research paper about democracy

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Quality of democracy makes a difference, but not for everyone: how political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy condition the relationship between democratic quality and political trust.

• Department of Knowledge Exchange and Outreach GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

In light of recent crises, not least the COVID-19 pandemic, citizen trust in the political system has been highlighted as one of the central features ensuring citizen compliance and the functioning of democracy. Given its many desirable consequences, one of the key questions is how to increase political trust among ordinary citizens. This paper investigates the role of democratic quality in determining citizens’ trust in the political system. While we know that citizens’ evaluations of democratic performance are a strong predictor of political trust, previous research has shown that trust is not always higher in political systems with higher democratic quality, indicating that democratic performance evaluations do not always correspond to actual democratic quality. Several moderating factors may account for this disconnect between democratic quality and citizens’ evaluations of democratic performance and, ultimately, political trust. For one, citizens may receive different information about the political system; second, they may process this information in different ways; and third, they may have different standards of what democratic quality ought to be. Using survey data from three rounds of the World Values Survey (2005–2020) and aggregate data on democratic quality and other macro determinants of political trust from the V-Dem project and World Development Indicators for 50 democracies around the world, this contribution empirically investigates the complex relationship between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust in multi-level moderated mediation models. Its findings demonstrate that democratic quality affects political trust indirectly through citizens’ democratic performance evaluations and that this indirect effect is stronger for citizens with higher political interest, higher education, and especially those with more liberal conceptions of democracy.

Introduction

Ever since the seminal works of David Easton (1965, 1975) , scholars have considered political trust as essential not only for the stability but also for the smooth functioning of democracy ( Hetherington, 1998 ; Dalton, 2004 ; Letki, 2006 ; Newton, 2009 ; Marien and Hooghe, 2011 ). Especially in times of crisis, political trust serves an important function for societal cohesion and compliance. For instance, recent research on the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that citizens with higher political trust are more likely to follow recommendations on social distancing ( Bargain and Aminjonov, 2020 ; Olsen and Hjorth, 2020 ) and to engage in recommended health behavior ( Han et al., 2020 ). If we want to ensure the stability and smooth functioning of democracy in times of crisis, then, it is of paramount importance to secure the trust of ordinary citizens. Since political trust will always fluctuate in reaction to short-term stimulants like changes in government ( Anderson and LoTempio, 2002 ), the implementation of specific policies ( Bol et al., 2020 ), or economic downturns ( Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014 ), building or maintaining a reservoir of trust based on more long-term factors would help retain citizen cooperation and compliance in times of crisis. One potential avenue to build such a reservoir of trust could be a strengthening of democratic quality: as political trust reflects citizens’ attitudes toward their political system, we might expect it to be at least somewhat dependent on one of the core characteristics of this political system, the level of democracy. Yet while there is strong evidence that citizens’ democratic performance evaluations are indeed a key predictor of political trust, the relationship between a country’s democratic quality and how much trust citizens have in its core political institutions remains obscured. Whereas some studies find political trust to be higher in countries with higher democratic quality ( Mishler and Rose, 2001 ; Norris, 2011 ; van der Meer and Dekker, 2011 ), others find this relationship to hold only under certain model specifications ( Anderson and Tverdova, 2003 ; van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017 ).

In an effort to shed light on this relationship, I first follow van der Meer (2017) and Mauk (2020a) in arguing that democratic quality as a macro-level phenomenon does not affect political trust as an individual-level attitude directly but rather that its effect is mediated through individual-level democratic performance evaluations. Second, I advance the theoretical discussion and dig deeper into the relationship between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust by introducing three characteristics of citizens that may moderate this relationship: political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy.

Combining data from the World Values Survey ( Haerpfer et al., 2020 ), Varieties-of-Democracy Project ( Coppedge et al., 2020 ), and World Development Indicators ( World Bank, 2020 ) for 50 democracies worldwide, the empirical analysis uses multi-level moderated mediation models to investigate how political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy interact with democratic quality in determining democratic performance evaluations and, subsequently, political trust. The results show that democratic quality indeed affects political trust only indirectly, mediated through citizens’ democratic performance evaluations. This indirect effect is moderated by citizens’ characteristics, with democratic quality affecting political trust more among the more politically interested, the higher educated, and especially those with more liberal conceptions of democracy. The findings contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship between democratic quality and political trust: they substantiate and add to previous literature hypothesizing the link between democratic quality and political trust to run through citizens’ democratic performance evaluations, and further the discussion by providing a first account of how this indirect effect varies according to citizens’ political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy.

Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses

Defined as citizens’ confidence that the political system, its institutions, or actors will “do what is right even in the absence of constant scrutiny” ( Miller and Listhaug, 1990 : 358), political trust is a relational concept which entails an evaluation of the relationship between the subject of trust (the citizen) and the object of trust (the political system). Determinants of trust can therefore relate to either characteristics of the individual citizen (exogeneous variables), characteristics of the political system (endogenous variables), or a combination of these two ( van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017 ).

Democratic quality is clearly a characteristic of the political system, i.e. the object of trust. Such endogenous characteristics are typically studied from a rational-choice perspective, arguing that citizens continuously form positive or negative evaluations about the political system’s performance which then form the basis for their attitudes about the political system itself ( Barry, 1970 ; Rogowski, 1974 ; Kornberg and Clarke, 1992 ). Previous research has identified citizens’ evaluations of the democratic process as one of the key determinants of political trust. Most prominently, the extent to which citizens find the political elites and institutions to be corrupt has been consistently found to exert a strong effect on both trust in institutions and satisfaction with democracy ( Seligson, 2002 ; Huang et al., 2008 ; Linde, 2012 ; Wang, 2016 ; Maciel and Sousa, 2018 ). Political freedoms, procedural fairness, free and fair elections, and accountability are other aspects of democratic quality that influence citizens’ attitudes toward the political system ( Mishler and Rose, 1997 ; Huang et al., 2008 ; Linde, 2012 ; Norris, 2014 ; Magalhães, 2016 ; Marien and Werner, 2019 ). We can therefore expect political trust to be higher when citizens evaluate the system’s democratic performance more positively.

Democratic performance evaluations are not, however, the same as democratic quality. Conceptually, democratic quality is an assessment of a political system’s structure and processes as compared to a normative benchmark. These assessments are usually based on expert judgements and most commonly relate to liberal democratic ideals, i.e. the presence of universal suffrage, electoral contestation, political participation, separation of power, rule of law, and civil liberties ( Dahl, 1971 ; Dahl, 1989 ; Morlino, 2004 ; Morlino, 2011 ; Geissel et al., 2016 ). In contrast, citizens’ democratic performance evaluations are based on each individual citizen’s conception of democracy, the information they receive, and how they process this information ( Gómez and Palacios, 2016 ; Kriesi and Saris, 2016 ; Quaranta, 2018a ). Consequently, while we find high agreement across different measures of democratic quality ( Steiner, 2016 ; Bernhagen, 2019 ; Boese, 2019 ), citizens’ evaluations of the same political system can differ vastly ( Pietsch, 2014 ). Empirically, prior research has demonstrated that citizens’ evaluations of a political system’s democratic performance hardly align with expert judgements of democratic quality ( Park, 2013 ; Bedock and Panel, 2017 ; Kruse et al., 2019 ).

When it comes to political attitudes, unlike individual-level democratic performance evaluations, macro-level democratic quality seems to exert only a limited effect. On the one hand, previous studies find corruption to decrease both trust in political institutions and satisfaction with democracy ( Mishler and Rose, 2001 ; Anderson and Tverdova, 2003 ; van der Meer and Dekker, 2011 ; Stockemer and Sundström, 2013 ; van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017 ) and citizens’ attitudes tend to be more positive in political systems with higher electoral quality or rule of law ( Norris, 2011 ; Dahlberg and Holmberg, 2014 ; Fortin-Rittberger et al., 2017 ). On the other hand, these effects mostly disappear completely once citizens’ perceptions of corruption or other evaluations of democratic performance are controlled for ( Listhaug et al., 2009 ; Stockemer and Sundström, 2013 ; Christmann, 2018 ). We may therefore expect macro-level democratic quality not to exert a direct effect on political trust but rather an indirect effect that is mediated through individual-level democratic performance evaluations (see also Figure 1 ). Results presented by van der Meer (2017) and Mauk (2020a) support the idea of an indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust.

FIGURE 1 . The theoretical linkage between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust.

H1: Democratic quality has an indirect effect on political trust that is mediated through democratic performance evaluations.

While the second part of this indirect effect, i.e. the link between democratic performance evaluations and political trust, has received considerable scholarly attention and shall not be discussed here further, the first part, i.e. the link between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations, remains undertheorized and understudied. If we want to explain how macro-level democratic quality translates into individual-level democratic performance evaluations , we may turn to attitude-formation theories developed primarily in the field of (social) psychology. Most of these theories identify four fundamental steps of the attitude-formation process: environment, information, beliefs, and attitudes ( Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980 ; Anderson, 1981 ; Zaller, 1992 ; Fishbein and Ajzen, 2010 ). Building on these theories, we can describe the process by which democratic quality (environment) translates into democratic performance evaluations (attitudes) as follows: Citizens receive information about their political system’s democratic quality which they interpret through various cognitive processes to arrive at beliefs about democratic quality. Comparing and integrating these beliefs with existing evaluative standards, citizens finally form their democratic performance evaluations.

As the huge variance of democratic performance evaluations even within the same country ( Bedock and Panel, 2017 ; Gómez and Palacios, 2016 ; Pietsch, 2014 ) suggests, this process can be distorted in several ways. As a result, the link between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations is likely to be far from uniform across citizens (see also Figure 1 ). By extension, this also means that the entire indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust may vary from citizen to citizen 1 . For one, the information citizens receive about the democratic quality of their political system can vary greatly, both in quantity and in accuracy. In general, information about democratic quality can be conveyed through two main channels: direct experience or indirect communications through the mass media and other channels ( Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975 ; Wyer and Albarracín, 2005 ). Direct experience with democratic quality may, for example, include witnessing voter intimidation on election day or being the victim of police harassment; indirect communications on democratic quality may, for example, include news coverage on a corruption scandal or social-media posts about gerrymandering. While direct experiences typically provide accurate, albeit potentially localized, information about democratic quality, not only the advent of “fake news” has cast doubt on the accuracy of indirect communications. Especially in non-democratic contexts, media freedom can be severely limited, and citizens have few means of obtaining accurate information about their country’s democratic quality through indirect communications ( Egorov et al., 2009 ; Popescu, 2011 ; Stier, 2015 ). In democracies, in contrast, the presence of media freedom and a pluralist media landscape means that accurate information about democratic quality is available from the media and other indirect channels, and the availability of information should hardly vary from citizen to citizen. What does vary, however, is the amount of information citizens receive. For both direct experience and indirect communications, those with higher political interest are more likely to receive information about the political system’s democratic quality as they are more likely to participate in politics and to follow political content on news and other media ( Verba et al., 1997 ; Strömböck et al., 2013 ; Lecheler and Vreese, 2017 ; Owens and Walker, 2018 ). As the more politically interested know more about the state of democracy in their country, i.e. hold more accurate beliefs, their democratic performance evaluations should more closely reflect the actual democratic quality of the political system. Consequently, we can expect the effect of democratic quality on democratic performance evaluations and, ultimately, the entire indirect effect democratic quality has on political trust to be larger for citizens with higher political interest.

H2: The indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust increases with political interest.

Second, the cognitive processes through which citizens interpret this information may also vary from individual to individual. Accurately processing complex information from different sources requires considerable cognitive skills, for instance to judge the credibility of the source, to weigh information from different sources, and to understand the content of the information they receive. Apart from cognitive capacity itself, one major factor determining how citizens translate information into beliefs is education ( van der Meer, 2010 ; Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012 ). Ceteris paribus, we can expect those with higher education to be more likely to be able both to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information and to understand their content correctly. Consequently, the higher educated not only have higher political knowledge but also hold more accurate beliefs about the political system ( Seligson, 2002 ; Monsiváis-Carrillo and Cantú Ramos, 2020 ). Lending empirical support to the idea that the well-educated are better informed about their country’s democratic quality, Ananda and Bol (2020) show that providing information about democracy to citizens in Indonesia lowers satisfaction with democracy among the lower educated but not among the higher educated. If we assume that education increases the accuracy of citizens’ beliefs about their country’s democratic quality, we can expect education to have a moderating effect on the relationship between macro-level democratic quality and individual-level democratic performance evaluations as well as, by extension, political trust.

Prior research strongly supports this proposition, at least when it comes to the effect of corruption. In their study of 21 European democracies, Hakhverdian and Mayne (2012) demonstrate that corruption only has an effect on political trust for citizens with at least medium levels of education, while political trust among those with the lowest levels of education remains virtually unaffected by the amount of corruption in the respective country. This finding is corroborated by van der Meer and Hakhverdian (2017) . Additionally, van der Meer (2010) presents evidence of an interaction effect between corruption and education in 26 European democracies, finding corruption to always have a negative effect on trust in parliament but for trust to decrease more rapidly for citizens with higher education. More generally, Monsiváis-Carrillo and Cantú Ramos’ (2020) results for 18 Latin American democracies suggest that democratic quality increases satisfaction with democracy among highly educated citizens, whereas it has little to no effect among the less educated. Providing further evidence for an interaction between democratic quality and education, Ugur-Cinar et al. (2020) show that education and political trust are positively correlated in countries with low levels of corruption but that in highly corrupt countries, the more highly educated express less trust in political institutions than the less educated. Similarly, Agerberg (2019) finds education to have a weaker positive effect on what he calls “institutional attitudes” in democracies with high levels of corruption, indicating that corruption has a stronger negative effect on citizens’ attitudes among the higher educated. Overall, we can therefore expect the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust to be larger for more highly educated citizens.

H3: The indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust increases with education.

Finally, we can expect the effect of democratic quality on political trust to vary with the standards to which citizens compare their beliefs. When it comes to such standards, previous research has predominantly examined the role of citizens’ value orientations. Scholars in the critical-citizens tradition have long argued that increasingly liberal and democratic value orientations among citizens set expectations that no real-world political system can ever meet and that this results in lower levels of political trust among citizens with stronger pro-democratic values ( Dalton, 2000 ; Dalton, 2004 ; Norris, 1999 ; Norris, 2011 ). In addition, a number of researchers have pointed to the role of education, suggesting that apart from its accuracy-inducing function (see above, hypothesis 3), education also has a norm-inducing function. According to this view, higher education elicits stronger support for core democratic values and principles ( Evans and Rose, 2007 ; Kotzian, 2011 ; Kołczyńska, 2020 ), which then leads to citizens attaching higher priority to democratic quality when evaluating their political system ( Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012 ; van der Meer and Hakhverdian, 2017 ; Monsiváis-Carrillo and Cantú Ramos, 2020 ). Empirically, while previous studies confirm a moderating effect of education on how democratic quality relates to political trust (see above), evidence for an interaction between democratic quality and citizens’ value orientations is scarce and at best mixed. While Huhe and Tang (2017) find pro-democratic value orientations to have a more positive effect on political trust in democracies than in autocracies in their analysis of 13 East Asian political systems, Mauk’s (2020b) analysis of 102 political systems across the globe provides no empirical support for an interaction between macro-level democratic quality and citizens’ value orientations.

One potential explanation for the mixed results is that citizens’ value orientations condition the relationship between democratic performance evaluations and political trust (see also Mauk, 2020a ; Mauk, 2020b ) but not the relationship between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations. Instead, I suggest that citizens employ another standard to which they compare their beliefs about democratic quality: conceptions of democracy . This proposition builds on Torcal and Trechsel (2016) , who argue that conceptions of democracy set expectations and determine which contextual factors citizens deem most relevant when forming their evaluations of democratic performance. For beliefs about democratic quality to be translated into democratic performance evaluations, citizens must compare them to what they think constitutes high democratic quality, i.e. their conceptions of democracy. Just as political interest and education, conceptions of democracy among citizens can vary widely. Previous research has shown citizens’ conceptions of democracy to range not only from minimalist electoral conceptions to maximalist substantive conceptions but also to sometimes include elements that are clearly undemocratic from a normative perspective ( Dalton et al., 2007 ; Hernández, 2016 ; Shin and Kim, 2018 ; Ceka and Magalhães, 2020 ; Zagrebina, 2020 ). Depending on their conception of democracy, citizens will arrive at different evaluations of democratic performance even if they hold the exact same beliefs about democratic quality ( Torcal and Trechsel, 2016 ). For instance, Bedock and Panel (2017) find that French citizens with a more minimalist conception of democracy (focusing mostly on free and fair elections) tend to evaluate their political system’s democratic performance more positively than those who hold a more encompassing conception of democracy (including elements of direct democracy). Overall, the more closely citizens’ conceptions of democracy align with the academic definition of democratic quality, the more closely macro-level democratic quality should relate to individual-level democratic performance evaluations. If we follow the mainstream of scholarship and define democratic quality in primarily procedural and liberal terms ( Dahl, 1971 ; Dahl, 1989 ; Morlino, 2004 ; Morlino, 2011 ; Geissel et al., 2016 ), this means that democratic quality should have a larger effect on democratic performance evaluations and, by extension, political trust for citizens who hold more procedural and liberal conceptions of democracy. Concerning such an interaction effect between democratic quality and citizens’ conceptions of democracy, previous literature is scarce, yet unanimous. Analyzing 29 political systems in Europe, Hooghe et al. (2017) show that good governance conditions how citizens’ conceptions of democracy affect political trust, with procedural conceptions of democracy having a more positive effect on political trust in countries with higher levels of good governance. van der Meer (2017) goes one step further and examines the entire causal chain from macro-level democratic quality to individual-level political trust including the mediating effect of citizens’ democratic performance evaluations. His results for 26 European democracies evidence that the effects of macro-level impartiality on trust in parliament are mediated at least in part through citizens’ evaluations of democratic quality. Testing for the moderating effect of conceptions of democracy, he finds that both macro-level impartiality and individual-level democratic performance evaluations play a larger role in shaping political trust for citizens who understand democracy in primarily procedural terms. Investigating the link between what they call “democratic knowledge” and citizens’ evaluations of democratic performance, Wegscheider and Stark (2020) demonstrate that citizens who consider only democratic (instead of autocratic) principles as essential characteristics of democracy–i.e. hold a conception of democracy that comes closer to its scholarly definition–evaluate their own country’s democratic performance more positively in more democratic countries and more negatively in more authoritarian countries. Summing up, we can expect democratic performance evaluations to reflect macro-level democratic quality more closely for citizens who hold procedural and liberal conceptions of democracy, and consequently for the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust to be larger for these citizens.

H4: The indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust is stronger among citizens who hold a more liberal conception of democracy.

Data and Methods

To examine how macro-level democratic quality interacts with individual-level political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy in determining citizens’ democratic performance evaluations and ultimately political trust, I combine aggregate data from the Varieties-of-Democracy project ( Coppedge et al., 2020 ) and World Development Indicators ( World Bank, 2020 ) with survey data from the World Values Survey ( Haerpfer et al., 2020 ). As the World Values Survey (WVS) has included suitable questions on democratic performance evaluations, political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy since its fifth round fielded from 2005, I can make use of three full rounds of the WVS (round five, 2005–2008; round 6, 2010–2014; round seven, 2017–2020). These data cover 50 democracies 2 in 92 country-years worldwide 3 (for a full list of countries, see Supplementary Table S1 ).

For the dependent variable political trust , I use three indicators measuring citizens’ confidence in the government, national parliament, and courts. Institutional confidence is a commonly used measure of political trust ( Dalton, 2004 ; Moehler, 2009 ; Hooghe et al., 2015 ). Taken together, the three institutions government, parliament, and courts cover all three branches of government and should thus represent citizens’ attitudes toward the political system as a whole. In all analyses, political trust will be modeled latently.

A single-item measurement captures the mediating variable democratic performance evaluations . By asking respondents how democratically they think their country is being governed today on a scale from completely undemocratic to completely democratic, the World Values Survey prompts a general and summative evaluation of democratic performance. Such a general and summative evaluation appears well-suited to my purposes as it does not provide any particular conception of democracy or emphasize any specific aspect of democratic quality, leaving citizens free to employ their own standards.

For the key independent variable, democratic quality , I employ V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index. This index captures both electoral (universal suffrage, electoral contestation, political participation) and liberal (separation of powers, rule of law, civil liberties) components of democracy and thereby represents common conceptions of democratic quality ( Dahl, 1971 ; Dahl, 1989 ; Morlino, 2004 ; Morlino, 2011 ; Geissel et al., 2016 ).

The theoretical argument outlined above proposes three variables moderating the effect of macro-level democratic quality on individual-level democratic performance evaluations: political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy. A question asking respondents how interested they are in politics measures political interest . For education , the World Values Survey records the highest level of education respondents have completed. The most recent round of the WVS uses the 9-category ISCED-2011 classification of education, but earlier rounds use different classifications and detailed categorizations are not available for all countries. To establish a minimum level of comparability, I recode the education variable into three categories: primary education or less; at least some secondary education; at least some tertiary education. While this is far from ideal, it allows us to compare the effects of democratic quality between citizens with low education (primary or less) and those with high education (at least some tertiary). For the third moderator, citizens’ conceptions of democracy , the WVS contains a question battery asking respondents which of a list of items are essential characteristics of democracy. Even though the number and content of items varies slightly from survey round to survey round, all three rounds contain three items which capture core elements of a procedural and liberal conception of democracy: people choose their leaders in free elections; civil rights protect people from state oppression; women have the same rights as men. Following Kirsch and Welzel (2019) , I use a factor of these three items to measure liberal conceptions of democracy. All moderating variables as well as democratic quality are scaled from 0 (lowest possible value) to 1 (highest possible value) to allow for a straightforward interpretation of the cross-level interaction effects.

All empirical models control for alternative individual-level determinants of political trust: social trust ( Zmerli and Newton, 2008 ), financial satisfaction ( Catterberg and Moreno, 2005 ), and household income ( Zmerli and Newton, 2011 ). They also include age and gender as standard sociodemographics. On the macro level, the analyses control for a country’s macroeconomic performance (logged GDP per capita, annual GDP growth; van Erkel and van der Meer, 2016 ) and human development (level of education, degree of urbanization, life expectancy; Norris, 2011 ). Data for country-level education come from V-Dem, whereas urbanization, life expectancy, and macroeconomic indicators are based on the World Development Indicators ( World Bank, 2020 ). All macro-level data are matched to the survey data with a 1-year lag to ensure that citizens have had a chance to gather and process the relevant information.

To estimate the (moderated) multi-level mediation effect proposed in the hypotheses, the empirical analyses use multi-level structural equation modeling (MSEM). MSEM takes into account the hierarchical nature of the data and allows for latent estimation of the dependent variable political trust. MSEM is superior to traditional approaches to multi-level mediation analysis as it decomposes the variance of all variables into within and between variance and thereby avoids producing conflated estimates of between and within components of the indirect effect ( Meuleman, 2019 ; Preacher et al., 2010 ). All models were estimated using Mplus (version 8.4; Muthén et al., 2019 ). Given the hierarchical nature of the data and the unbalanced TSCS design where some countries were surveyed in only a single year, while other countries were surveyed in two or even three years, a three-level model structure (individuals nested in country-years nested in countries) with year dummies at the country-year level would be most appropriate. Due to the relatively low number of level-3 clusters (countries), however, models using this structure run into estimation problems ( Meuleman and Billiet, 2009 ). The main models presented here thus utilize a simpler two-level structure (individuals nested in country-years, with year dummies on the country-year level). Robustness checks show that the three-level structure yields substantially similar results, even though standard errors may not be trustworthy for these models (cf. Supplementary Table S3 , Supplementary Figure S2 ). Additional robustness checks using only the newest available data for each country in order to avoid creating an unbalanced TSCS structure also yield substantially the same results as the main models (cf. Supplementary Table S4 , Supplementary Figure S3 ). As we lack truly longitudinal data 4 , the models follow common practice and leverage between-country-year differences in democratic quality to estimate how democratic quality affects democratic performance evaluations and political trust. Model-building proceeds stepwise, starting with the direct effect of individual-level democratic performance evaluations on political trust (Model 1) before adding the direct effect of macro-level democratic quality (Model 2) and the indirect effect of democratic quality via democratic performance evaluations (Model 3). The final set of models includes cross-level interactions to examine the moderating effects of political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy on democratic performance evaluations and, by extension, on political trust (Models 4–6). By estimating the cross-level interaction between macro-level democratic quality and individual-level political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy, thanks to the symmetrical nature of the interaction term (cf. Bauer and Curran, 2005 ), these models can test not only whether these individual-level characteristics (political interest, education, conception of democracy) have a larger effect in more democratic countries but also whether democratic quality has a larger effect among the more politically interested, the more educated, and those with a more liberal conception of democracy. By combining multi-level mediation with cross-level interaction effects, these models allow us to test complex hypotheses about the origins of political trust and to study how democratic quality affects democratic performance evaluations and, eventually, political trust, differently among different people.

Based on the empirical analysis of 50 democracies (in 92 country-years) across the globe, Model 1 in Table 1 corroborates the bulk of previous research by confirming that individual-level democratic performance evaluations have a strong positive effect on political trust. In contrast, we observe no direct effect of macro-level democratic quality on political trust (Model 2, Table 1 ). Instead, confirming hypothesis 1, macro-level democratic quality exerts a sizable indirect effect on political trust that is mediated through individual-level democratic performance evaluations (Model 3, Table 1 ). Figure 2 depicts this indirect effect graphically. It illustrates that while democratic quality does not directly affect how much trust citizens have in their core political institutions (path c’), it strongly influences how democratic they find their country to be (path a), and these democratic performance evaluations in turn shape citizens’ political trust (path b).

TABLE 1 . Democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust.

FIGURE 2 . The indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust. Notes : Multilevel structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation. Unstandardized estimates. Robust standard errors in parentheses. Model specifications according to Model 3 in Table 1 . * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. Sources : World Values Survey 2005-2020; V-Dem v10; World Development Indicators.

Turning to the core research question, Models 4 to 6 ( Table 2 ) investigate the cross-level interactions between democratic quality and political interest (Model 4), education (Model 5), and conceptions of democracy (Model 6). In line with the theoretical argument, which expects the relationship between macro-level democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations to vary according to citizens’ information (political interest), cognitive processes (education), and standards (conceptions of democracy), Models 4 to 6 estimate these cross-level interactions on the first part of the indirect effect (path a), i.e. the link between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations. Slopes for the second part of the indirect effect (path b), i.e. the link between democratic performance evaluations and political trust, are fixed. All variations in the overall indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust shown in Table 2 and Figure 3 will therefore solely reflect the conditionality of the relationship between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations (path a of the indirect effect). The cross-level interaction effects are introduced into the models separately and one at a time. This means that for each model, the coefficient of democratic quality can be interpreted as the indirect effect democratic quality has on political trust for citizens who score “0” on the respective moderating variable. As all moderating variables were scaled from 0 to 1, this equals the effect of democratic quality for citizens with no political interest at all (Model 4), the lowest possible level of education (Model 5), or the most illiberal conception of democracy (Model 6). The coefficient for the interaction term then represents the difference in effect size for democratic quality between these citizens and those who score “1” on the respective moderating variable, i.e. those with high political interest (Model 4), secondary or tertiary 5 education (Model 5), or the most liberal conception of democracy (Model 6). To provide some graphical representation of these numbers, Figure 3 illustrates the interactions by plotting the average marginal effects of democratic quality at different levels of the moderating variables.

TABLE 2 . The conditional effects of democratic quality on political trust.

FIGURE 3 . Conditional indirect effects of democratic quality on political trust. Notes : Multilevel structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation. Unstandardized estimates and 95% confidence intervals of conditional effect for varying levels of political interest/education/conceptions of democracy. Model specifications according to Models 4–6 in Table 2 . Sources : World Values Survey 2005-2020; V-Dem v10; World Development Indicators.

Beginning with the moderating effect of political interest, Model 4 shows a significant, yet weak cross-level interaction between democratic quality and political interest, indicating that the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust is at least to some extent contingent on how politically interested each individual citizen is. For those with higher political interest, democratic quality plays a larger role than for those with lower political interest. While democratic quality has a positive effect on democratic performance evaluations even for the politically uninterested, this effect is about 30% stronger for those with high political interest. Even though the difference between individual citizens is comparatively minor (see also Figure 3 ), we can still interpret this as tentative evidence for hypothesis 2 and the idea that citizens who receive more information about democratic quality generally hold more accurate beliefs about their country’s democratic quality than those who receive less information. 6

Model 5 presents empirical evidence on the moderating effect of education (hypothesis 3). Since education is a categorical variable, we need to estimate cross-level interactions between democratic quality and a dummy variable for each level of education, except the reference category (primary or less). The coefficient for the interaction term then indicates the difference in the effect of democratic quality for respondents with the respective level of education (secondary, tertiary) compared to respondents in the reference category, i.e. those with primary education or less. Looking at the results, we find no cross-level interaction between secondary education and democratic quality, indicating that democratic quality does not have a stronger indirect effect on political trust for citizens with secondary education compared to citizens with primary or less education (see also Figure 3 ). This changes for tertiary education: here, the interaction term is significant and positive, indicating that democratic quality plays a larger role for political trust among citizens with tertiary education compared to citizens who have at most primary education, with the effect size more than doubling for citizens with tertiary education. Interpreting these findings within the theoretical framework outlined above, tertiary education appears to make citizens more capable of adequately processing the information they receive about democratic quality, leading to these citizens having considerably more accurate beliefs about their country’s democratic quality than their lesser educated counterparts.

Finally, Model 6 demonstrates that conceptions of democracy exert a strong moderating effect on how democratic quality affects political trust. As evidenced by both the large coefficient for the cross-level interaction ( Table 2 ) as well as the plot in Figure 3 , the indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust varies dramatically between citizens with different conceptions of democracy. For those who hold a predominantly illiberal conception of democracy, higher democratic quality actually relates to lower political trust, indicating that these citizens apply standards that are very different from the mainstream academic definition when translating their beliefs about democratic quality into evaluations of democratic performance. This negative indirect effect of democratic quality vanishes and turns into a significant positive effect when citizens’ conceptions of democracy become more liberal. For those with the most liberal conceptions of democracy–aligning most closely with the academic definition of democratic quality–, democratic quality exerts a strong positive indirect effect on political trust, about four times the size of the (negative) effect it had for those with highly illiberal conceptions of democracy (hypothesis 4).

Summing up, the empirical evidence clearly corroborates the idea that macro-level democratic quality affects political trust only indirectly, i.e. via individual-level democratic performance evaluations. With regard to the conditionality of this indirect effect of democratic quality, the results provide at least some evidence for a moderating effect of political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy. While results were mixed for education–only tertiary education made a difference for how democratic quality affects political trust–and rather weak for political interest, the analysis found strong support for a moderating effect of conceptions of democracy, showing substantial differences between citizens with more liberal conceptions of democracy and those with more illiberal conceptions of democracy.

When it comes to the relationship between democratic quality and political trust, previous research has yielded mixed results. This contribution set out to enhance our understanding of this intricate relationship and to investigate whether and how macro-level democratic quality affects individual-level political trust. Integrating research on political trust with social psychological theories of attitude formation, it developed a theoretical framework which explicates the mechanisms that link macro-level context factors like democratic quality with individual-level attitudes like political trust and suggested a number of ways in which citizen characteristics may interact with macro-level democratic quality in shaping political trust. Utilizing multi-level structural equation models that combined mediation with moderating effects, it was able to test these complex relationships between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, political interest, education, conceptions of democracy, and political trust. Based on a broad data base covering 50 democracies on all continents, its findings are two-fold. First, democratic quality does affect political trust, but only indirectly by shaping citizens’ democratic performance evaluations, which in turn are a core predictor of political trust. Second, this effect of democratic quality on democratic performance evaluations and, consequently, its indirect effect on political trust, is not uniform for all citizens. Instead, democratic performance evaluations correspond more closely with expert-assessed democratic quality among those with more political interest, higher education, and especially those who hold more liberal conceptions of democracy.

These results lend support not only to the basic proposition that democratic quality exerts a purely indirect effect on political trust but also to the underlying idea that citizens need to receive, process, and interpret information about their country’s democratic quality to arrive at democratic performance evaluations. As a first account of the interactions between democratic quality, political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy, they can serve as a vantage point for further theory-building and empirical analyses. For instance, future studies could gain more insight into these mechanisms by collecting data on citizens’ beliefs about democratic quality that allow for a direct test of the underlying assumptions. They could test whether those who are more politically interested actually receive more information about their country’s democratic quality and whether those with higher education are more able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information as well as to correctly process this information, resulting in more accurate beliefs about democratic quality. Another emerging question is whether conceptions of democracy really serve as standards against which citizens compare their beliefs about democratic quality to translate these into democratic performance evaluations. Building on the present insights, researchers may further be interested in investigating the sources of citizens’ information and how the media landscape and citizens’ use of different media channels condition which information citizens receive, for instance whether citizens trust certain sources of information more than others and whether these sources of information differ systematically in the content and type of information they provide. The question of what sources of information citizens rely on becomes even more pressing when taking into account not only democracies but also autocracies, which guarantee not even a minimum of media freedom and where alternative sources of information may be hard to access. Moreover, given the limitations of the (survey) data, the present study could only leverage between-country differences in democratic quality to examine the relationship between democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, and political trust. Using time-series data and/or conducting case studies, future research may also want to investigate within-country effects and study whether and how citizens react to changes in democratic quality.

Despite their limitations, the present findings can provide some implications for how to secure citizens’ trust in the political system. First and foremost, they demonstrate that strengthening democracy is beneficial not only for normative reasons but can also help maintaining and winning political trust among ordinary citizens. Above all in times of crisis, political trust that is rooted in citizens’ appreciation of a political system’s democratic quality can serve as a reservoir of goodwill and contribute to ensuring social cohesion and citizen compliance with government measures. Governments might therefore wish to engage in programs aimed at improving democratic quality, for example the UNDP’s Global Program for Strengthening the Rule of Law and Human Rights ( United Nations Development Programme, 2020 ). In addition, the positive effects of such programs could be amplified through public information campaigns and other measures aimed at reaching broad segments of the population and in particular those who may otherwise not actively seek out information about the political system as well as those who may normally experience difficulties in understanding and processing such information ( Weiss and Tschirhart, 1994 ; Solovei and van den Putte, 2020 ). Finally, the findings suggest that democratic decisionmakers would be well-advised to make sure their country’s citizens have a liberal conception of democracy. Based on previous studies on sources of conceptions of democracy, this goal may also be served well by public information campaigns, as long as they include information on what democratic quality means ( Cho, 2015 ; Quaranta, 2018b ; Hernández, 2019 ). Especially in new and emerging democracies, conceptions of democracy might play a crucial role in how citizens evaluate and reward what are often incremental improvements in the quality of political institutions. At the same time, the results presented in this study tie in with the ongoing debate on democratic backsliding ( Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018 ; Waldner and Lust, 2018 ; Lührmann and Lindberg, 2019 ; Bakke and Sitter, 2020 ). In substantiating and qualifying the relationship between democratic quality and political trust, they exemplify that the curtailing of core democratic principles we are currently witnessing in countries like Poland and Hungary are likely to be met with backlash from citizens–but primarily among the politically interested, higher educated, and especially those holding more liberal conceptions of democracy.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp https://www.v-dem.net/en/ https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators . Code to recreate the dataset and to replicate the analyses in this paper is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/mmauk .

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved of its publication.

Acknowledgments

I greatly appreciate the provision of data by the World Values Survey, the Varieties-of-Democracy Project, and the World Bank. I would like to thank Antonia May, Amy Yunyu Chiang, Anne Stroppe, Tom van der Meer, and Carsten Wegscheider for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. I am most grateful to the two reviewers as well as the special issue editors for their constructive criticism and suggestions as well as the engaging discussions on the interactive review forum. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Association.

Conflict of Interest

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

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.637344/full#supplementary-material

1 The second part of this indirect effect, i.e. the link between democratic performance evaluations and political trust, may also vary from citizen to citizen as some citizens may place greater weight on democratic performance evaluations than others when forming their attitudes about the political system as a whole (see, e.g., van der Meer, 2017 ). While such variations would also mean that the entire indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust varies between citizens, this contribution is primarily interested in how citizen characteristics condition the first part of the indirect effect, i.e. the link between macro-level democratic quality and individual-level democratic performance evaluations.

2 Countries are classified as democratic according to V-Dem’s Regimes-of-the-World (RoW) measure ( Lührmann et al., 2018 ).

3 Not every country is covered in all rounds of the WVS.

4 Most importantly, the World Values Survey is not a panel study and we therefore cannot compare characteristics on the individual level over time. Additionally, not every country is covered in every round of the World Values Survey, which results in an unbalanced TSCS design and severely limits the amount of time-series data we could use even for a purely aggregate analysis.

5 Since education is a categorical variable, Model 5 includes cross-level interactions with dummy variables for secondary and tertiary education, respectively (reference category: primary education or less).

6 For the sake of brevity, Table 2 reports only the cross-level interactions on the total indirect effect of democratic quality on political trust. Supplementary Table S2 and Supplementary Figure S1 demonstrate that the moderating effects of political interest, education, and conceptions of democracy are even stronger when looking only at the theoretically relevant part of this indirect effect, i.e. the link between democratic quality and democratic performance evaluations (path a).

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Keywords: education, political interest, political trust, democratic quality, democratic performance evaluations, conceptions of democracy

Citation: Mauk M (2021) Quality of Democracy Makes a Difference, but Not for Everyone: How Political Interest, Education, and Conceptions of Democracy Condition the Relationship Between Democratic Quality and Political Trust. Front. Polit. Sci. 3:637344. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2021.637344

Received: 03 December 2020; Accepted: 19 April 2021; Published: 07 May 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Mauk. 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.

*Correspondence: Marlene Mauk, [email protected]

Disclaimer: 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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Rethinking the Value of Democracy

A Comparative Perspective

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• Is the first analytical contribution to present a unifying framework to study the value of democracy in a comparative perspective
• Tells a clear story about what value democracy does and does not bring in an era of uncertainties
• Urges the need for a conceptual change affecting how we would answer the question whether democracy is ‘better’ than any other political system

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This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the instrumental value of democracy in a comparative perspective. Based on extensive analyses of quantitative studies from different disciplines, it explores both the expected beneficial and harmful impact of democracy. Democracy’s reputation as delivering peace and development while controlling corruption is an important source of its own legitimacy. Yet, as this book acutely demonstrates, the arguments tend to be normatively driven interventions in ideologically charged policy debates. The book argues that we need neither a utopian framing of democracy as delivering all ‘good things’ in politics nor a cynical one that emphasizes only the ‘dangerous underbelly’ of this form of government. The author also raises critical questions about the value of the study of democracy: the choice for particular concepts and measures, the unknown mechanisms, and the narrow focus on specific instrumental values. This volume will be necessary reading for anyone interested in debates on democracy in the contemporary global context.

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The State of Democracy in the World—Problems, Pitfalls, and Policy

Introduction: Perspectives on Democracy

Thinking Democracy beyond Regimes: Untangling Political Analysis from the Nation-State

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Democracy and Corruption

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Front matter, why democracy.

Renske Doorenspleet

The Numerical Value of Democracy: League Tables, Scores and Trends

Democracy and interstate war, democracy and civil war, democracy and development, conclusion: rethinking the value of democracy, back matter.

“Timely and important, this book tackles the key question of whether democracy is 'worth it'. It challenges standard assumptions and its conclusion makes sobering reading. The book still calls on scholars not to abandon democracy, however, but to pursue further why and how democracy matters and to whom. A really brave book, with crucial findings, that, at the same time, sets out an agenda for future research.” (Jean Grugel, Professor of Development Politics, University of York, UK)

“Breaking new ground in democracy studies, this thoughtful book shows that the instrumental value of democracy has frequently been overstated. Connecting findings from political science, sociology and economics, it makes the compelling case for cross-fertilization between disciplines. Not just the empirical findings are admirably clear, but also the normative insights are interesting and inspiring. This comprehensive study will leave democracy scholars with much to ponder.” (Brigitte Geißel, Professor and Director of the Research Unit ‘Democratic Innovations’, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)

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Book Title : Rethinking the Value of Democracy

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A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy

• Philipp Lorenz-Spreen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6319-4154 1   na1 ,
• Lisa Oswald   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8418-282X 2   na1 ,
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One of today’s most controversial and consequential issues is whether the global uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence ( N  = 496 articles) on the link between digital media use and different political variables. Some associations, such as increasing political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy and were often observed in autocracies and emerging democracies. Other associations, such as declining political trust, increasing populism and growing polarization, are likely to be detrimental to democracy and were more pronounced in established democracies. While the impact of digital media on political systems depends on the specific variable and system in question, several variables show clear directions of associations. The evidence calls for research efforts and vigilance by governments and civil societies to better understand, design and regulate the interplay of digital media and democracy.

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The ongoing heated debate on the opportunities and dangers that digital media pose to democracy has been hampered by disjointed and conflicting results (for recent overviews, see refs. 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ). Disagreement about the role of new media is not a novel phenomenon; throughout history, evolving communication technologies have provoked concerns and debates. One likely source of concern is the dual-use dilemma, that is, the inescapable fact that technologies can be used for both noble and malicious aims. For instance, during the Second World War, radio was used as a propaganda tool by Nazi Germany 5 , whereas allied radio, such as the BBC, supported resistance against the Nazi regime, for example, by providing tactical information on allied military activities 6 , 7 . In the context of the Rwandan genocide, radio was used to incite Rwandan Hutus to massacre the country’s Tutsi minority 8 . In the aftermath of the genocide, using the same means to cause different ends, the radio soap opera ‘Musekeweya’ successfully reduced intergroup prejudice in a year-long field experiment 9 , 10 .

Digital media appears to be another double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can empower citizens, as demonstrated in movements such as the Arab Spring 11 , Fridays for Future and #MeToo 12 . On the other hand, digital media can also be instrumental in inciting destructive behaviours and tendencies such as polarization and populism 13 , as well as fatal events such as the attack on the United States Capitol in January 2021. Relatedly, the way political leaders use or avoid digital media can vary greatly depending on the political context. Former US President Trump used it to spread numerous lies ranging from claims about systematic voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election to claims about the harmlessness of Covid-19. In spring 2022, Russian President Putin had banned most social media platforms that would bypass the state-controlled classical media, probably to prevent access to information about his army’s attack on Ukraine 14 . At the same time, Ukrainian President Zelensky has skilfully used social media to boost Ukrainian morale and engage in the information war with Russia. Examples of the dual-use dilemma of digital media abound.

Clearly, digital media can foster liberation, democratization and participation, but can also play an important role in eroding democracy. The role of digital media is further complicated because unlike other communication technologies, it enables individuals to easily produce and disseminate content themselves, and offers largely frictionless interaction between users. These properties have not only moved the self-organized political behaviour of citizens into the spotlight 15 , but have also shifted power to large digital media platforms. Unlike broadcasters, digital media platforms typically do not create content; instead, their power lies in providing and governing a digital infrastructure. Although that infrastructure could serve as an online public sphere 16 , it is the platforms that exert much control over the dynamics of information flow.

Our goal is to advance the scientific and public debate on the relationship between digital media and democracy by providing an evidence-based picture of this complex constellation. To this end, we comprehensively reviewed and synthesized the available scientific knowledge 17 on the link between digital media and various politically important variables such as participation, trust and polarization.

We aimed to answer the pre-registered question “If, to what degree and in which contexts, do digital media have detrimental effects on democracy?” (pre-registered protocol, including research question and search strategy, at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ ). This two-stage question encompasses, first, the assessment of the direction of effects and, second, how these effects play out as a function of political contexts.

A major difficulty facing researchers and policy makers is that most studies relating digital media use to political attitudes and behaviours are correlational. Because it is nearly impossible to simulate democracy in the laboratory, researchers are forced to rely on observational data that typically only provide correlational evidence. We therefore pursued two approaches. First, we collected and synthesized a broad set of articles that examine associations between digital media use and different political variables. We then conducted an in-depth analysis of the small subset of articles reporting causal evidence. This two-step approach permitted us to focus on causal effects while still taking the full spectrum of correlational evidence into account.

For the present purpose, we adopted a broad understanding of digital media, ranging from general internet access to the use of specific social media platforms, including exposure to certain types of content on these platforms. To be considered as a valid digital media variable in our review, information or discussion forums must be hosted via the internet or need to describe specific features of online communication. For example, we considered the online outlets of traditional newspapers or TV channels as digital source of political information but not the original traditional media themselves. We provide an overview of digital media variables present in our review sample in Fig. 1d and discriminate in our analyses between the two overarching types of digital media: internet, broadly defined, on the one hand and social media in particular on the other hand.

a , Combinations of variables in the sample: digital media (A), political variables (B) and content features such as selective exposure or misinformation (C). Numbers in brackets count articles in our sample that measure an association between variables. b , Geographic distribution of articles that reported site of data collection. c , d , Distribution of measurements (counted separately whenever one article reported several variables) over combinations of outcome variables and methods ( c ) and over combinations of outcome variables and digital media variables ( d ).

We further aimed to synthesize evidence on a broad spectrum of political attitudes and behaviours that are relevant to basic democratic principles 18 . We therefore grounded our assessment of political variables in the literature that examines elements of modern democracies that are considered essential to their functioning, such as citizens’ basic trust in media and institutions 19 , a well-informed public 20 , an active civil society 21 , 22 and exposure to a variety of opinions 23 , 24 . We also included phenomena that are considered detrimental to the functioning of democracies, including open discrimination against people 25 , political polarization to the advantage of political extremists and populists 26 and social segregation in homogeneous networks 23 , 27 .

The political variables in focus are themselves multidimensional and may be heterogeneous and conflicting. For example, polarization encompasses partisan sorting 28 , affective polarization 29 , issue alignment 30 , 31 and a number of other phenomena (see ref. 32 for an excellent literature review on media effects on variations of ideological and affective polarization). For our purpose, however, we take a broader perspective, examining and comparing across different political variables the directions—beneficial or detrimental to democracy—in which digital media effects play out.

Notwithstanding the nuances within each dimension of political behaviour, wherever possible we explicitly interpreted each change in a political variable as tending to be either beneficial or detrimental to democracy. Even though we tried to refrain from normative judgements, the nature of our research question required us to interpret the reported evidence regarding its relation to democracy. For example, an increase in political knowledge is generally considered to be beneficial under the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry 20 . Similarly, a certain level of trust in democratic institutions is crucial for a functioning democracy 33 . By contrast, various forms of polarization (particularly affective polarization) tend to split societies into opposing camps and threaten democratic decision-making 34 , 35 . Likewise, populist politics that are often coupled with right-wing nationalist ideologies, artificially divide society into a corrupt ‘elite’ that is opposed by ‘the people’, which runs counter to the ideals of a pluralistic democracy and undermines citizens’ trust in politics and the media 36 , 37 . We therefore considered polarization and populism, for example, to be detrimental to democracy.

There are already some systematic reviews of subsets of associations between political behaviour and media use that fall within the scope of our analysis, including reviews of the association between media and radicalization 38 , 39 , polarization 32 , hate speech 40 , participation 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , echo chambers 46 and campaigning on Twitter 47 . These extant reviews, however, did not contrast and integrate the wide range of politically relevant variables into one comprehensive analysis—an objective that we pursue here. For the most relevant review articles, we matched the references provided in them with our reference list (see Materials and Methods for details). Importantly, and unlike some extant reviews, our focus is not on institutions, the political behaviour of political elites (for example, their strategic use of social media; see refs. 47 , 48 ), or higher-level outcomes (for example, policy innovation in governments 49 ). We also did not consider the effects of traditional media (for example, television or radio) or consumption behaviours that are not specific to digital media (for example, selective exposure 50 ). Furthermore, we did not focus on the microscopic psychological mechanisms that could shape polarization on social media (for a review, see ref. 51 ). For reasons of external validity, we omitted small-scale laboratory-only experiments (for example, see ref. 52 ), but included field experiments in our review. We included studies using a variety of methods—from surveys to large-scale analyses of social media data—and across different disciplines that are relevant to our research question. Details on the inclusion and exclusion criteria are provided in Materials and Methods. Our goal for this knowledge synthesis is to provide a nuanced foundation of shared facts for a constructive stage in the academic but also societal debate about the future of digital media and their role in democracy. In our view, this debate and the future design of digital media for democracy require a comprehensive assessment of its impact. We therefore not only focus on individual dimensions of political behaviour but also compare these dimensions and the methods by which they have been researched so far, thus going beyond the extant reviews. This approach aims to stimulate research that fills evidence gaps and establishes missing links that only become apparent when comparing the dimensions.

After conducting a pre-registered search (most recent update 15 September 2021) and selection process, we arrived at a final sample of N  = 496 articles. For further analysis, we classified them by the set of variables between which they report associations: type of digital media (for example, social media, online news), political variables (for example, trust, participation) and characteristics of the information ecology (for example, misinformation, selective exposure), as depicted in Fig. 1a . Each article was coded according to the combination of these variables as well as the method, specific outcome variable and, if applicable, the direction of association and potential moderator variables (see Materials and Methods for details). The resulting table of the fully coded set of studies can be found at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ , alongside the code for the analyses and visualizations offered here.

Figure 1 reports the composition of the set of included articles. Figure 1a confirms that the search query mainly returned articles concerned with the most relevant associations between digital media and political outcomes. Most of the articles were published in the last 5 years, highlighting the fast growth of interest in the link between digital media and democracy. Articles span a range of disciplines, including political science, psychology, computational science and communication science. Although a preponderance of articles focused on the United States, there was still a large geographical variation overall (see Fig. 1b ).

Figure 1c shows the distribution of measurements (counted separately when one article reported several outcomes) across methods and political variables. Our search query was designed to capture a broad range of politically relevant variables, which meant that we had to group them into broader categories. The ten most frequently reported categories of variables were trust in institutions, different variants of political participation (for example, voter turnout or protest participation), exposure to diverse viewpoints in the news, political knowledge, political expression, measures of populism (for example, support for far-right parties or anti-minority rhetoric), prevalence and spread of misinformation, measures of polarization (for example, negative attitudes towards political opponents or fragmented and adversarial discourse), homophily in social networks (that is, social connections between like-minded individuals) and online hate (that is, hate speech or hate crime). Similarly, the distribution of outcomes and associated digital media variables in Fig. 1d shows that many studies focused on political information online, and specifically political information on social media, in combination with political polarization and participation, while other digital media variables, such as messenger platforms are less explored. The full table, including the reported political variables within each category, can be found at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ . Figure 1 also reveals gaps in the literature, such as rarely explored geographical regions (for example, Africa) and under-studied methods–variable combinations (for example, involving the combination of data sources such as social media data with survey or secondary data).

Direction of associations

In the first part of our research question, we ask whether the available evidence suggests that the effects of digital media are predominantly beneficial or detrimental to democracy. To find an answer, we first selected subsets of articles that addressed the ten most frequently studied categories of political variables (hereafter simply referred to as political variables). We did not test specific hypotheses in our review. A total of N  = 354 associations were reported for these variables (when an article examined two relevant outcome variables, two associations were counted). The independent variable across these articles was always a measure of the usage of some type of digital media, such as online news consumption or social media uptake. Statistically speaking, the independent variables can be positively or negatively associated with the political outcome variable. For instance, more digital media use could be associated with more expression of hate (positive association), less expression of hate (negative association), or not associated at all. We decided to present relationships not at a statistical level but at a conceptual level. We therefore classified each observed statistical association as beneficial or detrimental depending on whether its direction was aligned or misaligned with democracy. For example, a positive statistical association between digital media use and hate speech was coded as a detrimental association; by contrast, a positive statistical association between digital media use and participation was coded as beneficial. Throughout, we represent beneficial associations in turquoise and detrimental associations in orange, irrespective of the underlying statistical polarity.

Figure 2 provides an overview of the ten most frequently studied political variables and the reported directions—colour-coded in terms of whether they are beneficial or detrimental to democracy—of each of their associations with digital media use. This overview encompasses both correlational and causal evidence. Some findings in Fig. 2 suggest that digital media can foster democratic objectives. First, the associations reported for participation point mostly in beneficial directions for democracy (aligned with previous results 45 ), including a wide range of political and civic behaviour (Fig. 1d ), from low-effort participation such as liking/sharing political messages on social media to high-cost activities such as protesting in oppressive regimes. Second, measures of political knowledge and diversity of news exposure appear to be associated with digital media in beneficial ways, but the overall picture was slightly less clear. Third, the literature is also split on how political expression is associated with digital media. Articles reporting beneficial associations between digital media and citizens’ political expression were opposed by a number of articles describing detrimental associations. These detrimental associations relate to the ‘spiral of silence’ idea, that is, the notion that people’s willingness to express their political opinions online depends on the perceived popularity of their opinions (see relevant overview articles 53 , 54 ).

Directions of associations are reported for various political variables (see Fig. 1d for a breakdown). Insets show examples of the distribution of associations with trust, news exposure, polarization and network homophily over the different digital media variables with which they were associated.

Fourth, we observed consistent detrimental associations for a number of variables. Specifically, the associations with trust in institutions were overwhelmingly pointing in directions detrimental to a functioning democracy. Measures of hate, polarization and populism were also widely reported to have detrimental associations with digital media use in the clear majority of articles. Likewise, increased digital media use was often associated with a greater exposure to misinformation. Finally, we also found that digital media were associated with homophily in social networks in detrimental ways (mostly measured on social media, and here especially on Twitter), but the pattern of evidence was a little less consistent. Differences in the consistency of results were also reflected when broken down along associated digital media variables (see insets in Fig. 2 ). For instance, both trust and polarization measures were consistently associated with media use across types of digital media ranging from social media to political information online; in contrast, results for homophily were concentrated on social media and especially on Twitter, while measurements of news exposure were mostly concentrated on political information online.This points not only to different operationalizations of related outcome measures, such as diverse information exposure and homophilic network structures, but also to differences between the distinct domains of digital media in which these very related phenomena are measured. Similar observations can be made when separating associations between general types of digital media: social media vs internet more broadly (Supplementary Fig. 1 ).

Next, we distinguished between articles reporting correlational versus causal evidence and focused on the small subset of articles reporting the latter ( N  = 24). We excluded causal evidence on the effects of voting advice applications from our summary as a very specific form of digital media, explicitly constructed to inform vote choices, and already extensively discussed in a meta-analysis 55 .

Causal inference

Usually, the absence of randomized treatment assignment, an inescapable feature of observational data (for example, survey data), precludes the identification of causal effects because individuals differ systematically on variables other than the treatment (or independent) variable. However, under certain conditions, it is possible to rule out non-causal explanations for associations, even in studies without random assignment that are based on observational data (see refs. 56 , 57 , 58 ). For a more detailed explanation of the fundamental principles of causal inference, see Supplementary Material page 5 and, for example, the work of the 2021 laureates of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics 56 , 57 , 58 .

Common causal inference techniques that were used in our sample include instrumental variable designs that introduce exogenous variation in the treatment variable 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , matching approaches to explicitly balance treatment and control groups 64 , 65 , 66 , and panel designs that account for unobserved confounders with unit and/or time-fixed effects 67 , 68 . We also found multiple large-scale field experiments conducted on social media platforms 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 as well as various natural experiments 59 , 61 , 62 , 73 .

Figure 3 summarizes the findings and primary causal inference techniques of these articles. Again, causal effects were coded as beneficial for or detrimental to democracy. This figure is structured according to whether evidence stemmed from established democracies or from emerging democracies and authoritarian regimes, adopting classifications from the Liberal Democracy Index provided by the Varieties of Democracy project 18 . In some autocratic regimes (for example, China), it is particularly difficult to interpret certain effects. For example, a loss of trust in government suggests a precarious development for an established democracy; in authoritarian regimes, however, it may indicate a necessary step toward overcoming an oppressive regime and, eventually, progressing towards a more liberal and democratic system. Instead of simply adopting the authors’ interpretation of the effects or imposing our own interpretation of effects in authoritarian contexts, we leave this interpretation to the reader (denoted in purple in the figure). The overall picture converges closely with the one drawn in Fig. 2 . We found general trends of digital media use increasing participation and knowledge but also increasing political polarization and decreasing trust that mostly aligned with correlational evidence.

Each box represents one article. Treatments (T) are in white boxes on the left, political outcome (O) variables in coloured boxes on the right; M denotes mediators; H represents sources of effect heterogeneity or moderators. Positive (+) and negative (−) signs at paths indicate reported direction of effects. Location of sample indicated in top right corner of boxes, primary causal inference strategy in bottom left. Strategies include statistical estimation strategies such as instrumental variables (IV), matching and panel designs (PD) that use, for example, fixed effects (FE) or difference in difference (DiD) for causal estimation, as well as lab or field experiments (for example, field experiments rolled out on various platforms that are often supplemented with IV estimation to account for imperfect compliance). Detrimental effects on liberal democracy are shown in orange, beneficial effects in turquoise, effects open to interpretation in purple and null effects in grey. Solid arrows represent pathways for which authors provide causal identification strategies, dashed arrows represent descriptive (mediation) pathways.

Effects on key political variables

In the following sections, we provide a short synopsis of the results, point to conflicting trends and highlight some examples of the full set of correlational and causal evidence, reported in Figs. 2 and 3 , for six variables that we found to be particularly crucial for democracy: participation, trust, political knowledge, polarization, populism, network structures and news exposure. The chosen examples are stand-ins and illustrations of the general trends.

Participation

Consistent with past meta-analyses 42 , 43 , 45 , the body of correlational evidence supported a beneficial association between digital media use and political participation and mobilization.

Causal analyses of the effects of digital media on political participation in established democracies mostly studied voting and voter turnout 64 , 67 , 71 , 74 , 75 , 76 ; articles concerned with other regions of the world rather focused on political protest behaviour 59 , 61 , 66 . Other articles considered online political participation 65 , 71 . One study, applying causal mediation analysis to assess a causal mechanism 77 , found that information-oriented social media use affects political participation, mediated or enabled through the user’s online political efficacy 65 . Overall, our evidence synthesis found largely beneficial mobilizing effects for political participation across this set of articles. Our search did not identify any studies that examined causal effects of digital media on political participation in authoritarian regimes in Africa or the Middle East.

Many articles in our sample found detrimental associations between digital media and various dimensions of trust (Fig. 2 ). For example, detrimental associations were found for trust in governments and politics 59 , 60 , 66 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , trust in media 83 , and social and institutional trust 84 . During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital media use was reported to be negatively associated with trust in vaccines 85 , 86 . Yet the results about associations with trust are not entirely homogeneous. One multinational survey found beneficial associations with trust in science 87 ; others found increasing trust in democracy with digital media use in Eastern and Central European samples 88 , 89 . Nevertheless, the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy. While the evidence stems mostly from surveys, results gathered with other methods underpin these findings (Fig. 2 inset).

The majority of articles identifying causal effects also find predominantly detrimental effects of digital media on trust. A field experiment in the United States that set browser defaults to partisan media outlets 37 found a long-term loss of trust in mainstream media. Studies examining social trust as a central component of social capital find consistent detrimental effects of social media use 84 ; in contrast, no effects of broadband internet in general on social trust was found 90 . In authoritarian regimes in Asia, increasing unrestricted internet access decreased levels of trust in the political system 59 , 73 , 91 . This finding confirms the predominant association observed in most other countries. Yet it also illustrates how digital media is a double-edged sword, depending on the political context: by reducing trust in institutions, digital media can threaten existing democracies as well as foster emerging democratic developments in authoritarian regimes.

Political knowledge

The picture was less clear for associations between the consumption of digital media and political knowledge. Still, the majority of associations point in beneficial directions and were found in both cross-sectional surveys 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 and panel surveys 100 , 101 , 102 . Studies linking web-tracking and survey data showed increased learning about politics 103 , but also a turning away from important topics 104 , whereas other experiments demonstrated an overall beneficial effect of digital media on issue salience 105 . These findings, however, stand in contrast to other studies that find a detrimental association between political knowledge and digital media use 106 , 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 .

The body of causal evidence on political knowledge also tends to paint a relatively promising picture. Multiple articles found that engagement with digital media increased political knowledge 67 , 70 , 72 , 74 and that engagement with political content on social media increased political interest among adolescents 111 . In line with these findings, it has been reported that political messages on social media, as well as faster download speed, can increase information-seeking in the political domain 67 , 71 . By contrast, there is evidence for a decrease in political knowledge 112 , which is mediated through the news-finds-me effect: social media users believe that actively seeking out news is no longer required to stay informed, as they expect to be presented with important information.

It is important to note that most of these effects are accompanied by considerable heterogeneity in the population that benefits and the type of digital media. For example, politically interested individuals showed higher knowledge acquisition when engaging with Twitter, whereas the opposite effects emerged for engagement with Facebook 113 . Furthermore, there is evidence that the news-finds-me effect on social media can be mitigated when users consult alternative news sources 112 .

Polarization

Most articles found detrimental associations between digital media and different forms of political polarization 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 . Our review obtained evidence for increasing outgroup polarization on social media in a range of political contexts and on various platforms 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 . Increasing polarization was also linked to exposure to viewpoints opposed to one’s own on social media feeds 69 , 123 . Articles comparing several political systems found associations that were country-dependent 124 , again highlighting the importance of political context 125 . Nevertheless, high digital media use was for the most part linked to higher levels of polarization, although there was some evidence for balanced online discourse without pronounced patterns of polarization 126 , 127 , 128 , as well as evidence for potentially depolarizing tendencies 129 .

The body of causal articles largely supported the detrimental associations of digital media that emerged, by and large, in the correlational articles. Among established democracies, both social media use and overall internet use increased political polarization 63 , 70 . This was also the case for an experimental treatment that exposed users to opposing views on Twitter 69 . However, some findings run counter to the latter result 130 : in a 2 month field experiment, exposure to counter-attitudinal news on Facebook reduced affective polarization (the authors used opposing news outlets as treatment instead of opinions on social media). Furthermore, one other field experiment did not find evidence that exposure to partisan online news substantively shifted political opinions but found a long-term loss of trust in mainstream media 37 . Still, taking all evidence into account, the overall picture remains largely consistent on the detrimental association between digital media and political polarization, including some but not all causal evidence.

Articles on populism in our review examined either vote share and other popularity indicators for populist parties or the prevalence of populist messages and communication styles on digital media. Overall, articles using panel surveys, tracking data and methods linking surveys to social media data consistently found that digital media use was associated with higher levels of populism. For example, digital platforms were observed to benefit populist parties more than they benefit established politicians 131 , 132 , 133 , 134 . In a panel survey in Germany, a decline in trust that accompanied increasing digital media consumption was also linked to a turn towards the hard-right populist AfD party 80 . This relationship might be connected to AfD’s greater online presence, relative to other German political parties 132 , even though these activities might be partly driven by automated accounts. There is also evidence for an association between increased social media use and online right-wing radicalization in Austria, Sweden and Australia 135 , 136 , 137 . Only a minority of articles found no relationship or the reverse relationship between digital media and populism 138 , 139 , 140 . For instance, in Japan, internet exposure was associated with increased tolerance towards foreigners 141 .

Similarly, most causal inference studies linked increased populism to digital media use. For instance, digital media use in Europe led to increased far-right populist support 63 , 142 , and there was causal evidence that digital media can propagate ethnic hate crimes in both democratic and authoritarian countries 62 , 68 . Leaving the US and European political context, in Malaysia, internet exposure was found to cause decreasing support for the authoritarian, populist government 60 .

Echo chambers and news exposure

The evidence on echo chambers points in different directions depending on the outcome measure. On the one hand, when looking at news consumption, several articles showed that social media and search engines diversify people’s news diets 67 , 143 , 144 , 145 , 146 . On the other hand, when considering social networks and the impact of digital media on homophilic structures, the literature contains consistent reports of ideologically homogeneous social clusters 147 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 . This underscores an important point: some seemingly paradoxical results can potentially be resolved by looking more closely at context and specific outcome measurement (see also Supplementary Fig. 2 ). The former observation of diverse news exposure might fit with the beneficial relationship between digital media and knowledge reported in refs. 67 , 74 , 94 , 95 , 102 , and the homophilic social structures could be connected to the prevalence of hate speech and anti-outgroup sentiments 120 , 152 , 153 , 154 , 155 .

Heterogeneity

We now turn to the second part of our research question and analyse the effects of digital media use in light of different political contexts. Figure 4 shows the geographical distribution of effect directions around the globe. Notably, most beneficial effects on democracy were found in emerging democracies in South America, Africa and South Asia. Mixed effects, by contrast, were distributed across Europe, the United States, Russia and China. Similarly, detrimental outcomes were mainly found in Europe, the United States and partly Russia, although this may reflect a lack of studies undertaken in authoritarian contexts. These patterns are also shown in Fig. 4c,d , where countries are listed according to the Liberal Democracy Index. Moderators—variables such as partisanship and news consumption that are sources of effect heterogeneity—displayed in Supplementary Fig. 3 also show slight differences between outcomes. Beneficial outcomes seemed to be more often moderated by political interest and news consumption, whereas detrimental outcomes tended to be moderated by political position and partisanship.

a , Geographical distribution of reported associations for the variables trust, knowledge, participation, exposure and expression. Pie charts show the composition of directions for each country studied. b , Geographic representation of reported associations for the variables hate, polarization, populism, homophily and misinformation. c , Data and variables in a , in absolute numbers of reported associations and sorted along the Liberal Democracy Index 18 . d , Data and variables in b , in absolute numbers of reported associations and sorted along the Liberal Democracy Index.

Furthermore, many causal articles acknowledge that effects differ between subgroups of their sample when including interaction terms in their statistical models. For example, the polarizing effects of digital media differ between Northern and Southern European media systems 142 : while consumption of right-leaning digital media increased far-right votes, especially in Southern Europe, the consumption of news media and public broadcasting in Northern European media systems with high journalistic standards appears to mitigate these effects. Another example of differential effects between subgroups was found in Russia, where the effects of social media on xenophobic violence were only present in areas with pre-existing nationalist sentiment. This effect was especially pronounced for hate crimes with a larger number of perpetrators, indicating that digital media was serving a coordinating function. In summary, a range of articles found heterogeneity in effects for varying levels of political interest 67 , 113 , political orientation 63 , 69 , 70 and different characteristics of online content 111 .

Most authors, particularly those of the causal inference articles in our body of evidence, explicitly emphasized the national, cultural, temporal and political boundary conditions for interpreting and generalizing their results (see, for example, ref. 111 ). By contrast, especially in articles conducted on US samples, the national context and the results’ potential conditionality was often not highlighted. We strongly caution against a generalization of findings that are necessarily bound to a specific political setting (for example, the United States) to other contexts.

Sampling methods and risk of bias

To assess study quality and risk of bias, we additionally coded important methodological aspects of the studies, specifically, the sampling method, sample size and transparency indicators, such as competing interest, open data practices and pre-registrations. In Fig. 5 , we show an excerpt from that analysis. Different sampling methods naturally result in different sample sizes as shown in Fig. 5a,b . Furthermore, behavioural data are much more prevalent for studies that look at detrimental outcomes, such as polarization and echo chambers. Classic surveys with probability samples or quota samples, in contrast, are often used to examine beneficial outcome measures such as trust and participation (Fig. 5c,d ). Overall, however, no coherent pattern emerges in terms of the reported directions of associations. If anything, large probabilistic samples report relatively less beneficial associations for both types of outcomes (Fig. 5 ). Generally, different types of data have different advantages, such as probability and quota samples approximating more closely the ideal of representativeness, whereas the observation of actual behaviour on social media escaping the potential downsides of self-reporting. A potential blind spot in studies working with behavioural data from social media, inaccessible to both us and the original authors of the studies, is the selection of data provided by platforms. Therefore, it is tremendously important for researchers to get unrestricted access or, at least, transparent provision of random samples of data by platforms. The selection of users into the platforms, however, remains an open issue for behavioural data as it is often unclear who the active users are and why they are active online. We find that political outcome measures studied with behavioural data appear to show quite distinct results compared with those studied with large-scale survey data. Combining both data types would probably maximize the chances for reliable conclusions about the impact of digital media on democracy.

a , Sample size vs sampling methods for variables of trust, knowledge, participation, exposure and expression. Each dot represents one measurement, colour coded according to the direction of the reported association. b , Sample size vs sampling method for variables of hate, polarization, populims, network homophily and misinformation. c , More detailed breakdown for the same varibales as in a of sampling methods and their respective counts of reported associations and their direction. d , Breakdown of sampling methods and counts of associations for the same variables as in b .

We found relatively few null effects for some variables. This could be accurate, but it could also be driven by the file-drawer problem—the failure to publish null results. To examine the extent of a potential file-drawer problem, we contacted authors via large mailing lists but did not receive any unpublished work that fitted our study selection criteria. Regarding possible risk of bias, we found that only in 143 out of 354 measurements did authors clearly communicate that no conflict of interest was present (beyond the usual funding statement). However, we did not find a striking imbalance in the distribution of reported associations between those articles that did not explicitly state competing interest and those that did. Of the few associations for which conflicts of interest were stated, 4 pointed in beneficial, 3 in detrimental and 2 reported lack of directionality. In only 79 of 354 measurements did the researchers use open data practices. Considering articles that reported detrimental associations, we did not find a clear difference in the directions between those with and without open data. However, considering articles that reported beneficial outcomes, the numbers of positive findings in the studies without open data are relatively much larger than for the open science studies. Namely, 103 beneficial and 33 detrimental associations were reported in those without open data, while 19 beneficial versus 14 detrimental were reported in studies with open data practices. This observation might be due to the large number of survey-based studies about participation, which often do not follow open data practices. Even fewer of the studies in our sample were pre-registerd, namely, 13 of the 354, where 9 reported detrimental associations, only 3 reported beneficial associations and 1 found no direction of association. To shed light on other potential biases, we additionally examined temporal variations in the directions of reported associations and found, besides the general explosive growth of studies in this domain, a slight trend towards an increasing number of both detrimental directions and null effects over time (Supplementary Fig. 4 ). At the author level, there was no clear pattern in the associations reported by those authors who published the greatest number of articles in our sample; several authors variously reported detrimental and beneficial effects as well as null effects, with a few exceptions (Supplementary Fig. 5 ). Their co-authorship network in Supplementary Fig. 6 , split for the two types of outcomes measures, shows some communities of co-authors; however, no clear pattern of preferred direction of reported association can be spotted. Overall, we did not find evidence of a systematic bias in either direction driven by temporal trends or particular authors.

Regardless of whether they are authoritarian, illiberal, or democratic, governments around the world are concerned with how digital media affect governance and their citizenry’s political beliefs and behaviours. A flurry of recent interdisciplinary research, stimulated in part by new methodological possibilities and data sources, has shed light on this potential interplay.

Although classical survey methods are still predominant, novel ways of linking data types, for example linking URL tracking data or social media data with surveys, permit more complex empirical designs and analyses. Furthermore, digital trace data allow an expansion in sample size. The articles we reviewed included surveys with a few hundred, up to a few thousand participants, but also large-scale social media analyses that included behavioural traces of millions. Yet with computational social science still in its early days, the amount of evidence supporting and justifying causal conclusions is still limited. Causal effects of digital media on political variables are also hard to pin down empirically due to a plethora of complexities and context factors, as well as the highly dynamic technological developments that make predicting the future difficult. While emergent political phenomena are hard to simulate in the lab, the value of estimation and data collection strategies to draw causal inferences from real-life data is enormous. However, the long-established trade-off between internal and external validity still applies, which also highlights the value of high-quality descriptive work.

Taking into account both correlational and causal evidence, our review suggests that digital media use is clearly associated with variables such as trust, participation and polarization. They are critical for the functioning of any political system, in particular democracies. Extant research reports relatively few null effects. However, the trends on each factor mostly converge, both across research methods and across correlative and causal evidence.

Our results also highlight that digital media are a double-edged sword, with both beneficial and detrimental effects on democracy. What is considered beneficial or detrimental will, at least partly, hinge on the political system in question: intensifying populism and network homophily may benefit a populist regime or a populist politician but undermine a pluralistic democracy. For democratic countries, evidence clearly indicates that digital media increase political participation. Less clear but still suggestive are the findings that digital media have positive effects on political knowledge and exposure to diverse viewpoints in news. On the negative side, however, digital media use is associated with eroding the ‘glue that keeps democracies together’ 33 : trust in political institutions. The results indicating this danger converge across methods. Furthermore, our results also suggest that digital media use is associated with increases in hate, populism and polarization. Again, the findings converge across causal and correlational articles.

Alongside the need for more causal evidence, we found several research gaps, including the relationship between trust and digital media and the seeming contradiction between network homophily and diverse news exposure. Methods that link tracking data for measuring news exposure with behavioural data from social media (for example, sharing activities or the sentiment of commenting) are crucial to a better understanding of this apparent contradiction.

Limitations

The articles in our sample incorporate a plethora of methods and measures. As a result, it was necessary to classify variables and effects into broad categories. This is a trade-off we had to make in exchange for the breadth of our overview of the landscape of evidence across disciplines. For the same reason, we could not provide a quantitative comparison across the diverse sample of articles. We believe that digital media research would benefit from more unified measures (for example, for polarization), methods across disciplines to allow for better comparability in the future, a systematic comparison of different types of digital media (that is, Facebook and Twitter are neither of one kind nor, in all likelihood, are their effects) and extensions of outcome measurements beyond certain types of digital media. This follows other recent calls for commensurate measures of political and affective polarization 156 . The breadth of our review and the large number of political outcome measures in particular, made it necessary to be quite restrictive on other ends (see Fig. 6 for our exclusion process and Supplementary Table 1 for the detailed criteria). We explicitly decided to prioritize the selection of causal evidence (see Fig. 7 for an overview of the causal inference techniques that we considered) and other large-sample, quantitative, published evidence. However, following this pre-registered search strategy led to the selection of unequal numbers of studies for different outcome variables. For example, our search query selected considerably more studies examining political participation than political expression or trust, while at the same time, it did not include all studies that are included in other systematic reviews 45 due to stricter exclusion criteria.

a , Keywords included in our search query, run on Web of Science and Scopus, with logical connectors. Focus was on causal inference methods (method column), but also inclusion of descriptive quantitative evidence, relationships between digital media (cause column) and political outcomes (direct effect box) or content features (indirect effect box). b , Flowchart representing the stepwise exclusion process, starting with title-based exclusion, followed by abstract-based exclusion. c , Example illustration of outcome variable extraction from the abstracts. d , Breakdown of the most frequently reported political variables into top 10 categories. Numbers in brackets are counts of measurements in the set.

Fundamental principles of causal inference techniques and statistical strategies used in our sample of causal evidence (excluding field experiments).

The interpretation of our results was in several cases hampered by a lack of appropriate baseline measures. There is no clear measure of what constitutes a reasonable benchmark of desirable political behaviour in a healthy democracy. In addition, there were no means of quantification of some of these behaviours in the past, outside of digital media. This problem is particularly pronounced for factors such as exposure to diverse news, social network homophily, misinformation and hate speech. Measuring these phenomena at scale is possible through digital media (for example, by analysing social network structure); much less is known about their prevalence and dynamics in offline settings. Many articles therefore lacked a baseline. For instance, it is neither clear what level of homophily in social networks is desirable or undesirable in a democratic society, nor is it clear how to interpret the results of certain studies on polarization 69 , 130 , whose findings depend on whether one assumes that social media have increased or decreased exposure to opposing views relative to some offline benchmark. For example, if exposure to opposing views is increased on social media, the conclusion of one study 130 would be that it reduces polarization, but if exposure is decreased, one would come to the opposite conclusion. Notably, in this study, counter-attitudinal exposure was found to be down-ranked by Facebook’s news feed—hence supporting a process that fosters polarization instead of counteracting it. Furthermore, results about populism might be skewed: descriptive evidence on the relative activity and popularity of right-wing populist parties in Europe suggests their over-representation, as in the case of Germany’s AfD, on social media, relative to established democratic parties (see, for example, ref. 132 ). Therefore, it is difficult to interpret even causal effects of digital media use on populist support in isolation from the relative preponderance of right-wing content online.

Our results provide grounds for concern. Alongside the positive effects of digital media for democracy, there is clear evidence of serious threats to democracy. Considering the importance of these corrosive and potentially difficult-to-reverse effects for democracy, a better understanding of the diverging effects of digital media in different political contexts (for example, authoritarian vs democratic) is urgently needed. To this end, methodological innovation is required. This includes, for instance, more research using causal inference methodologies, as well as research that examines digital media use across multiple and interdependent measures of political behaviour. More research and better study designs will, however, also depend on access to data collected by the platforms. This access has been restricted or foreclosed. Yet without independent research that has unhampered access to all relevant data, the effects of digital media can hardly be understood in time. This is even more concerning because digital media can implement architectural changes that, even if seemingly small, can scale up to widespread behavioural effects. Regulation may be required to facilitate this access 157 . Most importantly, we suggest that the bulk of empirical findings summarized here can be attributed to the current status quo of an information ecosystem produced and curated by large, commercial platforms. They have succeeded in attracting a vast global audience of users. The sheer size of their audience as well as their power over what content and how content gets the most attention has led, in the words of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, to a new structural transformation of the public sphere 16 . In this new public sphere, everybody can be a potential author spontaneously producing content, both right-wing radical networks as well as the courageous Belarusian women standing up for human rights and against a repressive regime. One need not share Habermas’ conception of ‘deliberate democracy’ to see that current platforms fail to produce an information ecosystem that empowers citizens to make political choices that are as rationally motivated as possible. Our results show how this ecosystem plays out to have important consequences for political behaviours and attitudes. They further underscore that finding out which aspects of this relationship are detrimental to democracy and how they can be contained while actively preserving and fostering the emancipatory potential of digital media is, perhaps, one of the most important global tasks of the present. Our analysis hopes to contribute to the empirical basis of this endeavour.

This systematic review follows the MOOSE Guidelines for Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews of Observational Studies 158 . The detailed protocol of the review process was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ . The repository also contains the completed MOOSE checklist showing where each guideline is addressed in the text.

Figure 6 summarizes the search query that we used on two established academic databases, Scopus and Web of Science (both highly recommended search tools), the resulting number of articles from the query and the subsequent exclusion steps, leading to the final sample size of N  = 496 articles under consideration 159 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 165 , 166 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 175 , 176 , 177 , 178 , 179 , 180 , 181 , 182 , 183 , 184 , 185 , 186 , 187 , 188 , 189 , 190 , 191 , 192 , 193 , 194 , 195 , 196 , 197 , 198 , 199 , 200 , 201 , 202 , 203 , 204 , 205 , 206 , 207 , 208 , 209 , 210 , 211 , 212 , 213 , 214 , 215 , 216 , 217 , 218 , 219 , 220 , 221 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 225 , 226 , 227 , 228 , 229 , 230 , 231 , 232 , 233 , 234 , 235 , 236 , 237 , 238 , 239 , 240 , 241 , 242 , 243 , 244 , 245 , 246 , 247 , 248 , 249 , 250 , 251 , 252 , 253 , 254 , 255 , 256 , 257 , 258 , 259 , 260 , 261 , 262 , 263 , 264 , 265 , 266 , 267 , 268 , 269 , 270 , 271 , 272 , 273 , 274 , 275 , 276 , 277 , 278 , 279 , 280 , 281 , 282 , 283 , 284 , 285 , 286 , 287 , 288 , 289 , 290 , 291 , 292 , 293 , 294 , 295 , 296 , 297 , 298 , 299 , 300 , 301 , 302 , 303 , 304 , 305 , 306 , 307 , 308 , 309 , 310 , 311 , 312 , 313 , 314 , 315 , 316 , 317 , 318 , 319 , 320 , 321 , 322 , 323 , 324 , 325 , 326 , 327 , 328 , 329 , 330 , 331 , 332 , 333 , 334 , 335 , 336 , 337 , 338 , 339 , 340 , 341 , 342 , 343 , 344 , 345 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 349 , 350 , 351 , 352 , 353 , 354 , 355 , 356 , 357 , 358 , 359 , 360 , 361 , 362 , 363 , 364 , 365 , 366 , 367 , 368 , 369 , 370 , 371 , 372 , 373 , 374 , 375 , 376 , 377 , 378 , 379 , 380 , 381 , 382 , 383 , 384 , 385 , 386 , 387 , 388 , 389 , 390 , 391 , 392 , 393 , 394 , 395 , 396 , 397 , 398 , 399 , 400 , 401 , 402 , 403 , 404 , 405 , 406 , 407 , 408 , 409 , 410 , 411 , 412 , 413 , 414 , 415 , 416 , 417 , 418 , 419 , 420 , 421 , 422 , 423 , 424 , 425 , 426 , 427 , 428 , 429 , 430 , 431 , 432 , 433 , 434 , 435 , 436 , 437 , 438 , 439 , 440 , 441 , 442 , 443 , 444 , 445 , 446 , 447 , 448 , 449 , 450 , 451 , 452 , 453 , 454 , 455 , 456 , 457 , 458 , 459 , 460 , 461 , 462 , 463 , 464 , 465 , 466 , 467 , 468 , 469 , 470 , 471 , 472 , 473 , 474 , 475 , 476 , 477 , 478 , 479 , 480 , 481 , 482 , 483 , 484 , 485 , 486 , 487 , 488 , 489 , 490 , 491 , 492 , 493 , 494 , 495 , 496 , 497 , 498 , 499 , 500 , 501 , 502 , 503 , 504 , 505 , 506 , 507 , 508 , 509 , 510 , 511 , 512 , 513 , 514 , 515 , 516 , 517 , 518 , 519 , 520 , 521 , 522 , 523 , 524 , 525 , 526 , 527 , 528 , 529 , 530 , 531 , 532 , 533 , 534 , 535 , 536 , 537 , 538 , 539 , 540 , 541 , 542 , 543 , 544 , 545 , 546 , 547 , 548 , 549 , 550 , 551 , 552 , 553 , 554 , 555 , 556 , 557 , 558 , 559 , 560 , 561 , 562 , 563 , 564 , 565 , 566 , 567 , 568 , 569 , 570 , 571 , 572 , 573 , 574 , 575 .

Study selection criteria

We included only original, empirical work. Conceptual or theoretical work, simulation studies and evidence synthesizing studies were excluded. Articles had to be published in academic journals in English. Unpublished studies for which only the abstract or a preprinted version was available were excluded from the review. We excluded small- N laboratory experiments and small- N student surveys ( N  < 100) from our body of original work due to validity concerns. Although correlational evidence cannot establish a causal direction, we focused on articles that examined effects of digital media on democracy but not the opposite. We therefore excluded, for example, articles that examined ways to digitize democratic procedures. To be included, articles had to include at least two distinct variables, a digital media variable and a political outcome. Articles measuring a single variable were only included if this variable was a feature of digital media (for example, hate speech prevalence, homophily in online social networks, prevalence of misinformation in digital media).

Search strategy, study selection, coding and data extraction

Articles eligible for our study had to be published before 15 September 2021. We sourced our review database from Scopus and Web of Science, as suggested by ref. 159 . The search query (Fig. 6 ) was constructed in consultation with professional librarians and was designed to be as broad as possible to pick up any articles containing original empirical evidence of direct or indirect effects of digital media on democracy (including correlational evidence). We further consulted recent, existing review articles in the field 32 , 39 , 40 to check for important articles that did not appear in the review body. Articles that were included manually are referenced separately in the flowchart (Fig. 6 ). In addition, we contacted authors via large mailing lists of researchers working on computational social science and misinformation but did not receive any unpublished work that fitted our study selection criteria. The query retrieved N  = 3,509 articles. Of these, 1,349 were retained after screening the titles for irrelevant topics. This first coding round, whether an article, based on the title, fits the review frame or not, was split between two coders. Coders could flag articles that are subject to discussion to let the other coder double check the decision. In this round, only clearly not fitting articles were excluded from the sample. A list of exclusion criteria can be found in SuppIementary Information .

The next coding round, whether an article, based on the abstract, fits the review frame, was conducted in parallel by two coders. The inter-coder reliability, after this round of article selection, was Krippendorff’s alpha of 0.66 (87% agreement). After calculating this value, disagreement between coders was solved through discussion. At this stage, we excluded all studies that were not original empirical work, such as other reviews or conceptual articles, simulation studies and purely methodological articles (for example, hate speech or misinformation detection approaches). This coding round was followed by a more in-depth coding round. Here we refined our exclusion decisions; for example, we excluded studies that examined the digitization of government, preprints, small-scale lab experiments, small-scale convenience or student samples and studies that only included one variable (for example, description of online forums) (see Supplementary Table 1 for a detailed list of criteria). A full-text screen was performed in cases where the relevant information could not be retrieved from the abstract and for all articles implying causal evidence.

After both rounds of abstract screening, 474 articles remained in our sample. After cross-checking the results of our literature search against the references from existing reviews, we found and included further N  = 22 articles that met our thematic criteria but were not identified by our search string. Ultimately, a total of 496 articles were selected into the final review sample. Figure 6b summarizes the selection procedure.

The following information was extracted from each article using a standardized data extraction form: variable groups under research (digital media, features of media and/or political outcome variables), the concrete digital media under research, the explicit political outcome variable, the methods used, the country of origin, causal claims, possible effect heterogeneity (moderation) as well as various potential sources of bias. To assess various quality criteria of the studies, the coders had to visit the full text of the articles (for example, to find the declaration of competing interests, pre-registration or data availability statements, or to consider the methods section). Therefore, and facing the large number of articles under consideration, blinding could not be established during this procedure.

When conducting a systematic review with a broad scope, categories of the variables cannot be exhaustively defined before coding. Therefore, variable categories, especially for the digital media variables and the political outcome variables, were chosen inductively. In the first extraction step, coders stuck closely to the phrasing of the authors of the respective study. To reduce redundancy and refine the clustering of the variables, we iteratively generated frequency tables and manually sorted single variables to the best-fitting categories until a small number of clearly distinct categories was selected. After the categories were defined, both coders re-coded 10% of the sample to calculate inter-coder reliabilities for all key variables. We provide a table of inter-coder reliabilities (percentage agreements and Krippendorff’s alphas) (Supplementary Table 2 ).

Data synthesis and analysis

Due to considerable heterogeneity in methods in the articles—including self-report surveys through network analysis of social media data, URL tracking data and field experiments—no calculation of meta-analytic effect sizes was possible. The final table of selected articles with coded variables will be published alongside this article as a major result of this review project. The effect directions of 10 important political outcome variables (4 consistent with liberal democracy, 4 opposing democratic values) are summarized in Fig. 2 . For articles dealing with these political variables, we also assessed the country in which the study was conducted (Fig. 4 ), as well as explicit sources of effect heterogeneity such as demographic characteristics of study participants or characteristics of the digital media platform.

For the overview analysis, which includes both correlational and causal evidence, we mainly restricted ourselves to the evaluation effects reported in the abstracts. Articles making explicit causal claims and/or using causal inference methods (Fig. 7 ) were examined in-depth and summarized as simplified path diagrams with information on mediators, moderators, country of origin and method used (Fig. 3 ).

Deviations from the protocol

The volume of papers our query returned prevented an in-depth analysis of confounding variables. Instead, our assessment of quality relied on the sampling strategy and sample size, the method used, sources of heterogeneity and transparency criteria, such as open data practices and pre-registration. Furthermore, we were able to construct the co-author network by matching the author’s names, but were unable to produce a meaningful co-citation network due to the incompleteness and ambiguity of references in the export format that we used.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The dataset including all originally collected studies with decision stages ( N  = 3,531, ‘full_data.xlsx’), the table including all papers within our review sample ( N  = 496, ‘data_review.xlsx’) and the table including all effects reported within papers dealing with the top ten outcome measures ( N  = 354, ‘data_effects.xlsx’) are available at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ .

Code availability

R scripts for all analyses and figures are available at https://osf.io/7ry4a/ .

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Munzert for providing his perspective on causal inference and issues specific to political science, D. Ain for editing the manuscript and F. Stock for help in the literature comparison. P.L.-S., S.L. and R.H. acknowledge financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation (grant ‘Reclaiming individual autonomy and democratic discourse online: How to rebalance human and algorithmic decision-making’). S.L. acknowledges support from the Humboldt Foundation through a research award and partial support by an ERC Advanced Grant (PRODEMINFO) during completion of this paper. L.O. acknowledges financial support by the German National Academic Foundation in the form of a PhD scholarship. The authors received no specific funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Hertie School, Berlin, Germany

Lisa Oswald

School of Psychological Science and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

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Lorenz-Spreen, P., Oswald, L., Lewandowsky, S. et al. A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nat Hum Behav 7 , 74–101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1

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• Democracy Papers

Democracy in the Twenty-First Century: Toward New Models of Democratic Governance

André Bächtiger and Claudia Landwehr, in the latest contribution to the Democracy Papers , explore innovative ways to address citizen dissatisfaction with existing institutions of representative democracies. They argue that adding deliberation-oriented features to existing systems can boost citizen support for, and participation in, democratic life. As an example, they point to deliberative mini-publics, which create conditions for considered deliberation among citizens through supportive conditions such as information provision, expert hearings, and facilitator intervention.

Contemporary perceptions of democracy

In a study of German citizens’ understanding of democracy, Landwehr and Steiner found that citizens seem to disagree on specific models of democracy. 4 Claudia Landwehr and Nils D. Steiner, “ Where Democrats Disagree: Citizens’ Normative Conceptions of Democracy ,” Political Studies 65, no. 4 (2017): 786–804. Employing an exploratory factor analysis, they find evidence for four distinct attitudinal patterns that may be interpreted as alternative understandings of democracy. Citizens who hold a “trustee conception of democracy” support procedures and institutions that insulate decision-making from electoral pressures and trust representatives to serve their interest. By contrast, “anti-pluralist sceptics” are concerned that competing interests compromise the common good and ask for a stronger voice of affected groups in politics. “Deliberative proceduralists” also value participation, albeit less as a means to control decision-makers and more to ensure rational discourse and public participation. Finally, “populist majoritarians” hold onto a united will of the people for which they are willing to—at least to some degree—sacrifice minority rights.

Such “pluralistic” schemes may be in tune with attempts at democratic renewal in the twenty-first century. As Warren and Pearse have noted, “systems that unify powers are increasingly dysfunctional within societies that are culturally democratizing, complex, and diverse.” 7 Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse, “The Separation of Powers and Democratic Renewal of Westminster Systems,” mimeo (2018). They suggest “retrofitting” existing political systems with additional democratic innovations, especially with deliberative mini-publics.

Do democratic innovations work?

In this essay, however, we do not seek to debate the pros and cons of direct democratic mechanisms, 11 For an excellent overview of this debate, see Wolfgang Merkel and Claudia Ritzi, eds., Die Legitimität direkter Demokratie: Wie demokratisch sind Volksabstimmungen? (Wiesbaden: SpringerVS Verlag, 2017). but instead concentrate on two novel ways of increasing citizen involvement in policymaking, namely citizen juries and deliberative mini-publics.

However, critics of deliberative mini-publics have argued that ordinary citizens do not want to deliberate 13 Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy . or that deliberation is more demanding than voting, meaning it privileges already advantaged citizens with higher incomes and education. For instance, some scholars argue that people with lower socioeconomic status lack rhetorical skills and tend to use different speaking styles less likely to be regarded as typical deliberative qualities—differences that may translate into a lack of influence. Moreover, group discussion—the hallmark of any deliberative event—sometimes triggers undesired dynamics, such as group polarization, reducing the normative value of the outcomes of mini-publics (such as opinion change).

Challenges and ways forward

Another promising project is being pursued by Neblo et al., dubbed “directly representative democracy.” 27 Neblo, Esterling, and Lazer, Politics with the People . It starts from the idea that it is time to renew representative democracy by creating more direct exchanges between the represented and representatives. They do so by bringing MPs and citizens together, engaging them in a common deliberative forum on pressing issues of public policy.

Finally, deliberative mini-publics can also have functions beyond direct policy uptake. One prominent example is a “trust-based” function, which can inform citizens’ own later deliberations. The idea behind the trust-based function is that the (large) majority of nondeliberating citizens can trust the judgments of the (small) minority of deliberating citizens because that small minority, selected randomly for a deliberative mini-public, do not have to follow partisan logics of electoral representation and can focus instead on common concerns. 28 Mark E. Warren and John Gastil, “ Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship? ” Journal of Politics 77, no. 2 (2015): 562–574. Some empirical evidence indicates this trust-based function works in practice: the more voters knew about the randomly selected British Columbia Citizen Assembly and Irish Citizen Convention, the more likely they were to vote for the mini-public’s policy recommendation in the later citizen referendum. In the US state of Oregon, mini-publics make recommendations to voters in direct democratic campaigns. Empirical evidence shows a substantial amount of voters take these recommendations as “cues” to inform their choices at the ballot.

In sum, democracy in the twenty-first century should move toward more hybrid models, combining representative, dialogic, and direct-democratic governance schemes.

In addition, in order to assess the merits and shortcomings of existing institutions and design complementary and alternative procedures, there is a demand for open and inclusive meta-deliberative processes. 29 Claudia Landwehr, “ Democratic Meta-Deliberation: Towards Reflective Institutional Design ,” Political Studies 63, S1 (2015): 38–54. The media, academia, civil society associations, and ordinary citizens should engage in exchanges about how and by whom collective decisions at different levels and in different policy areas should be taken. We believe that a pluralistic, meta-deliberative renewal of the procedural consensus is required to safeguard democracy in the face of populist and elitist challenges.

Moreover, rather than adopting a “one size fits all” approach to democracy and claim that either representative, direct-democratic, or deliberative schemes are the best and only way to salvage democracy, we think a “problem-based” approach to democracy 30 →Mark E. Warren, “ A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Systems ,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2017): 39–53. →André Bächtiger and John Parkinson, Mapping and Measuring Deliberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). is more appropriate. Such an approach takes the variety of citizens’ democratic preferences (under specific conditions) seriously and reimagines democracy in pluralistic and hybrid terms. For instance, given scarce resources for politics, many citizens are happy to “delegate” decision-making to elected representatives; but when citizens feel that issues affect them strongly, a substantial share of them demands more involvement (as our research shows). In order to make this involvement reasoned and consequential, representative decision-making may need to be coupled with deliberative mini-publics (including co-governance structures) and direct democratic schemes. In our view, only such hybrid schemes are apt at enhancing political support of citizens and make our democracies viable in the twenty-first century.

References:

André Bächtiger

André Bächtiger has held the chair of political theory at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart since 2015. His research focuses on the challenges of mapping and measuring deliberation and political communication as well as understanding the preconditions and outcomes of high-quality deliberation in the contexts of both representative institutions and mini-publics. His research has been published by Cambridge University Press and in the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Political Science Review, Political Studies, and Acta Politica. He is coeditor... Read more

Claudia Landwehr

Claudia Landwehr is a professor of public policy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has been a co-organizer of the German Democratic Anxieties project, which collaborates closely with the SSRC. Her work focuses on citizens’ conceptions of democracy and the design of democratic institutions. Before joining the faculty at Mainz, she was a Schumpeter Fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt and a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the Australian National University. She is the author of Political Conflict and Political Preferences: Communicative Action Between Facts, Norms and Interests (ECPR Press, 2009) and has published articles in the Journal... Read more

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An Introduction to the Conceptualization of Democracy and Democratization

This article aims to provide a snapshot of how democracy and democratization have been conceptualized and understood in comparative politics through two content areas. First, with a succinct summary of the various approaches which scholars have taken to define and measure democracy, light is shed on the difficulty in guarding the minimalist components of democracy from the risks of "definitional gerrymandering" and "epistemological anarchism." Second, with a brief overview of the existing studies around the various forms of modernization theory, attention is called to the continuous refinement of methodological design to account for potential contextual and local nuances and the necessity of applying robustness and causality checks to validate statistical results.

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In the wake of the ColdWar, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized as historical, multidimensional, disaggregated, and transparent.We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

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A comprehensive and integrated framework for the analysis of data is offered and used to assess data sets on democracy. The framework first distinguishes among three challenges that are sequentially addressed: conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. In turn, it specifies distinct tasks associated with these challenges and the standards of assessment that pertain to each task. This framework is applied to the data sets on democracy most frequently used in current statistical research, generating a systematic evaluation of these data sets. The authors' conclusion is that constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about method-ological issues but that even the best indices suffer from important weaknesses. More constructively, the article's assessment of existing data sets on democracy identifies distinct areas in which attempts to improve the quality of data on democracy might fruitfully be focused. T he study of democracy—a core concern within comparative politics and international relations—increasingly has drawn on sophisticated statistical methods of causal inference. This is a welcome development, and the contributions of this quantitative literature are significant. However, with a few notable exceptions, 1 quantitative researchers have paid sparse attention to the quality of the data on democracy that they analyze. Indeed, the assessments that have been carried out are usually restricted to fairly informal discussions of alternative data sets and somewhat superficial examinations of 5 AUTHORS' NOTE: We would like to thank

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This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article submitted for consideration in the Representation [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Representation is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrep20/current"

Matthew Bishop

The second edition of this popular and authoritative text provides a truly global assessment of democratization in theory and practice in the contemporary world. It has been systematically revised and updated throughout to cover recent developments, from the impact of 9/11 and EU enlargement to the war in Iraq. "This… [new edition] is exemplary: it is very extensively updated and revised and the authors have not tried to cut corners by keeping outdated references or bits of text…. [A]n excellent textbook for undergraduate students both for its comprehensive overview of the literature and as a basis for discussion." – Anna Khakee, Democratization

Michael Bernhard

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By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Dobbs and Democracy

Harvard Law Review, Vol. 137, No. 3, p. 738, 2024

U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-41

80 Pages Posted: 9 Aug 2024

Katherine Shaw

University of Pennsylvania - Carey Law School; Yeshiva University - Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Melissa Murray

New York University School of Law

Date Written: January 11, 2024

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito justified the decision to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey with an appeal to democracy. He insisted that it was “time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” This invocation of democracy had undeniable rhetorical power: it allowed the Dobbs majority to lay waste to decades’ worth of precedent, while rebutting charges of judicial imperialism and purporting to restore the people’s voices. This Article interrogates Dobbs’s claim to vindicate principles of democracy, examining both the intellectual pedigree of this claim and its substantive vision of democracy. In grounding its decision in democracy, the Dobbs majority relied on a well-worn but dubious narrative: that Roe, and later Casey, disrupted ongoing democratic deliberation on the abortion issue, wresting this contested question from the people and imposing the Court’s own will. The majority insisted that this critique had always attended Roe. However, in tracing the provenance of the democratic deliberation argument, this Article finds more complicated intellectual origins. In fact, the argument did not surface in Roe’s immediate aftermath, but rather emerged years later. And it did so not organically, but through a series of interconnected legal, movement, and political efforts designed to undermine and ultimately topple Roe and Casey. The product of these efforts, the Dobbs majority’s claim that democracy demanded overruling Roe and Casey, was deployed to overcome the force of stare decisis in Dobbs — and may ultimately reshape the scope and substance of the Court’s stare decisis analysis in future cases. Having identified the intellectual origins of the democratic deliberation argument and its contemporary consequences, this Article examines the contours of the Dobbs majority’s vision of democratic deliberation. We show that although Dobbs trafficked in the rhetoric of democracy, its conception of democracy was both internally inconsistent and extraordinarily limited, even myopic. The opinion misapprehended the processes and institutions that are constitutive of democracy, focusing on state legislatures while overlooking a range of other federal, state, and local constitutional actors. As troublingly, it reflected a distorted understanding of political power and representation — one that makes political power reducible to voting, entirely overlooking metrics like representation in electoral office and in the ecosystem of campaign finance. The opinion was also willfully blind to the antidemocratic implications of its “history and tradition” interpretive method, which binds the recognition of constitutional rights to a past in which very few Americans were meaningful participants in the production of law and legal meaning. The deficits of the Dobbs majority’s conception of democracy appear even more pronounced when considered alongside the Court’s recent and active interventions to distort and disrupt the functioning of the electoral process. Indeed, Dobbs purported to “return” the abortion question to the people and to democratic deliberation at the precise moment when the Court’s own actions have ensured that the extant system is unlikely either to produce genuine deliberation or to yield widely desired outcomes. Ultimately, a close examination of the Dobbs majority’s invocation of democracy suggests that the majority may have employed the values and vernacular of democracy as a means to a different end. As we explain, the majority’s embrace of democracy and democratic deliberation allowed it to shield its actions from claims of judicial activism and overreach. More profoundly, and perhaps paradoxically, the opinion may lay the groundwork for the eventual vindication and protection of particular minority interests — those of the fetus. With this in mind, the Dobbs majority’s settlement of the abortion question is unlikely to be a lasting one. Indeed, aspects of the opinion suggest that this settlement is merely a way station en route to a more permanent resolution — the recognition of fetal personhood and the total abolition of legal abortion in the United States.

Keywords: abortion, democracy, reproductive rights, reproductive justice, stare decisis

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