Digital Civil Society & Democratic Erosion

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries & Politics and History
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

Through mixed-methods empirical research, my project sheds a light on digital civil society, DCS and assesses its impact on democracy that contributes to our understanding of the incoming ‘Life 3.0’ (Tegmark, 2017). I attempt to conceptualize, operationalize, and measure DCS through mixed methodology that not only ensures the robustness of this study but also helps account for the complexity of DCS. For the purpose of this project, I define DCS as occurrences and mobilizations of civil society taking place online or initiating online and continuing in the offline public sphere (Bernholz et al., 2013). To grasp the variance in the ‘DCS–traditional civil society dynamics’, I use the case study of Poland. My research questions are: 1). What is the impact of DCS on the quality of consolidated democracy?; 2). Does the erosion of democracy spur interest (likes/retweets) and an online traffic for pro-democratic DCS organizations? I am also interested in the question, 3). “in what ways are the process and outcomes of activist movements impacted by social media” (and other digital means)? (Rotman et al., 2011). In my research, I made a comparison between the Polish Committee for Democratic Defense (Komitet Obrony Demokracji, KOD), which focuses primarily on offline activism and Action Democracy (Akcja Demokracja), whose main activities happen online (McMahon & Niparko, 2022). I gauge their activism based on data publicly available through Twitter’s application programming interface (API) and other tools, such as Google Trends, or Sprinklr and CrowdTangle—the social media research and monitoring platforms. In addition, I measure the correlation between DCS indicated by the Digital Society Project dataset (Mechkova et al., 2022) and the consolidated democracy variable as measured by the Varieties of Democracy (Coppedge et al., 2022). Finally, I supplement this study with semi-structured open-ended interviews.

Author

• Łukasz Walenty Niparko, University of Nebraska-Lincoln