15:00 - 16:40
Parallel sessions 4
+
15:00 - 16:40
P4-S79
Room: -1.A.01
Chair/s:
Despina Alexiadou
Discussant/s:
Mirko Crulli
The Consequences of the Digital Governance of Online Public Spaces by Populist Leaders
P4-S79-5
Presented by: Juan Gomez Cruces
Juan Gomez Cruces
Hasso-Plattner Institute
This paper examines how populist leaders adopt policies that influence the governance of online public spaces, shaping their functionality, accessibility, and impact on public opinion. While previous studies have explored some of the economic and democratic outcomes of populist governments, they have largely overlooked how populists in power differ from their non-populist counterparts in shaping online public spaces. The study employs a two-stage methodology. First, it uses data from the Manifesto Project and the Global Party Survey to train a Large Language Model able to distinguish party manifestos based on populist versus non-populist, right-wing versus left-wing, and liberal versus illiberal characteristics. Second, it uses this classification along with data from V-Dem and Freedom on the Net (Freedom House) to test causal relationships between various forms of populism and three key outcomes: improving access to online public spaces, imposing content limits, and protecting or violating user rights. A difference-in-differences approach is applied to establish causality. The results indicate that left-wing populists do not significantly differ from their non-populist left-wing counterparts in promoting policies that improve access to online public spaces. However, there is a causal effect of illiberal populists—regardless of ideological orientation—on increasing content restrictions. Additionally, illiberal right-wing populists are uniquely associated with violations of user rights and more restrictive access policies. This study offers a nuanced understanding of how populist governance impacts the quality of online deliberation, which, in turn, has implications for the quality of democracy given its current critical role.
Keywords: Digital governance, populism, online public spaces

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