and Szakonyi, “Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes.”
38 Miner, “The Unintended Consequences of Internet Diffusion;” Tang and Huhe “Alternative Framing,”
39 Ruijgrok, “From the Web to the Streets.”
40 Bailard, Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword.
41 Ibid.
42 Grönlund, “Knowing and not Knowing.”
43 Reuter and Szakonyi, “Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes.”
44 Oates, Revolution Stalled; Weidmann and Rød, “The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies.”
45 For full methodology and survey results please see: www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp
46 For a list of countries in the study, the year the study was conducted in each country as well as their Freedom House standing at the time of the survey, please see Table A1 in the appendix.
47 Sekhon, “Opiates for the Matches.”
48 Hainmueller, “Entropy Balancing for Causal Effects.”
49 Rubin, “Using Multivariate Matched Sampling and Regression Adjustment to Control Bias in Observational Studies.”
50 A full list of variables that were reweighted, as well as the covariate weighting before and after performing entropy balancing can be found in tables A5–A7 in the appendix.
51 Stegmuller, “How Many Countries for Multilevel Modeling?”
52 Hox, “Multilevel Modeling.”
53 Stegmuller, “How Many Countries for Multilevel Modeling?”; Hox, “Multilevel Modeling.”
54 For full methodology please visit: https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world-research-methodology.
55 Karatnyky, “The Decline of Illiberal Democracy.”
56 See Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood.”
57 Metcalfe, “Metcalfe’s Law after 40 Years of Ethernet.”
58 Loveless, “Media Dependency;” Geddes and Zaller, “Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes.”
59 Geddes and Zaller, “Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes.”
60 A note of caution to readers when interpreting control variables in the table: After performing entropy balancing, the covariates balanced are reweighted so their mean values as reported in the tables are not their true relationship with the dependent variables. The values reported are based on a covariate’s relationship with the dependent variable given their reweighted means. These means are dependent on the treatment variable- internet use- which was used to reweight the covariates to be used in the empirical models displayed in the paper (see Ho et al., “Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing”; Sekhon, “Opiates for the Matches”). For full tables of each model please see Tables A8–A10 in the Appendix.
61 Gentzkow and Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline.”
62 Vraga et al., “Accidentally Attentive: Comparing visual, close-ended, and open-ended measures of attention on social media;” Dokuka et al., “Echo Chambers vs Opinion Crossroads in News Consumption on Social Media;” Vaccari et al. “Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs.”
63 Greitens, “Authoritarianism Online.”
64 Nisbet et al., “Internet Use and Democratic Demands;” Stoycheff and Nisbet, “What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy?”
65 Groshek, “A Time-Series, Multinational Analysis of Democratic Forecasts and Internet Diffusion.”
66 Nisbet, “Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy.”
67 Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood.”
68 Sik, “The Imitated Public Sphere”; Simpson and Druxes, “Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States.”
69 Neudert et al., “Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections;” Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Organization of Social Media Disinformation Campaigns.”
70 Pop-Eleches and Tucker, “Communist Legacies and Left-Authoritarianism;” Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins of Political Trust.”
71 Entropy balancing performed before OLS regressions in this table. See Appendix for weighting statistics.