The question this article tries to answer is: to what extent can the recent rise of populism outside of the West be attributed to anti-Western sentiment? Interest in populism has focused on Western democracies, with far less attention devoted to regimes in non-Western parts of the world. This article takes three major cases – India, China, and Turkey. The article examines the recent intensification of populism in the three cases, but also shows how populism fits into the longer comparative-historical trajectories of a revolt against Western domination. The conclusion puts populism in a wider perspective: how do these non-Western assertions of populism shed light on debates about alternative paths within modernity and on the nature of populism in Western democracies?
The Swedish national parliamentary election of 2018 took place amidst considerable concern over the role of misinformation. This paper examines the role of digital media during the election against the background of the Swedish media system. It focuses on the role of bots and how they supported the Sweden Democrats, whose agenda was also promoted by anti-immigrant alternative news websites. This article reports on a study of Twitter that used computational techniques to distinguish bots from genuine accounts across hashtags related to the election and Swedish politics (such as #valet2018). I examine which parties are supported and criticised by bots and by genuine accounts, and discuss the content of the tweets. In this article, I place bots in the context of broader debates about the role of digital media in politics and argue that misinformation and alternative news websites will demand continued future vigilance.
This essay examines the role of disinformation in the Indian general election of 2019. The findings are presented against the background of previous work on the role of digital media in Indian politics. The essay uses 25 in-depth interviews among ordinary Indians to probe their level of awareness about so-called 'fake news'. It also examines their behavior in seeking news and sharing political information and their views about the digital campaign strategies of leaders and parties. The interviewees were concerned about the increasing role of religious extremism online. Yet they were also strongly aware of the role of disinformation campaigns and had strategies for working around being misled by information shared on social media. The essay concludes by assessing how disinformation and online extremism are likely to have affected the 2019 election, and makes comparisons with Modi's election in 2014 and with other leaders.
This paper draws on Collins's conflict theory to understand the contemporary surge of populism. It puts forward an account centred on citizenship rights and the state, and on 'my nation first' politics in four countries: the US, Sweden, India and China. Collins has identified a capitalist crisis, the dynamics of geopolitical legitimacy, and state-penetrating bureaucracy as three central processes in modern societies. Especially the last of these focuses attention on the conflict between cosmopolitan elites and 'the people', construed in exclusionary terms, which is on the rise in all of the four cases discussed here. The paper analyses the similarities and differences between them, and sketches the prospects for populist politics.
Since Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump, news media around the world have given extensive coverage to the issue of disinformation and polarization. This paper argues that while the negative effects of social media have dominated the discussion, these effects do not address how right-wing populists have been able successfully and legitimately to use digital media to circumvent traditional media. The paper uses the United States and Sweden as case studies about how digital media have helped to achieve electoral success and shift the political direction in both countries - though in quite different ways. It also argues that the sources of right-wing populism go beyond the hitherto dominant left-right political divide, capturing anti-elite sentiment and promoting exclusionary nationalism. The dominance of the issue of media manipulation has obscured the shift whereby the relation between the media and politics has become more fluid and antagonistic, which fits the populist agenda. This shift requires a rethinking of political communication that includes both the social forces that give rise to populism and the alternative digital channels that entrench them, with implications for the prospects of the role of media in politics in the two countries and beyond.
The idea that populism is a 'thin ideology'—unlike other full-bodied 'thick' ideologies like conservatism or socialism—has come close to being an orthodoxy among populism scholars. This paper challenges that view and argues that it is at best an open question whether populism meets the criteria of a thick ideology, which should be whether it offers a comprehensive program of political change and whether it has staying power. This argument will be made by reference to three countries, the United States, Sweden and India, all of which have recently seen a populist turn. The paper first summarizes debates about populism, ideology and social change. Then it provides a brief account of populism in the three country cases and argues that their populist turns may be a coherent and lasting new departure. The paper concludes with reflections about the broader ramifications of populism as 'thick' versus 'thin'.
Populism has recently been surging with explanations to date focusing on economic or cultural power. This paper builds on Mann's work to develop an explanation centered on political power instead. It presents an account of populism's longer-term trajectories and a process of struggle 'from below' for citizenship rights, which should be curtailed for some and expanded for others. This paper compares four countries – Sweden, the United States, India and China – their commonalities but also the differences in terms of how 'others', internally and externally, are excluded, and how elites are criticized. The conclusion assesses the prospects for populists in power.
AbstractVisions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.
This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order.
The role of new digital media in politics has often been discussed for individual countries and technologies, or at a general level. So far, there are few studies which compare countries and treat new media in the context of the media system as a whole, including traditional and new digital media. The main contribution of this article is to compare two countries at the extremes of the political spectrum and with quite different media systems, the United States and Sweden. It synthesizes what is known to date about digital media in these two cases, including about the uses of Twitter, Facebook and other new media. The article discusses the shortcomings of existing analyses of political communication and of how digital media work in a way that is different from traditional or mass media. The argument is that new media expand input from people into the political systems only at the margins, where they can circumvent established agenda setting and gatekeeping mechanisms. The article develops a framework for understanding digital media which highlights how they extend and diversify the public sphere, even as this sphere is monitored and managed, and still faces the constraint of the limited attention devoted to political issues.
This paper examines two aspects of multi-user virtual reality (VR) systems; the socio-technical shaping of these systems and the social relations inside multi-user virtual worlds. The paper begins with an overview of the history of networked interactive computer graphics and examines the main factors which are currently shaping networked VR systems. The second part explores the social relations between users inside virtual worlds and makes comparisons with other forms of computer-mediated-communication. In the conclusion, these two parts are linked: how is the development of multi-user virtual reality technology influencing how users interact within virtual worlds - and vice versa?
Metadata only record ; This paper is an analysis of environmental policies and practices and their impact on access and control of resources within a gender context. The analysis shows how women worked to change usufruct rights and male leaders manipulate environmental policies to "re-claim" the resources for Natural Resource Management projects. Women converted low-lying land into lucrative irrigated vegetable gardens to see projects allow men to take control over the territory. Land inheritance is patrilinear in this area; women often get permission to use unwanted land such as swampland and low-lying land. Market season is short so women carry their vegetables and sell them door to door.
Metadata only record ; This article discusses gender dynamics of gardens and orchards along the North Bank of the river Gambia: rivalry between men and women's crops, competition over women's labor when trees are introduced for the environmental stabilization, and how the shade canopy undermines women gardeners' rights and keeps the lands under male control. The author conducts an ethnographic study in the North Bank of the river Gambia in 1989 and 1991. Because of two decades of drought that changed this area' ecology, there was competition between men and women's crop production systems over low-lying and groundwater resources. Men and women have separate places, specific crops, time and different product value for production. Men grow mainly cash crops and women grow food crops. However, two decades of drought led to women's groups increasing fruit and vegetable production in low-lying communal gardens and adopting a new type of shorter-duration production systems. Women's labor sustained men's irrigated cash crops. These changes with infrastructure development and government policies attracted many funds and development project in this area that motivated women to expand their garden production of cash crops. This cash income gradually made women a major financial contributor within their household. However, conflict developed with male construction of orchards and subsequent demands for women's labor in the same locations.
Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem with limited reach among the public. Its prominence in public discourse is instead best understood as a "moral panic." In this article, we argue that we should shift attention from these evocative but empirically marginal phenomena of deviance connected with digital media toward the structural transformations that give rise to these fears, namely those that have impacted information flows and attention allocation in the public arena. This account centers on structural transformations of the public arena and associated new challenges, especially in relation to gatekeepers, old and new. How the public arena serves actually existing democracy will not be addressed by focusing on disinformation, but rather by addressing structural transformations and the new challenges that arise from these.
Globalisation is an area where supporters and non-supporters of left- and right-wing parties disagree, both for domestic and international policies. Populists see metropolitan elites as 'corrupt' and oppose policies that encourage globalisation in trade, immigration, and multi-culturalism. Media play important roles in providing pro- and anti-globalisation content, both in traditional and digital media. We use a unique combination of large-scale web-tracking and cross-country survey data to study the interactions between populism, media trust, consumption, and globalisation attitudes in the US and Germany. We find country variances for different aspects of globalisation, particularly among the supporters of right-wing populist parties or leaders. Populist anti-elitism and a feeling of powerlessness in relation to influencing the country's politics are two important factors behind the backlash against globalisation. We also find that a higher level of trust in public service media is associated with more supportive attitudes toward globalisation.
