3G Internet and Confidence in Government

Abstract

How does the internet affect government approval? Using surveys of 840,537 individuals from 2,232 subnational regions in 116 countries in 2008-2017 from the Gallup World Poll and the global expansion of 3G networks, we show that an increase in internet access reduces government approval and increases the perception of corruption in government. This effect is present only when the internet is not censored and is stronger when traditional media is censored. Actual incidents of corruption translate into higher corruption perception only in places covered by 3G. In Europe, the expansion of mobile internet increased vote shares of anti-establishment populist parties.

Does digitalization improve government effectiveness? Evidence from developing and developed countries

“…Furthermore, some studies have addressed the effect of ICTs on trust between citizens and the government (Guriev et al, 2019;Porumbescu, 2016;Gracia & Arino, 2015;Parent et al, 2005).…”

Facebook Causes Protests

“…Müller and Schwarz exploit Facebook and Internet outages(Müller & Schwarz, 2019a) and the rise of Donald Trump together with Twitter usage(Müller & Schwarz, 2019b) to show that social media increases hate crimes in Germany and the US, respectively. Bursztyn, Egorov, Enikolopov, and Petrova (2019) also find that social media influences the rate of hate crimes in Russia.4Guriev, Melnikov, and Zhuravskaya (2019) show that increased access to 3G networks reduced government approval in a sample of 116 countries and, in European democracies, the vote shares of antiestablishment populist parties.5 One paper that goes beyond documenting the uses of social networks to evaluate their impact isLarson, Nagler, Ronen, and Tucker (2019), who collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protests in Paris, recording both real-world protest attendance and social network structure. They show that the protesters are significantly more connected to one another relative to comparable Twitter users.…”

The Political Economy of Populism

“…In Figure 5, we consider four alternative classifications of populist parties and produce a population-weighted annual average populist vote share in Europe from 2000 to 2018 (using the latest election). 15 All classifications show steady growth of populist vote shares 15 The respective country samples are (i ) Algan et al (2017)-EU-28 excluding Croatia, Latvia, Lithua- 2017), Guriev, Melnikov, and Zhuravskaya (2019), Rooduijn et al (2019), populismindex.com (accessed in October 2019.…”

“…After 2008, the spread of the internet resulted in higher support for the populist Five-Star Movement, which consciously used online media to connect to voters; M5S got a larger number of votes in municipalities with higher broadband internet penetration. Guriev, Melnikov, and Zhuravskaya (2019) consider the impact of the expansion of mobile broadband internet on the rise of populism across 398 subnational regions in 33 European democracies covering 102 elections between 2007 and 2018. The rollout of thirdgeneration (3G) mobile telecommunications affects both left-wing and right-wing populist vote share.…”