Digital politics

2022

1. Digital politics

   Lisa Garbe

   2022

   Governments worldwide suppress access to information, often during times of contentious politics, such as elections or social unrest. While political scientists have thoroughly studied how increasing internet access and, in particular, access to social media has influenced protest behavior, research remains inconclusive about the consequences of a sudden loss of access to the internet for mobilization. This project offers a novel way to measure different forms of online censorship and a systematic assessment of their consequences for offline mobilization. We also investigate whether increasing Internet access and use challenges authoritarian elections. Internet access provides both opposition supporters and government authorities with new means to shape electoral conduct. Overall, the results stress the important role that Internet access can play for opposition actors in authoritarian elections. At the same time, they highlight their susceptibility to manipulation by government authorities.

2024

1. JPR

   Pulling through elections by pulling the plug: Internet disruptions and electoral violence in Uganda

   Lisa Garbe

   Journal of Peace Research, 2024

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   Does increasing Internet access and use challenge authoritarian elections? I argue that Internet access provides both opposition supporters and government authorities with new means to shape electoral conduct. Opposition supporters can use the Internet to report on electoral malpractice and mobilize for support. At the same time government authorities can use the Internet to monitor antiregime sentiment prior to the elections and disrupt Internet access to selectively repress regime opponents during the elections. Studying Uganda’s 2016 presidential elections, evidence from election monitoring and survey data suggests that electoral violence is significantly higher in opposition strongholds with greater Internet access prior to the Internet disruption and is targeted specifically at voters. Insights from qualitative interviews with politicians, journalists and activists underline that the disruption of Internet access indeed hindered opposition supporters to effectively challenge electoral malpractice. Overall, the results stress the important role that Internet access can play for opposition actors in authoritarian elections. At the same time, they highlight their susceptibility to manipulation by government authorities.

   @article{garbe_jpr_2024,
     author = {Garbe, Lisa},
     title = {Pulling through elections by pulling the plug: Internet disruptions and electoral violence in Uganda},
     journal = {Journal of Peace Research},
     year = {2024},
     pages = {842-857},
     publisher = {SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England},
     status = {peer},
     proj = {protests, internet},
     keywords = {exclusion},
     proj.1 = {protests, internet}
   }

2023

1. RIO

   The political power of internet business: A comprehensive dataset of Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO)

   Tina Freyburg, Lisa Garbe, and Veronique Wavre

   The Review of International Organizations, 2023

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   The ’internet’–familiar shorthand for information and communication technologies (ICT)–is built on a physical infrastructure owned by a variety of state and private actors, foreign and domestic, with multiple interests. It has not only driven change on a global scale; its spread also had a profound impact on the social sciences. However, our understanding of how its architecture, and especially its owners, influence its political and economic impact is still in its infancy. This paper presents the Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO) dataset on ownership of internet service providers (ISPs) that allows to recognize the internet as strategically built and used by governments and corporations. Along with a thorough discussion of the conceptualization and operationalization of ownership as a variable, the TOSCO dataset enables comparative large-N analysis of the determinants and effects of varying ownership structures and identities in the transforming context of 49 African countries, 2000–2019. We demonstrate its usefulness with descriptive statistics and regression analyses using replication data from research on the internet’s democratizing and corruption-reducing effects. In allowing for a more realistic account, TOSCO supports scholars and practitioners concerned with the determinants and effects of internet service provision, use and control in Africa and beyond.

   @article{garbe_rio_2023,
     author = {Freyburg, Tina and Garbe, Lisa and Wavre, Veronique},
     title = {The political power of internet business: A comprehensive dataset of Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO)},
     journal = {The Review of International Organizations},
     year = {2023},
     number = {3},
     pages = {573--600},
     volume = {18},
     publisher = {Springer},
     status = {peer},
     proj = {networks, internet},
     keywords = {elite connections},
     proj.1 = {internet}
   }

2. ICS

   How African countries respond to fake news and hate speech

   Lisa Garbe, Lisa-Marie Selvik, and Pauline Lemaire

   Information, Communication & Society, 2023

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   While scholars have already identified and discussed some of the most urgent problems in content moderation in the Global North, fewer scholars have paid attention to content regulation in the Global South, and notably Africa. In the absence of content moderation by Western tech giants themselves, African countries appear to have shifted their focus towards state-centric approaches to regulating content. We argue that those approaches are largely informed by a regime’s motivation to repress media freedom as well as institutional constraints on the executive. We use structural topic modelling on a corpus of news articles worldwide (N = 7′787) mentioning hate speech and fake news in 47 African countries to estimate the salience of discussions of legal and technological approaches to content regulation. We find that, in particular, discussions of technological strategies are more salient in regimes with little respect for media freedom and fewer legislative constraints. Overall, our findings suggest that the state is the dominant actor in shaping content regulation across African countries and point to the need for a better understanding of how regime-specific characteristics shape regulatory decisions.

   @article{garbe_wep_2023,
     author = {Garbe, Lisa and Selvik, Lisa-Marie and Lemaire, Pauline},
     title = {How African countries respond to fake news and hate speech},
     journal = {Information, Communication \& Society},
     year = {2023},
     number = {1},
     pages = {86--103},
     volume = {26},
     publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
     status = {peer},
     proj = {internet},
     keywords = {democracy, elite connections}
   }