Abstract
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing the last several years over social media’s influence on information environments and democratic processes. This is true in the United States, where a former president and countless elected officials used social media, and other platforms, to falsely claim that Joesph Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, pundits, podcasters, and pollsters anxiously point to platforms such as Gab, Parler, and the ironically named Truth Social as havens for mis- and dis-information and as potential hubs for political radicalization. While Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani do not make any sweeping conclusions about the relative desirability of different kinds of citizen participation, particularly at the extremes, they do ask readers to pause, take a deep breath, and think more seriously about average social media users, their political experiences in digital spaces, and the implications of these experiences for political participation inside—and outside—the United States. The resulting book, Outside the Bubble: Social Media and Political Participation in Western Democracies, is a veritable treasure trove of empirical findings on social media and political participation in nine western liberal democracies.
Recentering social science research on average social media users and their experiences in digital spaces is a key contribution of the book. The authors remind us that most social media users are not particularly interested in politics and that some users actively avoid exposure to political posts and messages. Consequently, by focusing on average social media users, Vaccari and Valeriani are in a position to underscore three shortcomings that haunt the existing research on digital technologies and political participation, which they call fallacies, and address these specters head on.
In a nutshell, the current stock of knowledge tends to (1) overdetermine the importance of platform affordances on political engagement, (2) flatten the relationship between online political interactions and participation, and (3) neglect the effects of the national political context and the structure of its media system on social media use and political participation. The authors address these shortcomings in two ways. First, they draw on some 15,000 survey respondents to focus on the personal experiences of social media users with political information. Specifically, they consider the extent to which their respondents engage with messages they agree or disagree with, the frequency with which they encounter political messages accidently while on a platform for other purposes, and whether they receive messages urging them to vote for a candidate or party. Second, they assess whether these experiences are moderated by a state’s institutional characteristics, including patterns of electoral competition, whether the political system is focused on parties or candidates, and its mass media system (à la Hallin and Mancini).
The bulk of this excellent book consists of robust analyses of individuals’ personal experiences with social media and the implications for political participation. The authors make three key findings related to the fallacies outlined above. First, they find that social media platforms do not completely determine how individuals interact online or the kinds of content to which they are exposed. In aggregate, their respondents reported that they were exposed to political content with which they agree and disagree in roughly equal measure. Moreover, about half of the respondents noted that they had accidently stumbled on political news, and about a third claimed they had received content asking them to vote for a party or candidate on a social media platform.
Second, they find that social media differentially influences users’ political participation. Political content has limited influence on political junkies, or individuals who are already politically involved and turn to social media for more political content and opportunities for engagement, but boosts the participation of less politically involved users, who learn about new issues, ideas, and candidates, accidently or otherwise. Importantly, the authors find that these participatory boosts were not limited to ideological extremes, nor did they favor the center-left or center-right. The proverbial rising tide lifted all ships.
Finally, they find that the national context has mixed results on the relationship between social media and political participation. For example, they find that the effects of electoral mobilization efforts via social media are larger on users’ participation in party-centric political systems than candidate-centric ones. However, they also find that the structure of the media system didn’t always influence political participation.
In the concluding chapter of the book, the authors grapple with what their results mean for democratic theory and democracy. There are no easy answers here, and the chapter is worth a close read. The overriding message, however, is that we can exhale and perhaps wring our hands less vigorously. Social media aren’t just toxic bubbles filled with content that radicalizes the most politically extreme among us. For the average user, social media offer a diverse and rich political information ecosystem in which most users—one way or another—will be exposed to political ideas. If anything, there is reason to be optimistic about the role of social media in political participation because it reduces participation gaps by engaging the disconnected and giving them a voice in democratic processes. Hopefully, other researchers will follow Vaccari and Valeriani’s lead and focus less on the political extremes and more on average social media users, who constitute the bulk of the citizenry.