Reaching the Periphery: Social Media Campaigns and Pro-Democratic Mobilization in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes

Pro-democratic civil society in electoral authoritarian regimes is often confined to urban centers, limiting its ability to build broad-based coalitions. Can paid social media advertisements help overcome this geographic concentration? We examine this through the first large-scale field experiment of social media-based mobilization in an authoritarian context. Partnering with Turkey’s leading election-integrity NGO, we randomly assigned non-metropolitan districts to receive ads recruiting election monitors ahead of the 2023 general election. The campaign increased volunteer sign-ups by 27% and reduced the number of districts without any volunteers by 19%, with the strongest effects in opposition-leaning and socioeconomically less developed areas. It also increased the share of low-education volunteers, a typically underrepresented group. These findings suggest that digital tools can activate latent pro-democratic capacity in underserved regions, partially compensating for structural barriers in civil society outreach, though their effectiveness remains conditioned by prior political alignment.

Anja Neundorf is a Professor of Politics and Research Methods at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Starting in September 2020, Professor Neundorf will lead a five-year ERC-CoG project "Democracy under Threat: How Education can Save it" (DEMED): https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/democracyresearch/

She previously held a position at the University of Nottingham (2013-2019) and a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellowship in political science at Nuffield College, University of Oxford (2010-2012). She received my PhD from the University of Essex in 2010. 

The event is part of the Lecture Series Democratic Resilience through Civil Society.