Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism: The Power of the Internet in the post-Soviet World
Final Report Abstract
The Emmy Noether project “Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism: The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Region” was situated at the intersection of the two disciplines communications and political science. The project’s overarching research question was the following: How has the rapid rise of Internet-mediated communication affected political communication, politics, and polities in the post-Soviet world? In order to answer this question, the Emmy Noether project was organized in six subprojects. (1) The first subproject investigated how digitally-enabled representation via Internet elections was leveraged by a protest movement under authoritarian rule. Specifically, this subproject investigated the trajectory of the Russian protest movement ‘For Fair Elections’ (2011-2013), which organized online elections with a turnout of 80,000 activists in October 2012. As subproject 1 illustrated, by conducting these elections, the protest movement transformed from an ‘organizationally enabled connective action network’ into a more centralized, more formalized ‘organizationally brokered collective action network’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). (2) The second subproject resulted in three academic articles that scrutinized how comment sections of new outlets, as a novel participatory feature, (a) diffused in post-Soviet authoritarian contexts over the past two decades and (b) how citizens commented and participated in these communicative spaces. As the project found, even in the most closed regimes in the post-Soviet region, comment sections were still a relatively commonly observed phenomenon. For authoritarian leaders, these limited forms of citizen participation were not only associated with risks but also with benefits, such as for instance the generation of real-time citizen-feed-back on specific policies and lower level officials. (3) The third subproject was dedicated to online information flows about scandals and protest events. It partly adopted novel computational methods of data collection. Specifically, this subproject analyzed a set of 30,471 search results, which were retrieved in regular intervals for nine query terms targeting a key protest event from four platforms (Yandex.ru, News.yandex.ru, Google.ru, and News.google.ru). As the findings demonstrated, the algorithms of Russia’s search engine Yandex (by comparison with their Google counterparts) referred users to significantly fewer websites that contained information about the protest event. (4) The fourth subproject focused on how authoritarian deliberation, online discussion and internet elections were misused by ruling authoritarian elites to generate the illusion of responsiveness and increase the perceived input legitimacy of post-Soviet regimes. For instance, this research project scrutinized how Russia’s ruling elites repeatedly organized ‘Internet votes’ to staff advisory bodies to the government. (5) The fifth subproject investigated how novel Internet-based technologies affected political memories in authoritarian contexts. In specific, it traced how novel technological tools facilitated the emergence of a novel form of “mnemonic counterpublics”, i.e. publics that feel excluded based on how they relate to a particular fragment of the past. (6) A sixth and overarching subproject was dedicated to theory development, grounded in the findings of the five empirical subprojects. This subproject proposed a novel theory of multiple authoritarian public spheres. One key line of argument is that authoritarian publics spheres are comprised of a multiplicity of publics, with some even including niche publics where fierce criticism of the authoritarian leadership circulates. The findings of the project were published in more than 15 academic articles appearing in leading international, peer-reviewed journals, and one book manuscript. In terms of outreach activities, members of the Emmy Noether groups were featured in numerous articles in leading German media.
Publications
- (2016). Beyond the four theories: Toward a discourse approach to the Comparative study of media and politics. International Journal of Communication, 10, 1530–1547
Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-19902) - (2018). From connective to collective action: Internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia. Information, Communication & Society, 21(4), 531–547
Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1290127) - (2018). Innovating consultative authoritarianism: Internet votes as a novel digital tool to stabilize non-democratic rule in Russia. New Media & Society, 20(3), 956–972
Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675444) - (2018). Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world. New Media & Society, 20(8), 2844–2861
Toepfl, F., & Litvinenko, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817733710) - (2019). Querying the Internet as a mnemonic practice: How search engines mediate four types of past events in Russia. Media, Culture & Society, 41(1), 21–37
Zavadski, A., & Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718764565) - (2019). The “Gardening” of an Authoritarian Public at Large: How Russia’s Ruling Elites Transformed the Country’s Media Landscape After the 2011/12 Protests “For Fair Elections”. Publizistik, 64(2), 225–240
Litvinenko, A., & Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-019-00486-2) - (2020). Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats. Communication Theory, 30(2), 105–125
Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz015) - (2021). Critically commenting publics as authoritarian input institutions: How citizens comment beneath their news in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. Journalism Studies, 22(4), 475–495
Toepfl, F., & Litvinenko, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.1882877) - (2021). Gauging reference and source bias over time: How Russia’s partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated an anti-regime protest event. Information, Communication & Society
Kravets, D., & Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1933563) - (2021). The (Non-)Adoption of Participatory Newsroom Innovations under Authoritarian Rule: How Comment Sections Diffused in Belarus and Azerbaijan (1998–2017). Digital Journalism
Litvinenko, A., & Toepfl, F.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1888137)
