Networked Democracy
The growth of the Internet and social media have provided new opportunities for citizen expression, information-seeking, and collective mobilization. At the same time, citizens are increasingly subjected to online censorship, surveillance, harassment, and privacy violations in democratic and authoritarian contexts alike. Communicative technologies may also amplify underlying problems of late-stage democracy by exacerbating populism, nationalism, democratic dissatisfaction, and political and cultural polarization.
The implications of “networked democracy” and “networked authoritarianism” for public policy and democratic politics within the United States and abroad is a central focus of CCPP scholarship. These questions are also explored through participation in the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) where CCPP scholars have led post-election studies of political communication patterns in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, and Iran
Recent Selected Publications
- Dal., A., Nisbet, E.C., and Kamenchuk, O. (2022). Signaling Silence: Affective and Cognitive Responses
to Risks of Online Activism about Corruption in an Authoritarian Context. New Media & Society - Dal, A. and Nisbet, E.C. (2022). Walking through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context. Social Media & Society
- Dal, A. and Nisbet, E.C. (2022). To share or not to share? How emotional judgements drive online political expression in high-risk contests. Communication Research, 49(3) 353-375
- Stoycheff, E., Nisbet, E.C., and Epstein, D. (2020). Differential effects of capital-enhancing and recreational Internet use on citizens’ demand for democracy. Communication Research 47(7) 1034-1055
- Wojcieszak, M.E., Nisbet, E.C., Kremer, L., Behrouzian, G., Glynn, C. (2019). What drives media use in autocratic regimes? Extending selective exposure theory to Iran. International Journal of Press Politics 24(1), 69-91
- Nisbet, E.C., Kamenchuk, O., Dal, Aysenur (2017). A Psychological Firewall? Risk Perceptions and Public Support for Online Censorship in Russia. Social Science Quarterly. 98(3). 958-975
Recent Sponsored Projects:
- Assessing “Privacies”: Explicating and Validating the Measurement of Social Media Privacy Across Cultural-Political and Expressive Contexts (Sponsored by Facebook)
- Serbian Security & Governance Project (Sponsored by U.S. Department of State)
- A Changing Electoral Politics in Western Democracies: Comparing the 2017 British Election to France, Germany, the United States, and Southern Europe within the Comparative National Election Study (Sponsored by National Science Foundation)