Together with Wieland Müller and Freek van Gils, I have studied the consequences of digitization and datafication for democratic elections since early 2016. Inspired by news resports right after the Brexit referendum and the U.S. Presidential elections 2016, which claimed that those votes had been influenced, if not tilted, by misinformation spread via social media, we first asked whether and how this is possible theoretically. Notably, our thinking went, if voters do not trust election outcomes anymore, they may also lose trust in democracy as a political system in the first place. Indeed, there is a strong decline of public trust over the past 20 years, which at least correlates with the rise of social media, the main source of political information for many voters (proving causality is more difficult).

Now, this first paper, titled “Microtargeting, Voters’ Unawareness, and Democracy,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. There, we study how two recent technological developments have raised concerns about threats to democracy because of their potential to distort election outcomes: (a) data-driven voter research enabling political microtargeting, and (b) growing news consumption via social media and news aggregators that obfuscate the origin of news items, leading to voters’ unawareness about a news sender’s identity. We provide a theoretical framework in which we can analyze the effects that microtargeting by political interest groups and unawareness have on election outcomes in comparison to “conventional” news reporting. We show which voter groups suffer from which technological development, (a) or (b). While both microtargeting and unawareness have negative effects on voter welfare, we show that only unawareness can flip an election. Our model framework allows the theory-based discussion of policy proposals, such as to ban microtargeting or to require news platforms to signal the political orientation of a news item’s originator.

The second paper of this co-author team, which is described here and features a large lab experiment testing the theory empirically, is still in the reviewing process.