The Internet, political trust, and regime types: a cross-national and multilevel analysis

Abstract

The Internet has played important roles in driving political changes around the world. Why does it help to topple political regimes in some places but improve the quality of governance in others? We found Internet usage in general leads to citizens’ distrust in political institutions. Different political environments, however, can condition such trust-eroding impacts of the Internet in significantly different ways. A democracy enables citizens to connect their online behaviors and offline expression and organization, releasing political discontent while facilitating state–society communication. On the contrary, by restricting various forms of off-line expression, authoritarian regimes drive Internet-active citizens' discontent and distrust to higher levels. We use the World Values Survey data to establish these different mechanisms across democracies and authoritarian systems. Entropy balancing shows our findings to be highly robust.

Modeling Social Media Effects on Political Distrust in Lebanon

“…An approach that discusses the positive effects of social media on political trust (Anduiza et al, 2009;Norris, 2000;Valenzuela et al, 2009). The second approach discusses the negative effects of social media on political trust (Bekmagambetov et al, 2018;Ceron, 2015;You & Wang, 2020) and the third approach, i.e., the party approach, looks at the effects of the media on political trust (Klein & Robison, 2020). Optimists positively assess the effect of social media on political trust.…”

Ensuring the constitutional rights and freedoms of a person with the help of the latest information technologies

“…Особый интерес вызывает научное исследование [20], основанное на данных социологических опросов World Values Survey (WVS) [21], которое показывает, что использование интернета оказывает негативное влияние на политическое доверие как в демократических, так и в недемократических странах. Однако негативный эффект в демократических странах оказывается существенно ниже, нежели в недемократических.…”

The effect of the media in times of political distrust: the case of European countries

“…It encourages political interest among those who are not typically engaged (Davis & Owen, 1998) and may be a tool for either democratisation or authoritarianism (Best & Wade, 2009), with its effects contingent on the political environment in question (Cho, 2014). Offering a different means of obtaining information (Hill & Hughes, 1998), use of the internet seems to turn people away from involvement in the political arena (Sunstein, 2001) disconnecting citizens from the political community and fostering critical citizenship (You & Wang, 2019).…”