The anti-democratic prism: democratic values and political use of social media in six European countries

Abstract

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Empirical studies have yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between the emergence of social media and the perceived unraveling of the democratic consensus in established democracies. This article contributes to the existing literature by examining a previously overlooked avenue for understanding this relationship: we investigate users’ characteristics and self-selection into different social media platforms. The central hypothesis tested in the article is that the political use of social media is more prevalent among individuals with more extreme (non-democratic) values than among individuals with more mainstream (democratic) views. Our analysis of novel survey data from six European countries reveals that political users of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram tend to align with non-democratic values. We discuss several theoretical mechanisms that could account for this self-selection process and speculate on how our findings may help understand the role of social media platforms in political polarization.