The use of digital technology in the 2016 election “represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of legacy institutions
that had set bounds for American politics in the postwar era,” Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, writes in a forthcoming paper, “Can American Democracy Survive the Internet?”
According to Persily, the Trump campaign was “totally unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics.” He argues that
this type of campaign is only successful in a context in which certain established institutions — particularly, the mainstream media
and political party organizations — have lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world.
Along parallel lines, Cristian Vaccari, a reader in politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, argued in an email
that social media have contributed to the sudden emergence of candidates and parties running the ideological gamut:
Matthew Hindman, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of “The Myth of Digital Democracy,” said in a phone interview
that “if you took the label off, someone looking at the United States would have to be worried about democratic failure or transitioning toward a hybrid regime.”
Such a regime, in his view, would keep the trappings of democracy, including seemingly free elections,
while leaders would control the election process, the media and the scope of permissible debate.
In a forthcoming paper “Outsourcing Politics: The Hostile Takeovers of Our Hollowed Out Political Parties,” Samuel Issacharoff,
a law professor at New York University, writes about how the erosion of political parties played out in 2016:
Neither party appeared to have a mechanism of internal correction.
