New Insights on Tech and the Crisis of Democracy

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

On this podcast, we’ve come back again and again to questions around mis- and disinformation, propaganda, rumors, and the role that digital platforms play in anti-democratic phenomena. In a new book published this summer by Oxford University Press called Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy, a group of scholars from varied research traditions set out to find new ways to marry more traditional political science with computational social science approaches to understand the phenomenon of democratic backsliding and to bring some clarity to the present moment, particularly in the United States.

Justin Hendrix had the chance to speak to two of the volume’s editors and two of its authors:

• Steven Livingston, a professor and founding director of the Institute for Data Democracy and Politics at the George Washington University;
• Michael Miller, managing director of the Moynihan Center at the City College of New York;
• Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington and a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public; and
• Josephine Lukito, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and senior faculty research associate at the Center for Media Engagement.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm so excited to have the four of you here to talk about the ideas that are presented in this book, Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy. So many folks who have contributed to this and been part of editing it have had their ideas represented either directly or referenced or otherwise been on the pages of tech policy press over the years. I feel like this book is written to some of our core concerns, and so I'm excited to try to talk through it with you and learn a little bit more about the project and hopefully help my listeners understand the types of conclusions you've arrived at here, and what they mean for the broader project of considering the intersection of technology and democracy.

Steven, I'm going to start with you. Kind of help us understand the framework for this book. You and Michael, in particular, set this thing up and then draw it to some conclusion. You have a variety of different ways of explaining precisely what you're trying to do here. You have an introduction from Daniel Ziblatt where he asks this question, "What has given rise to the growth and endurance of the liberal right-wing radicalism and established democracies?" He sets up what he calls the conservative dilemma, and that's a term and a conceptual framework that the authors throughout this book continue to go back to and continue to apply, based on the circumstances of their particular chapters.

Steven, can you set this up for us, what's the operating framework that this book's written around?

Steven Livingston:

The origins of this book really in some sense go all the way back to an earlier social science research council project that Mike Miller and I were involved in early on called The Disinformation Age. That particular book successful, but it seemed like it needed to be theorized a bit more deeply. We needed to understand at some deeper level what was going on. And it occurred to me in thinking about this, that one of the things that would be of tremendous value would be for scholars who are working in the disinformation space, whether they were political scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, sociologists, et cetera, to avail themselves of some of the research and literature that had been written for decades within the political science amongst historians.

What the political scientists, what we call in this book, the "institutionalists," were doing, was looking at the connection between such things as the nature of the political system that leads to democratic backsliding. Are presidential systems more prone to democratic backsliding? Slipping into authoritarianism, as opposed to parliamentary systems? What about the role of civil society? What about the role of economic inequality and social inequality? Those weren't completely missing from the political communication scholarship, but the political communication scholarship tended to place emphasis on the technology. It tended to place more emphasis on cognitive processes.

And so what Mike and I did reaching out to our colleague Lance Bennett, we brought Daniel Ziblatt's concerns about these civil society organizations and economic inequality, something he wrote about in a book called Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. A book published in around 2013, a wonderful book. Daniel developed those ideas in that particular work in his discipline, and I brought on board Lance Bennett and he and I wrote a framework chapter that brought in questions about technology. But rather than using that cognitive science framework of presuming that social media platforms lead to an individual being radicalized, instead we emphasized the role of social media platforms in forming new kinds of organizations, what we call digital surrogate organizations, picking up some of the jargon that Ziblatt uses with some of our own jargon.

And a digital surrogate organization would be those kinds of collective action entities that emerge online in the form of Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags, subreddits, et cetera. They have some of the features of a conventional organization, in that they bring people together around shared values and norms. It mobilizes resources and it directs action towards the achievement of some goal and purpose. So what Lance and I were able to do is pick up some of the interests of the communication scholars, or the data scientists about social media platforms and marry it together with Ziblatt and Nancy Bermeo and others working in this political science and historical community tradition, and say, well, what we're actually looking at are forms of civil society organizations that have the tendency of pulling conventional conservative parties into authoritarian space.

Give you an example. The kinds of organizations that used to be talked about would be Evangelical Christians only, or the NRA or something like that. Those are civil society organizations. What Bennett and I in our framework chapter are able to do is say, well, but wait a minute, so is QAnon, which Jo picks up on beautifully. So is QAnon a kind of organization. So is Stop the Steal, which Kate picks up on beautifully in her contribution. These kinds of online organizations, or digital surrogate organizations, make worse the kinds of problems that Daniel Ziblatt identifies in his non-technically oriented work.

And so what Ziblatt is getting at in that foreword is, is that really in a sense what we've been able to do is marry political communication kinds of concerns, or it's a larger camp than just political communication, but technologically oriented concerns with these more traditional older social science concerns about how civil society organizations can undermine democracy.

Justin Hendrix:

So you write that, "The aim of this volume is to build on the conventional understanding of surrogate organizations with insights gained by media study scholars about the nature of organizing and organizations in digital space."

But I just want to press on one thing that keeps coming up in the volume, which is what Ziblatt calls this "conservative dilemma" and why we're sort of in dangerous terrain with the kind of combination of the online environment with these new forms of political organization that you're talking about. Can you explain the conservative dilemma, why it's important to understand?

Steven Livingston:

So one of the drivers, not only in Daniel Ziblatt's work, and again I want to differentiate it, Ziblatt's working over here with the political science, the historians, the economists and others, who have the habit of ignoring technology as a variable in their own work. So what Ziblatt describes in his book is this dilemma that conservative parties face and his is a historical analysis of late-19th century, early-20th century Europe for the most part. And here's what he found. He found that conservative parties, say the Tories or the various German conservative parties during the Weimar Republic after the first World War in Germany, these conservative parties face a dilemma.

Their closest natural constituency are the wealthy, whether the wealth is in the form of land or industrialists, et cetera, wealth takes on different forms over different historical periods of time. These conservative parties are most closely aligned with the sources of concentrated wealth. Yet, these conservative parties have to run successfully in an election. They have a couple of choices. One choice is they can just eliminate democracy, which is what happened of course in the Weimar Republic in Germany. In the case of the Tories, we don't have to go into the details of this, but the Tories, the conservative party of the UK, had a disastrous election in 1906, and there was the entertaining the possibility that the Tories would eliminate democracy in the UK.

Instead, what they ended up doing is finding a way of running successfully in an open and free and fair election in two ways. And this is picking up clearly on the framework that we're using in this volume. One, they formed alliances with what Ziblatt calls surrogate organizations. Let's simplify it, civil society organizations, but also some businesses, individual media moguls, et cetera, right? And the second thing besides forming these alliances with what he calls surrogate organizations, they had to discover, look for cross-cutting cleavage issues. Fancy political science term, simply means issues that have the capacity of pulling together a coalition from across different classes. Those cross-class coalition issues tend to be hot button issues. They're culture war issues.

In the case of the British, after the 1906 election, three issues animated the conversation in conservative British politics. Preserving the monarchy, preserving the Church of England, opposing independence for Ireland. Those were the motivating issues that allowed the conservative party to form a cross-class coalition that allowed it to run successfully in elections. What we are arguing in this particular volume that QAnon, for example, and some of the dominant issues that we're hearing a lot about these days with Jeffrey Epstein, et cetera, that QAnon pushed a cross-cutting cleavage issue in alliance with the Republicans with surrogate organizations, including podcasters, et cetera, that allowed the Republicans not to run on what one might reasonably assume to be a really important issue for the United States right now. That three people own as much as the bottom 160 million Americans, that 45% of Americans couldn't afford a unexpected $400 bill.

None of those issues came up in conversation. Instead, it's all about trans, it's all about hot button issues that allow the Republicans to form a cross-class coalition and be triumphant in recent elections. So that's the way in which this idea works.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, Michael, I might bring you in here as well and just ask, how do you feel at the moment? The circumstances in the US, how would you characterize them? Why do they make this a conservative dilemma, particularly prickly one for our present moment?

Michael Miller:

It's interesting. We started working on this, I believe in 2020. We put together a group of folks who were thinking about topics related to the subject in 2020. And of course that was in the middle of COVID and it took us a while to actually get together in a room. Then it took a while for the book to finally come together and then to come out in print. And for a good while there I kind of thought, I wonder if this will still have the same relevance when it comes out five years after we started thinking about it. And alas, it feels more relevant than it even did in 2020. And the Big Beautiful Bill I think is pretty indicative of the core thesis, which is that conservative parties do have historically a natural constituency and that is the wealthy. And those policies may not, at least on the face, they don't seem to benefit materially as many folks in the country.

And this bill massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and it's likely to be an increased tax burden for poor folks, with cuts to Medicaid, etc. All the while the dominant story in the media is related to conspiracies and folks who've taken on prominent positions in this administration cut their teeth peddling in conspiracies online. And were part of these kind of liminal networks of folks who are connected through the comment sections of podcasters. And it's pretty notable to think that the head of the FBI and the deputy of the FBI were peddling conspiracies that they said that they would get to the bottom to when they got into office. And now have finally caught the proverbial firetruck and don't know what to do.

Which I think is suggested by this model that when you are relying on non-party groups, surrogates, to mobilize really disparate groups of people who otherwise might not have any similar material interests, it becomes unwieldy. And I think we're seeing that right now, precisely how unwieldy it is. And it seems he's got a pretty good track record thus far, of being able to reel it in and being able to get folks back behind him, Trump that is. But for a moment it seems like it may have gotten a little bit out of hand because there's just that network of surrogates is really vast and variegated, and I think frankly unwieldy.

Justin Hendrix:

I think it makes sense to maybe bring you in here, Kate. This book's asking a lot of questions. One of them is how do digital-enabled organizational forms affect the stability of liberal democracy? Kate, this has been what you're working on for years now and particularly what you've been looking at with regard to Stop the Steal and the Big Lie and your thinking around participatory disinformation in this moment. Yes, where so many of these figures that you would have studied their influence in your past research are now sitting in seats of power. I don't know, what do you make of this moment? How do you connect it to your work on the Big Lie and Stop the Steal?

Kate Starbird:

Michael said it extremely well and explained some of these dynamics. For 10-plus years we've been studying the dynamics of online rumors and Steven set it up. My team comes from human-computer interaction from data science from cognitive science, got a little sociology, we're interdisciplinary, but we didn't come from political science. We've been studying online organizing since the early 2010s, but not necessarily in the context of political organizing. And in the last few years really have seen these dynamics that we've been studying of rumors and misinformation and disinformation become more and more salient in politics, in everything. Characters that we saw that were fringe characters spreading fringe conspiracy theories go from sort of like we're afraid to even talk about them because it's kind of like it just doesn't feel right, it feels almost embarrassing or cringe. And then now these folks are not just in the head of the FBI, but they're Health and Human Services, National Intelligence, you name it, they're there.

And they sort of gathered their power and their position from spreading a certain kind of, not even spreading to tapping into what I see as these online dynamics where you've got these intersections between influencers and political elites on the right and the conservative side, the left has similar things but not quite as crystallized. Tapping into these sort of audience relationships with influencers where audience and influencers sort of co-create a kind of grievance based propaganda that spins this system.

Our work comes in looking at disinformation from 2016 thinking about it. Okay, it's this top-down thing, and what we see is it's not a top-down thing at all. Everyday people, especially with the Big Lie, which we've seen, but not just that we've seen it also with anti-immigrant propaganda and other kinds of things. Where we see influencers kind of say, hey, we're talking about this kind of thing. Or they set a frame for the day or the week or the year, and audience members begin to sort of co-create the content. And sometimes the audiences, we can see them sort of nudging the influencers in certain kinds of directions. The influencers, the elites don't necessarily have control of what the conversation is.

They can nudge it in certain directions, but they're in large part shaped by the audiences themselves. We talk about this as this idea of an influencer. They're the ones influencing, but actually in the modern information environment, influence works in both directions. And we've used some other kinds of metaphors of improvisational performance and other kinds of things, but we can worry about audiences being radicalized by influencers, but we can also worry about elites and influencers being radicalized by audiences. And that's kind of the participatory cycle that we're seeing. And we've called it participatory disinformation. We've called it participatory propaganda and other kinds of things, but certainly on the conservative side, this has been a driving force of almost a snowball picking up energy as it rolls downhill in our information environment, in our political environment. And that's not just happening in the United States, this is a global phenomenon.

Justin Hendrix:

Jo, good place to bring you in. Let's talk about your chapter on QAnon, in particular, which of course has a role in the Big Lie and Stop the Steal. And certainly even on January 6th, the physical presence of QAnon supporters and the iconography of QAnon seems indelibly combined with that day. But how would you relate QAnon to the conversation here?

Josephine Lukito:

Yeah, I think QAnon presents a really salient ideal case for studying digital surrogates, particularly given some of the practices that Kate and others have mentioned in this conversation. Just the way that digital surrogates engage in participatory democracy, the way that they build relationships with political actors, particularly within the Republican Party, I think makes itself a really good case to study, which is why you see so many chapters discuss it. And I think for me in particular, one of the things that we really glean from our analysis of QAnon from their inception during Pizzagate all the way till now is the way in which they build not just their digital conversations and their narratives or their spaces, but how they build their relationship to the Republican Party.

And I think it's really worth emphasizing that there's this mutual relationship. It's not just that QAnon gains political leverage from the Republican Party, but the Republican Party also gains a constituency. And so both QAnon as well as the Republican Party are incentivized to keep this relationship going no matter how advantageous it is to extremist communities. And no matter how much it contributes to Democratic backsliding. And I think at the time, to Mike's point earlier, I had thought after we had written this chapter, we were starting to see this sort of dying down of QAnon, particularly after January 6th. There was a lot of conversation about, well, maybe these sort of digital surrogates, these conspiratorial communities are moving away into fringe communities.

And of course, that was not the case, right? We see this resurgence of conversations about a pedophilic cabal, particularly around the 2024 elections. And then of course now we see, as many of the other folks have mentioned, this movement, I'd say, or this appointments of conspiracy theorists of media actors holding these now very prominent political positions. I think often of Pete Hegseth and his position as the Secretary of Defense. And he didn't gain that because of his military prowess. Many people during the time of his appointment pointed to the fact that he was a prominent anchor on Fox & Friends, and given his media persona, that was much more of the justification for his appointment.

And so we see now, especially during this administration, the amplification, not just the media platforming, but the political appointing of these conspiratorial actors, these digital surrogates now being rewarded for their alliance with Donald Trump.

Justin Hendrix:

Let me ask you a question about QAnon, and Kate maybe you could come in on this as well, but I want to maybe just zero in a little bit on the role of technology platforms in the proliferation of QAnon and the extent to which that was a crucial piece of it. Can you separate in your mind the journey from fringe group to digital surrogate status that QAnon represents? Can you separate it from QAnon's presence on large technology platforms, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or YouTube?

Josephine Lukito:

I think QAnon draws very much from these platform affordances and what they're able to achieve, not only on these mainstream platforms, but on fringe platforms in particular. So platforms such as Telegram or Truth Social, which we know is perhaps conceived in some way by Donald Trump he's who's most well known on that space. But I think these platforms and the ability for them to bring fringe ideas and fringe actors together is really important for the sort of patterns that Kate had mentioned with participatory democracy. I think it's very hard to imagine a world where if we didn't have this technology, say we were still living in the times where we were sending mail to each other, it would be very hard, not impossible, but difficult, I think to build as robust of an active community that we see now.

And especially when we think about its relationship, the way in which these conspiracy groups such as QAnon not only co-opt and co-create these sort of conspiracies together, but the way in which they then amplify them, get the attention of media actors to believe there is a pedophilic cabal that is behind the scenes of the US government and somehow Donald Trump will take that down. That sort of narrative would not have made its way into Fox News if it didn't have this groundswell bottom-up support coming from many, many people who do actively believe in this conspiracy theory.

And then the last thing I want to highlight is the resilience of these communities, especially because of digital technologies. So particularly after January 6th, we saw a widespread platform suspension of people who believed in the Big Lie and people who believed in QAnon. But these actors didn't just disappear because they were operating on digital technology they were able to migrate or move from mainstream platforms to these alt-tech platforms where they were able to still maintain their resiliency, grow support, and operate in the darkness even without being on these mainstream platforms.

Kate Starbird:

Yeah. I just want to echo things from Jo there. It's not just that the internet allows people to come to together. It's not any one sort of affordance, it's just the participatory nature of online technology that allows people to connect in new and different ways. And this is not necessarily a problem. We see all this amazing kind of online organizing. I wrote my dissertation in 2012 on how people organize during disaster events to help each other and to help people halfway across the world with disaster response. QAnon uses the same affordances, many of the same kinds of technologies. It gives its participants many of the same kinds of rewards of feeling like they're part of something, feeling like they're part of a community, like they're helping, they're saving children from pedophilia.

And so it's no different than other kinds of online organizing in so many ways. And yet it has taken on these very sort of toxic manifestations and has led to these really interesting reconfigurations of power. And again, you don't just take one system and have it work differently or suspend some accounts, it's really difficult to intervene in any way in that kind of ground up participatory organizing.

Steven Livingston:

I want to just jump in on what Kate was just saying. Perhaps she doesn't remember this, but I first became aware of her work because I was interested in the very same thing. I was interested in how various digital technologies were facilitating war crimes investigations and human rights investigations. And then at some point this disinformation space became, I became aware of it. What is interesting though for me and what Kate just said is that the very same affordances facilitated these humanitarian endeavors can also facilitate democratic backsliding. That's my principal concern, how democratic institutions are eroded through disinformation and other online means. And to go back to one of the parallels that Mike and I and Lance Bennett also is trying to make here, is that that same sort of Janus face quality to civil society organizations is present as well. If you were to pay attention to the work of Robert Putman, the famous political sociologist at Harvard who gave us Bowling Alone, his great concern in his work is that there aren't enough civil society organizations and social capital is eroding, right?

So he wants more civil society organizations, whether they be bowling leagues or Elk clubs or whatever the case may be. But what his work doesn't miss is that the Janus face quality. I don't mean to cast aspersions at my eminent colleague, Robert Putnam, but what that body of work tends to not pay attention to is like technology, civil society organizations can also include democratically, inimical kinds of organizations. The Ku Klux Klan is a civil society organization. Various kinds of white supremacy or neo-Nazi groups are, they're not Elk clubs, but they're civil society organizations. That sort of same Janus-faced quality also presents itself when, to use our concept, digital organizations are available.

You have some civil society organizations that are there for the purpose of providing humanitarian relief or response to disasters, et cetera. But you also have the same technologies, the same organizing effects manifesting in such things as the Boogaloo Boys or Stop the Steal or QAnon. And what does this tell us? I think what this tells us is is that we need, as scholars, we need to stop saying, oh, well, it's all the technology's fault. It's a bit more complicated than that. Technology facilitates human will, but it's the human will, it's the intentionality behind it that produces the outcome that technologies facilitate. Whether it's Ushahidi to a mapping system, a crowdsourcing mapping system to respond to disaster reliefs, or if it's a subreddit that's being used to organize white supremacist rallies.

Justin Hendrix:

There are many other ideas that are presented in this book that try to get at different aspects of this. From Steven Feldstein looking at the propaganda feedback loop with more traditional conservative media, Adam Hilton, on how the parties organize themselves. The extent to which the parties have been hollowed out in this particular environment that we're in today, particularly the Democratic Party and its relationship to advocacy organizations. There's a focus on this idea of demographic determinism by Andrew Ifedapo Thompson. And I want to pause on that for a second because part of this book seems to me each of the authors on some level are kind of engaging with big narratives and how those play out in different circumstances, certainly through things like QAnon or things like Stop the Steal.

But also with regard to broader narratives about the economic circumstances of the US or other countries. There's a chapter, for instance, on Germany and the AFD. Narratives around migration. Narratives around how the economy works. So I kind of want to just bring that into the conversation, the role of narrative in this work and the way that you think about that. I don't know, Michael, maybe it's a place to point to you and Steven, Kate, Jo, if you want to comment on that as well.

Michael Miller:

I think it's a great way to frame what ties some of these topics together. And it's actually, I don't know if I thought about it precisely like this, Justin, but I think it's apt. All right, if you need to mobilize folks who may not share the same material interests, how do you do that? You mobilize them around particular narratives, and I think that's a lot of what these cross-cutting cleavages are, that right? They're about status threats. They're about cultural norms that people feel uncomfortable that are being changed and they feel the ground is moving beneath them. What these narratives about, again, like pedophilia rings or the nature of identity in the 21st century are powerful, right?

They make people feel things and those feelings can be anger, they can be anxiety, they can be connectedness with other people who feel those same things and may ultimately be mobilized to go vote for one party, again, that's going to ultimately fleece them. And I think that's what has come to pass or what is about to come to pass.

Kate Starbird:

We've been trying to, in fact, I think Steven's witnessed as well, where we had a conference that was focused on narrative and we were trying to talk about it, conceptualize it, operationalize it in our research. And we came away talking about frames and framing because narrative was hard to operationalize and a lot of the data that we had. And so our team has really been focused in the last few years on thinking about the role of frames and framing in these propaganda campaigns that we see. And one of the things that this has helped us do is see a lot of these dynamics as manipulation, dynamics of disinformation and propaganda, especially participatory disinformation as manipulations both at the frame level and the fact level.

And what we often see is a frame is put out or developed or promoted by these surrogate organizations or the influencers or even the elites. And the frame could be anti-DEI or anti-trans or voter fraud frames and different kinds of things. And those are sort of salient in the moment they're promoted. And then everyday people go out and they produce the evidence to fit these frames. They use these frames, they misinterpret their own experiences. And so for the voter fraud frames, we could see people thinking that they were going to be defrauded or thinking they were going to be cheated, go into the voting booth or go into their mailbox and misinterpret what they were seeing through this lens and think that there was voter fraud.

And then they would share that and the influencers would amplify it. And so we almost see this sort of a combination of frames and evidence sharing as a important part of the dynamics of how participatory propaganda, participatory disinformation takes shape. And we can show that over and over again from the voter fraud stuff, the DEI stuff, they're eating the pets things over and over again these same dynamics are taking place. And I tried to articulate, I think for the first time in that chapter, for this chapter in this particular book, but we've continued to talk about it.

One student that I'm working with, Steohen Prochaska, has also tried to map that back to stories and narrative. In really kind of thinking about the relationship between these individual frames to the deep stories that animate action on the right, that tie people together, that give a shared sense of shared grievance, shared values, shared understandings of the world. And that's been a really valuable way that we've finally found to connect this sort of dynamics that we're seeing between frame manipulation and evidence generation and this concept of narrative, these deep stories that seem to be tied to identity and all these other things.

Josephine Lukito:

Yeah. I'm going to pick back off of what Kate said just because I think you did a really good job crystallizing the complexity of narratives and the complexity of framing and also the importance of it. The way in which we as a society and societies as a whole use narratives to make sense of demographic changes, to make sense of things happening in society, to make sense of things happening politically. And I think one of the nice things about the concept of digital surrogates and the work that we're doing in this book is that we're combining not just this understanding of narratives and sense making, deep stories and conventional discourses, but we're connecting that to technology.

How do we then take these narratives and actually share them out and connect with other people and talk about them? And yes, sometimes those can be positive narratives or narratives that are supposed to improve democracy, but just as easily these narratives can be leveraged by elite actors, can be leveraged by conspiracy theorists to advance anti-democratic practices.

One tiny thing I wanted to mention, I think when it comes to QAnon narratives and frames in particular, and when I think about conspiracy theories as a whole, is that there is a little bit of a grain of truth or I think something that people believe in that underlies these sort of conspiracies. Which is to say, I think on a whole, society believes that pedophilia is wrong and is a bad practice and people should not be engaging in it. Now, I think there's many steps that go from pedophilia is wrong to there is a worldwide pedophilic cabal that is eating children, and most of the Democrats are in this cabal.

I think the question for us as researchers across many disciplines is how do we get from the one thing, pedophilia is bad to this more extreme conspiratorial belief? And I think a lot of that comes through participatory democracy building evidence that is confirmed by other people in your community that is amplified by elites who can take advantage of these things. And so I think there's, Mike used the term complex, and that's probably the best way to describe our media ecosystem right now, particularly in digital media, is one that is complex and can be very much taken advantage of.

Steven Livingston:

I couldn't agree more with my colleagues and what you said. If I might please let me try to, once again, help the listeners viewers understand how all of this fits together. The moving parts of the framework really are quite simple. A lot of it rests with Daniel Ziblatt's original argument about the conservative dilemma and the necessity of parties that are historically attached to wealthy elites. What do they do to win an election? They do two things. They form alliances with what he calls surrogate organizations. One of the principle contributions, intended contributions of the edited volume is to expand that notion of surrogate organizations to include what we're calling digital surrogate organizations. Which is to say online collective action entities that take on the characteristics of an organization. That's number one.

Number two of the Ziblatt model is what the political scientists and lovely political science jargon call cross-cutting cleavage issues. Let's instead call them narratives, let's call them frames, let's call them stories that have what effect? They have the effect of being able to motivate people from different social classes, whether you are poor or rich, to get on board with a particular candidate or platform. That's what it's all about. QAnon was one of those, but in different places, in different times it's been different issues, but at the heart of it are narratives really. And I like that term, but I love the fact that Kate and her team are bringing back this really standard political communication concept called framing.

My now retired colleague Robert Entman, Projections of Power, in his many articles about framing come to mind when Kate is using these concepts. And so one of the things or one of the benefits of this particular edited volume is it's bringing together some of the classic literature with cutting edge research on technology, as Jo was implying just a moment ago. And I think that's one of the strengths of this. I really must take a moment though as a co-editor of this to call out the fact that Curd Knüpfer and Ulrike Klinger, our two German colleagues, really brought home in their particular contribution, the centrality of narratives. It was Curd and Ulrike who really brought home this idea that were really talking about the power of particular kinds of narratives.

And Christopher Sebastian Parker and Rachel Blum do the same thing, but in their particular focus, they're looking at the role of race in American politics. But again, it's a long-standing issue or narrative structure that has that capacity to mobilize support from across classes.

Justin Hendrix:

And I suppose potentially those forces once unleashed, you don't know exactly where they're going to go. You write at one point about the idea that some of these short-term political tactics, I suppose to take advantage of frames or narratives, stories, maybe you want to win an election, hold onto power, but that can of course lead to destabilizing effects on democratic institutions. I suppose it could also consume the individuals that attempt to utilize those frames, which is I feel like what we might be seeing a little bit of right now with Donald Trump and the Epstein concern. But perhaps I'll set that aside only to maybe move to one thing that I wanted to make sure to get to in the few minutes that we have left, which is that Michael, in the final chapter, you have a kind of commentary on the research trajectory, the field, and what these types of considerations have looked like certainly since 2016, where they need to go.

You say democracy is perched on a powder keg with political pyromaniac stoking matches left and right. But you also essentially challenge academia, researchers to begin to form new hypotheses about where to go next. I don't know, what would you tell the listener about what you think the project of considering the intersection of tech and democracy should look like going forward?

Michael Miller:

That's a lot of pressure. I guess, and I invite my colleagues to weigh in on this as well, I guess my main advice to the research community is, and this is the origins of this book are informed by this. Not to get too siloed in our own disciplinary communities or in our own hypotheses about how the world does work. I think that for a while, and I'd certainly come out of this tradition, folks really wanted to make a lot or maybe too much of the impact of innovations in novel technology. And I think it's right to grapple with the impact of AI and with social media, et cetera. But as Steven Feldstein points out in his chapter, these technology don't exist outside of a broader context that includes mass media, like Fox News that includes the radio.

And I think a lot of the radicalization, especially on the right, it happened over the radio in the last 25, 30 years. And so my suggestion would be, don't stop talking to people who do different kinds of research than you do. Don't stop talking to people who use different methods than you do. Don't stop talking to folks who are in different disciplines and are reaching different conclusions than you are because the world is messy and complex. Politics and technology matter, they both do.

Steven Livingston:

Let me piggyback on Michael's response to your question, if I might for a moment. That last chapter, what he and I are trying to do is really offer some guidance and also do a brief history of how we responded to events in 2016. There was an extraordinarily well-intentioned and not without a lot of merit effort on the part of some really farsighted folks in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere to martial foundation support to investigate the way and the role of social media in leading to what many rightly understood even in 2016 as being an example of democratic backsliding, democratic erosion. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency, at the same time Brexit had just happened. And there was even back then, way back then, there was clear signs, clear evidence that authoritarianism was emerging in Europe and North America.

And so these foundations brought together some experts. They did a great job, issued a report. We talk about it in the last chapter of the book. But the implicit hypothesis left out the Daniel Ziblatts of the world. It left out the Nancy Bermeos of the world. It left out the political science and the history and the economics literature that had been grappling with the question of democratic backsliding for decades. And instead, the implicit sole hypothesis, not always sole, but often was, well, if we want to understand Donald Trump and democratic backsliding in 2016, we just need to look at the social media platforms. Not taking in consideration all of those economic factors that probably led people to be pretty pissed off even before they went on their social media platforms.

And so what Michael and I point out there is that that sort of initial burst of energy, along with over $70 million in funding that emerged, and Kate and I benefited from it, so did Michael. So we're a part of that. But there is also an implicit argument that says, well, it all has to do with the way in which the human mind works and it's cognition and it's the role of disinformation and triggering cognitive biases. All true. All true. That's not wrong, though Michael and I in that last chapter point out that literature suffers from replication crises. It's got problems that often aren't talked about when it goes from cognitive science into political science.

And so what we are arguing in the end in that is, and throughout the entire book, is that we need to not only have individual level effects that rest on the notion that social media trigger individuals to somehow go down rabbit holes and then they become individually radicalized. But as Lance Bennett and I talk about it in the opening chapter, we need an explanation as to how radicalized individuals are brought together on social media platforms, and that you turn the analysis into an organizational level affects understanding of democratic backsliding.

You add to the notion that individuals are radicalized online to say yes, but what happens next? What happens next is that they form organizational-like structures that then pull, in our case, the Republican Party into authoritarian terrain. So you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon candidate becoming a member of Congress. And then as my colleagues have pointed out, you've got all the conspiracy theorists now in positions of power, including they didn't point this out, including our president who got his start in politics with the birther conspiracy theory. So we have conspiracy theorists now who have taken over institutions through these organizational mechanisms.

Josephine Lukito:

I'd be remiss if I also didn't mention the political pressure and current threats impacting people who are studying technology and politics right now. And we see this particularly with the current administration, continual attacks at the fiscal level when it comes to grants at the digital harassment or efforts to censor this sort of important research on disinformation on technology and policy, and the impact that these political actors play digitally. And I think for anyone who's doing this research, it's so incredibly important to persevere. And I think if there's any listeners out there who's doing that work, please continue doing the work that you do.

Michael Miller:

Hear, hear.

Steven Livingston:

Kate, I want to hear what you have to say to this issue. Kate has just been such a driving force and courageous actor in this space.

Kate Starbird:

We continue to do our work, and the funding environment is definitely challenging, but it is not going to completely deter us. We have got amazing students and faculty at the University of Washington who continue, and we've got colleagues like Jo around the country that face different situations that are challenging in this space. And it is wild that we have to say, you have to be brave in order to do the kind of work that we're doing. You can then see just how effective that their effort to censor us has been. Just the fact that Jo has to bring that up should be something that I think people know, but maybe they don't. Maybe they don't realize how it has been an act of bravery to be studying these topics.

It always has been due to the chance of harassment, but now that harassment isn't just a random person on the internet, it can be someone with more power than anyone else in the world. In the case of folks like President Trump and Elon Musk who engage in some of these conversations and levy accusations against folks that do this kind of work. And so yeah, we're just going to keep on doing it. I will say you go through the fire and you get some scars and then you realize that you're okay, and so I think in some ways some of us have already experienced some of what this has to offer and have made the decision to keep going. And because I think this kind of work is really just so important right now for eliminating what's happening, maybe for helping people make different choices that can turn back some of these changes to democracy that are happening.

And maybe we're just leaving breadcrumbs for someone in 50 years to pick up and be like, what happened here and how can we prevent it in the future? I hope it's not that last scenario, but no matter what it is, I'm committed to continuing this work and I work with a lot of brave scholars who are continuing this work as well.

Justin Hendrix:

There's a lot more that we didn't discuss in this book. I would point people towards many interesting parts, David Karpf, on how advocacy organizations use data analytics, digital listening, and the rise of the liberal politics. An interesting tangent into Japan and an online organization there that I didn't know about before reading this book. So many different other aspects that I would commend the listener to in this volume, Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy.

Kate, Jo, Michael, Steven, thank you very much for joining me.

Steven Livingston:

Thank you for having us.

Josephine Lukito:

Thanks, Justin.