“The rise of Homo Informaticos, namely a person relying on social media for information, places governments on a razor's edge, where any mistake, any untold event, can draw networked people into the streets. This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike; this is the crisis in the world and concerns loss of trust in government. The greater the diffusion of information to the public through social media, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear. It poses an existential challenge to the illegitimacy of every government.”
Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
In the second lecture of the Honorary Lectures on Political Economy in Memory of Alberto Alesina, Professor of the Paris School of Economics Ekaterina Zhuravskaya told about her joint with Sergei Guriev (Sciences Po) and Nikita Melnikov (Princeton University) research 3G Internet and Confidence in Government
ICT Revolution
In the past decade, the world has lived through a revolution in information and communication technologies. It was caused by the birth and then rapid expansion of the broadband mobile Internet, largely, the third generation (3G) mobile networks. 3G was the 1st generation of mobile technology that allowed users to freely stream and upload videos, to send photos immediately from anywhere they are, and that was the key driver of the fast expansion of social media. The third generation mobile networks have not only changed how much time we spend online and where we can go online, but also what we do online because social media wouldn't have spread without the 3G mobile Internet.
Meanwhile, there is an ongoing public debate about political implications of the global expansion of mobile broadband and social media. On the one hand, there are optimists who, starting with the Arab Spring, call the Internet a liberation technology for two important fundamental reasons: it has improved access of people to independent political information and enabled people to coordinate, for example, coordinate protests. On the other hand, pessimists consider the Internet and social media as misinformation technology: social media facilitate the dissemination of fake news, empower non-democratic regimes by reducing costs of surveillance and propaganda.
Research and Its Conclusions
The research is based on a combination of data on the expansion of 3G Internet across the globe over the last decade with survey data on the attitudes towards the government and the election results for the European democracies and different measures of institutional environment and corruption. The main takeaways came up: first, on average, access to 3G Internet decreases government approval and the availability of independent-of-the-government political information is one of the channels at play. The Internet helps expose actual corruption censorship, and the overall level of corruption matters a lot for the effects of 3G on government approval. This pattern also has electoral implications: incumbents lose votes with the expansion of 3G, while the populist opposition, interestingly, wins.
What could explain this effect of 3G? The first possible hypothesis is that it's probably a way for people to get information about their governments. If 3G provides citizens with negative information on their government performance, irrespective of whether this is real information or fake information, we would expect that the effect would be weaker if Internet content was censored. Meanwhile, the effect is stronger if alternative channels of information are missing or censored.
Today, there is a large number of countries which censor the Internet; most of them are in Asia, some in Europe and Africa. For countries that censor the Internet we observe that the government approval level doesn't fall with the expansion of the 3G Internet. At the same time in places with above-median censorship of the traditional media, the relationship between 3G and government approval is steeper than in places where the traditional media is freer. In other words, in places where there are other alternative sources of information independent from the government, there is no role for 3G to play in disseminating this information.
Why Confidence Falls
It should be keep in mind that social media is more prone to disseminating negative rather than positive messages because people just react more to more negative information. Another issue is that in many countries, elites have some control over the traditional media, which means that the pre-3G view of the government is too positive, and with the arrival of 3G, this positive bias gets corrected.
Some might think that social media make people somewhat sociopathic. The logic behind this is that with their expansion, we communicate with real people much less and it may make people depressed. If that's so, then the revealed effects could be just a result of the fact that people start being unhappy about everything, not just the governments. However, the research finds no impact of the arrival of 3G on the current or expected life satisfaction and standard of living. So, the effects largely relate to the information on the government. This causes voters’ disillusionment with governments which, in turn, bears electoral implications. We observe that the world share of the populist opposition both on the right and on the left increases with the arrival of 3G and at the same time, non-populist opposition, particularly green parties, are found to be unaffected.