How Technology Influences Politics

Advances in how we communicate will continue to create opportunities for those who want to sow division.

- Johan Fourie

Social media has changed politics. It is now much easier for leaders to talk directly to their followers. In the US, Barack Obama was one of the first presidents to use social media to bolster support. Donald Trump tweets almost daily to his more than 88m followers.

Twitter and other social media do not only benefit political incumbents. A recent study forthcoming in Management Science calculates the additional campaign contributions that politicians, who run for the US Congress, received after they began using Twitter. The authors estimate that “the differential effect of opening a Twitter account in regions with high versus low levels of Twitter penetration, amounts to an increase of 0.7% to 2% in donations for all politicians and 1% to 3.1% for new politicians, who were never elected to the Congress before”. When experienced politicians join Twitter, the effects are “negligibly small”. This, the authors argue, shows that social media can reduce the barriers to entry in politics.

But this direct line of communication can also have a dark side. History can help us to understand why. The radio, for example, brought major changes to how information and beliefs disseminated in society. A remarkable study by a University of Pittsburgh PhD student, Tianyi Wang, demonstrates the power that this new form of communication yielded. Wang investigates the first populist radio personality in American history, a man by the name of Father Charles Coughlin. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Father Coughlin blended populist demagoguery, anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies to create a hugely popular radio programme that attracted tens of millions of listeners. Wang wants to know what the effect of Father Coughlin’s populism was on American voters.