Retooling Politics: How Digital Media Are Shaping Democracy

Andreas Jungherr · Gonzalo Rivero · Daniel Gayo-Avello

Jun. 2020 · Cambridge University Press

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Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, Brexit: digital media have provided political actors and citizens with new tools to engage in politics. These tools are now routinely used by activists, candidates, non-governmental organizations, and parties to inform, mobilize, and persuade people. But what are the effects of this retooling of politics? Do digital media empower the powerless or are they breaking democracy? Have these new tools and practices fundamentally changed politics or is their impact just a matter of degree? This clear-eyed guide steps back from hyperbolic hopes and fears to offer a balanced account of what aspects of politics are being shaped by digital media and what remains unchanged. The authors discuss data-driven politics, the flow and reach of political information, the effects of communication interventions through digital tools, their use by citizens in coordinating political action, and what their impact is on political organizations and on democracy at large.

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Andreas Jungherr is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Konstanz. His research addresses strategic adaptation to digital technology by organizations, political actors, and citizens in international comparison; he also focuses on harnessing the potential of computational social science. He is author of the books Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data and Das Internet in Wahlkämpfen (with Harald Schoen).

Gonzalo Rivero is a research data scientist at the Statistics and Evaluation Sciences Unit at Westat. His research focuses on political representation, electoral behavior, and quantitative methods for public opinion research.

Daniel Gayo-Avello is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Oviedo. His main area of interest is Web Mining with a focus on social media. He has published in venues such as Communications of the ACM, IEEE Internet Computing, and IEEE Multimedia. He co-edited a special issue of Internet Research on the predictive power of social media, and contributed a chapter on Political Opinion to the book Twitter: A Digital Socioscope.