Democratic Resilience and Sociotechnical Shocks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the vulnerabilities of democratic elections in the Web 2.0 era, highlighting systemic fragility due to heterogeneity and proposing targeted policy interventions to enhance democratic resilience.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic systems perspective on election support vulnerabilities, providing a framework for policy interventions based on resource allocation to improve resilience.

Findings

Micro-level heterogeneity leads to systemic fragility.

Targeted interventions can significantly improve democratic resilience.

Resource allocation strategies can mitigate effects of disinformation and harassment.

Abstract

We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the United States and offers potential policy interventions from a dynamic system's perspective. We propose that micro-level heterogeneity across individuals within crucial institutions leads to vulnerabilities of election support systems at the macro scale. Our analysis provides comparative statistics to measure the fragility of systems against targeted harassment, disinformation campaigns, and other adversarial manipulations that are now cheaper to scale and deploy. Our analysis also informs policy interventions that seek to retain public officials and increase voter turnout. We show how limited resources (for example, salary incentives to public officials and targeted interventions to increase voter turnout) can be allocated at the population level to improve these outcomes and maximally enhance democratic resilience. On the one hand, structural and individual heterogeneity cause systemic fragility that adversarial actors can exploit, but also provide opportunities for effective interventions that offer significant global improvements from limited and localized actions.