Platforms, politics, and the crisis of democracy: Connective action and the rise of illiberalism

Summary

Bennett and Livingston argue that scholarship on democratic backsliding has been split between a “technocentric” paradigm fixated on individual-level cognitive effects of disinformation and an “institutionalist” paradigm focused on parties and elites — and that neither alone can explain the rise of illiberalism. Through a reflective synthesis anchored in the MAGA transformation of the Republican Party, they propose a “communication-as-organization” framework in which digitally networked publics constitute a new class of digital surrogate organizations that compete with, and ultimately overwhelm, traditional party gatekeepers. Memes, influencers, partisan media, operatives, and tax-exempt nonprofits weave once-scattered extremist factions into electorally consequential networks, pulling conservative parties toward authoritarianism in the US and across Europe.

Key Contributions

• Bridges technocentric and institutionalist accounts of backsliding through the concept of digital surrogate organizations.
• Extends Ziblatt’s surrogate organization theory to encompass crowd-enabled, digitally networked actors (QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal networks).
• Reframes platform politics as organization rather than persuasion, applying Bennett & Segerberg’s connective action continuum to party radicalization.
• Identifies five interlocking networking mechanisms: partisan media/influencers, tax-exempt nonprofits, political operatives, elected leaders, and spreadable memes.
• Offers a comparative research agenda for illiberal public spheres across democracies.

Methods

Conceptual synthesis and critical literature review spanning political communication, misinformation studies, and comparative democratization. The authors critique the technocentric paradigm (including the disputed backfire effect and the replication problems in correction research), extend institutionalist work (Ziblatt, Levitsky, Hacker & Pierson, Bermeo), and apply the connective action framework. Empirically, they draw on secondary sources, journalism, DFRLab data, and comparative European studies (AfD, Orbán, Swedish radical right, EU campaigns), with MAGA, Stop the Steal, and January 6 as illustrative cases.

Findings

• Misinformation research is conceptually fragmented and dominated by individual-level cognitive approaches with mixed, often non-replicable results.
• Roughly $70 million in funding (2016–2021) has channeled academic attention toward individual-level correction at the expense of institutional analysis.
• Republican Party boundaries have become “porous,” absorbing extremist digital surrogates alongside legacy ones like Fox News and the Koch network.
• The Stop the Steal meme generated over 70 million online engagements (Sept 2020–Feb 2021), acting as a cross-platform networking mechanism.
• Acceptance of Biden’s 2020 victory fell from 69% (2021) to 61% (2024); only 31% of Republicans accepted it by 2024.
• Parallel patterns of nativist, anti-gender, and “lost greatness” mobilization appear in Germany, Hungary, Sweden, and EU-level campaigns.

Connections

This piece’s organizational reframing of platform politics speaks directly to work showing that elite and partisan media supply — not algorithmic exposure alone — drives polarized information ecosystems, e.g. Bakshy2015-rn, Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq, and Budak2024-ef. Its account of how memes and influencers knit extremist factions into party infrastructure resonates with research on coordinated rumoring and election denial networks (Starbird2025-jj, Prochaska2025-ef, Donovan2025-ws, Marwick2025-ov) and on the comparative dynamics of right-wing illiberal communication (Frischlich2025-vn, Humprecht2025-ml, Kalsnes2025-zb). The authors’ skepticism of individual-level correction paradigms also dialogues critically with the inoculation and debunking tradition represented by van-der-Linden2026-jt and Spampatti2026-kx.