Conventional wisdom suggests that the Internet enhances democracy. Estonian as well as other policy-makers keep following this wisdom by making investments into public initiatives aiming at engaging citizens online. The proof seems to be in the pudding. In the last four elections people have been able to submit their vote online and percentage of voters using this opportunity has increased constantly in Estonia. There is even a correlation between increased participation and votes submitted online in the last municipal elections. But we should not fall for the fallacy of electoralism – tendency to focus on elections while ignoring other political realities. Elections are necessary but certainly not sufficient prerequisites of democracy. Hence, we should look a bigger picture how the Internet affects democracy.

Matthew Hindman’s recent book The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press 2008) is great help for policy-makers in understanding the interactions between the Internet and democracy. I just published a review of his book in the Journal of Politics (Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2010). The following discussion is based on this review. Hindman provides comprehensive and methodologically vigorous research supported by extensive and detailed data. The data is based on the United States but should be relevant for policy-makers in other parts of the world as well. The findings are compelling enough to be taken seriously by researchers with diverse specializations as well as policy-makers with different persuasions, as Hindman covers a wide array: online campaigning, blogging, link structure, traffic and search and other issues are tackled in the book.

Without much theorizing on his part, the author lets the data speak for itself. He demonstrates that the Internet has not increased political mobilization and has not significantly broadened political discourse. These findings certainly challenge conventional wisdom on the democratizing power of the Internet. For instance, media reports tend to characterize online politics as being dominated by young people and used by politicians as a means to engage new generations. Hindman points out that while 43 percent of all World Wide Web traffic is generated by eighteen to thirty-four year olds, they only account for 32 percent of visits to news sites and 22 percent of visits to political sites.

The significance of his contribution comes out best in the discussion on link structure, traffic and search of political websites. Hindman establishes how so-called Googlearchy (referring to “the rule of the most heavily linked” web sites) shapes the role of political websites. This makes the link structure of the Internet a fundamental element in understanding online political activity. In collaboration with Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis and Judy Johnson, Hindman used computer science techniques to explore millions of political web pages and found that “a small set of hypersuccessful sites receives most of the links”. Substantial overlap between search results of leading search engines such as Yahoo and Google contributes to the winners-take-all patterns of online politics. This keeps public attention highly centralized. While search engines may provide opportunities for finding new sources of information, they also make it easier to visit known web sites. Most importantly, political websites are visited by an insignificant percentage of all web users: just slightly more than 0.1 percent of overall web traffic.

Extensive data in the book provides plenty of opportunities for expanding on some unexplored issues. For instance, Hindman points out some evidence for supporting the view that political websites are essentially online political echo chambers. This means that people with set ideological beliefs will visit certain websites in order to confirm their opinions rather than to seek out alternative explanations. However, the findings are not conclusive. Many political websites send or receive only trivial amount of traffic across ideological lines. Such political polarization is not the case for at least twelve of top 50 political sites, as a significant amount of traffic flows over to websites presenting competing viewpoints. Nevertheless, Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy profoundly challenges the conventional wisdom about the democratizing effect of the Internet. Policy-makers should ignore this book at their own peril.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 01:12 and is filed under In English, Meelis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.