Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism: The Power of the Internet in the post-Soviet World

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Töpfl
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251946504

Whenever protest arose recently in non-democratic regimes across the globe, mass media were quick to speak of Twitter Revolutions or Facebook uprisings. In parallel, in academic journals, a vibrant debate has evolved around how internet-mediated communication affects non-democratic politics. However, while essayistic treatment of this question has been pervasive, a strong body of research on the topic is only in the emerging. Most importantly, in this literature, there is still a surprising scarcity of case-based, cross-national research. This striking lack of comparative research is highly unfortunate because it significantly limits the ability of researchers to claim validity for their findings beyond the specific national context they investigate. To address this gap, this project will compare phenomena of internet-mediated communication (and their consequences) across three (semi-)authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet world.The project s central research question can thus be formulated as follows: how has the rapid rise of internet-mediated communication in the past decade changed political communication, politics, and polities across the post-Soviet world? To address this question, the project is divided in five subprojects. Each subproject will investigate communicative change in relation to one of the following theoretical key concepts: (1) political representation, (2) decoding of political news; (3) news literacies of audiences; (4) political scandal, and (5) authoritarian deliberation. Working with these concepts is highly innovative because most previous research has focused on political key events like election campaigns or protest. By contrast, the five concepts suggested here concern forms of everyday mediation of authoritarian rule that are pivotal to the long-term stability of contemporary (semi-)authoritarian regimes.In terms of empirical data collection, the project will focus on three countries: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. These countries were selected because they cover the full range of political regime types that have emerged in the post-Soviet region since the fall of Communism (diverse cases). Moreover, despite the central relevance of these countries to the energy and military security of the European Union, they have been scarcely researched to date. Particularly with regard to Belarus and Ukraine, the project will therefore have to chart out largely new terrain. To date, no major study addressing the central research question with regard to these two countries has been published in major communications or political science journals.Filling in this gap, the project will make highly visible theoretical contributions to the recently vibrant debates on de-westernizing media studies and the mediatization of politics. Moreover, it will create a wealth of knowledge that will find great interest among German and European policy makers.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups