Not Twitter Revolutions, but Twitter-Assisted Revolutions - Miller-McCune
It’s tempting to think of the Internet as the world’s best weapon against authoritarianism. Where it goes, democracy will follow, if we can just figure out how to strategically drop enough thumb drives, cell phones, and “shadow” technology.
But, of course, the relationship between the Internet and democracy is much messier. And what we are now beginning to understand about it - with scientific rigor, that is - suggests that the laws governing this latest technology are not so different from its predecessors like radio and TV.
“The Internet can play a role and facilitate things,” said Erik Nisbet, an assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University. “But like all media, whether that’s mass media or the Internet, it often reinforces change. It doesn’t drive change.”
Nisbet has published a new study that underscores this in a special edition of the Journal of Communication devoted to the role of the Internet in democratization. His findings hearken back to a pair of essays miller-mccune.com published last year in the early days of the Arab Spring warning against the impulse to overstate the importance of shifts in technological innovation.
Nisbet and colleagues Elizabeth Stoycheff and Katy E. Pearce set out to examine the relationship between the Internet and citizens’ attitudes about - and demand for - democracy in 28 countries. Most research on the subject focuses on the top-down impact of the Internet on government institutions.
“But what about the attitudes of citizens about democracy?” Nisbet asked. “Democracy requires democrats. For democracy to be sustainable and successful, you need a population and institutions both that value democracy and believe democracy is the only game in town.”
The researchers relied on existing survey data from 35,000 people from African and Asian countries with a range of open-to-authoritarian government policies and varying Internet penetration.
“The more people use the Internet, regardless of how much, regardless of how authoritarian or free the country is, how much Internet penetration there is, the Internet is associated with a greater demand for democracy,” Nisbet said. “But what we’re seeing is that the influence of the Internet might be amplified or dampened depending on certain country-level contextual factors.”
The researchers found that the Internet is most likely to play a role in democratization in countries that already have modest or good Internet penetration and partly democratic political regimes. In other words, the further on its way to democracy a country already is, the more the Internet may be able to help.