Digital Threats to Democracy - Studies in Digital Politics and Digitalization Policy-Making

PhD defence by Mads Vestergaard.

Assessment Committee

  • Associate Professor Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen, Chair (University of Copenhagen)
  • Associate Professor Linnet Taylor (Tilburg Institute for Law)
  • Professor David Budtz Pedersen (Aalborg University)

Moderator of the defence

  • Associate Professor Søren Overgaard (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of the Copenhagen University Library, South Campus
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
  • At the Department of Communication, Karen Blixens Plads 8

Abstract

The thesis examines threats posed to democracy by digitalization.

The first part addresses political misinformation and its potential impact on democracy. It illustrates how misinformation, increasingly afforded technologically and incentivized economically in the novel media environment, may pose a threat to democracy. Post-factual democracy is defined and connected to the digitalized and networked media environment in which polarizing populist narratives of us and them are highly successful at the expense of sound factual information. It introduces a notion and ideal of factual democracy in which a division of labour between citizens and their political representatives on the one hand and experts on the other is in place ensuring that the citizens hold political authority, thus avoiding technocratic governance, while the experts hold the epistemic authority, thus avoiding post-factual disregard for facts and evidence.

The second part explores the digital transformation of the attention economy of political communication. Its baseline is George Franck’s attention economic framework according to which attention plays the part of both currency and capital. In this economy, the media plays the role of the financial institutions granting (attention) credits while speculating in maximizing attracted attention. This structural analogy between finance and political communication, suggested by Franck, is updated to the current data-driven media environment. It is also extended to include notions of speculative bubbles of attention introducing and defining news bubbles and political bubbles - both of which may work as distractions undermining the ability to politically address what really matters. The structural analysis suggests that the digital transformation of the attention economy of political communication may incentivize and increase news and politics produced and supplied according to (consumer) demand potentially undermining the ability to address and mitigate pressing societal problems politically.

The final part turns from digital politics and communication to digitalization policy-making and the question of technological determinism. It empirically investigates recent official Danish policy papers pertaining to digitalization. It examines and discusses inherent assumptions and narratives of digitalization as an inevitable accelerating technological development to which democratic polities can only adapt, but not influence. Such inevitabilist narratives, it is argued, may undermine the prospect of collective democratic agency vis-a-vis technological development - thus potentially contributing ideologically to political apathy.