Since Plato, popular culture has been discussed either as a way to increase people’s interest in politics or as a diversion from engaging with the actual and present. According to Jim McGuigan (2005), the preoccupation with the impact of popular culture on political opinions has been a prevalent feature of both right- and left-wing theorists throughout history. Recent references to a “culture war” can hence be argued to have a long historical tradition. The debate in the wake of current articulations of radical right-wing opinions has led to polarised discussions about representations in popular culture and disputes over cultural policy (Harding, 2022). Further, the new media landscape has led politics and audiovisual storytelling to permeate Western societies as never before. In this situation, it is more important than ever to take stock of what is known about how fiction affects democracy.
Since around the 1990s, scholars have increasingly engaged in empirical research on the relationship between fictional audiovisual media and politics. This growing academic interest coincided with a rise in access to, the supply of, and time spent consuming fictional content. For example, today, Swedes in general spend two hours and 18 minutes every day watching television, according to Ohlsson (2023). As noted by several scholars, “the sheer amount of fictional content viewers consume makes it a likely source of information that affects political and social views” (Mutz & Nir, 2010: 197). Despite the expansion of research on fiction and politics over the last 35 years, there is, to our knowledge, no systematic study of what we know about the relation between democracy and audiovisual fiction. In addition, working in the Nordic context, we note that research on Nordic Noir film and television productions has pointed to the intermingling of fictional storytelling and critique of the welfare state as a prominent feature of the genre (see, e.g., Chow et al., 2020; Hansen & Waade, 2017; Hayward & Hall, 2021; Åberg, 2015). How the research on Nordic Noir contributes to the larger body of studies of fiction and politics is, however, yet to be investigated, not least considering the global brand and success of the genre. Therefore, this article presents a systematic literature review in the form of a critical interpretative synthesis (Booth et al., 2016). The aim is to map extant research, to identify taken-for-granted assumptions and gaps in the conceptualisation of the link between fiction and democracy, and to refocus the research agenda. In order to do so, we address the following questions:
What characterises studies of the connection between democracy and fiction?
In what ways are democracy and politics conceptualised in the corpus?
How do scholars deploy and conceptualise the links and intersections between politics, fiction, and audiences?
The analysis of the body of research shows, quite unsurprisingly, that fiction impacts democracy in two major ways: First, under certain circumstances, it affects political opinions, attitudes, and behaviour; and second, it contributes to constructing identities and belongings which can either enhance democracy and struggles for democracy or support authoritarian regimes. Further, we find that conceptualisations of audiences’ agency and of implicit ideas about what constitutes a connection between fiction and democracy are crucial to what answers are provided. For the future, we call for research that more extensively engages with audiences and examines the production conditions shaped by various political contexts. We also encourage research that problematises the new media landscape with respect to democracy and the increased intermingling of fact and fiction.
This introduction is followed by a discussion on previous attempts at structuring and conceptualising the relation between fiction and politics and a methods section. Three major sections ensue. The first discusses what characterises the studied literature in terms of disciplinary belonging of the authors, time of publication, and geographical context. The second delves into how the studied articles conceptualise democracy; this section is motivated by the fact that we found articles to be more inclined to discuss fiction and politics than fiction and democracy, even when their topics are clearly related to democratic processes, for instance, studying democratically elected leaders or political campaigns (see, e.g., Frame, 2016; Kato, 2015). The third section consists of three parts, each of which deals with one reciprocal relation in a triad, where the political system and politics, audiences (the people), and fiction constitute the nodes. Hence, in the first part we discuss politics and fiction and present articles that deal with how fictional representations of politics affect politics, as well as how the political context and the conditions this context creates for audiovisual productions affect fiction. The relationship between audiences and fiction is discussed in the second part, where we analyse to what extent conceptualisations of the audiences are agentic or not, as well as ideas about how fiction is influenced by “what audiences want”. In the third part we discuss politics and audiences, focusing on how fiction affects audiences’ political opinions, attitudes, and behaviour, including activism. Furthermore, we discuss how politicians use fiction in, for instance, election campaigns. The article concludes with a final discussion that summarises key findings and explores their broader implications.
Scholars have examined the role of popular culture in politics from various angles. Adorno and Horkheimer, informed by Marxist theory as well as their own experiences of fascism, argued that culture industries provided a powerful instrument of social control (Kellner, 1984: 197). Media scholars like McGuigan (2005) developed the notion of a cultural public sphere to emphasise the role of popular culture and entertainment. Other theories, such as Dahlgren and Hill’s (2023) media engagement, and Bengesser’s work on public service media (Antoniazzi & Bengesser, 2023; Bengesser, 2023), have contributed to the theorising of the importance of culture for politics. Similarly, in cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s seminal work on media reception and popular culture was ultimately concerned with the uneven distribution of the power over public discourse (Gripsrud, 1998).
However, in the 1990s, a research field across multiple academic disciplines specifically interrogating the links between politics and fiction began to take shape. This coincided in time with the rise of a social constructivist agenda within media effects theory (Borah, 2016). While other approaches to media effects such as cultivation theory, framing theory, and agenda setting (see, e.g., Borah, 2016; Mutz & Nir, 2010; Singer, 2018) were by no means abandoned, the social constructivist approach appealed to scholars in cultural and cinema studies. In the 1990s, studies specifically analysing intersections between politics and popular culture, including fiction, began to appear (Street, 1997). Soon, various journals such as Media, Culture & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, and Popular Communication published studies (re)evaluating fiction as a valuable tool for examining the relationship between entertainment and political representation. These studies analysed how anglophone television series with political themes mediate political culture, politicians, and processes, shaping viewers’ understanding of formal politics through fictional narratives (Cardo, 2011; Corner & Richardson, 2008; Inthorn et al., 2013; Nikolaidis, 2011; Van Zoonen & Wring, 2012).
Efforts to understand the relationship between entertainment and politics often involve creating a research framework that identifies areas of inquiry, relevant questions, and empirical materials likely to yield insights into the intersections between the popular and the political. For example, Holbert’s nine-part typology (see Figure 1) focuses on content (“the nature of political messages in various entertainment outlets”) and reception (“how these content types influence audiences”), ultimately linking types of entertainment television to potential audience effects (Holbert, 2005: 437). The typology contains two axes, explicit–implicit and political as primary–political as secondary.
Typology for the study of entertainment television and politics
Source: adapted from Holbert, 2005: 445
Street (2012) identified specific ways that popular culture engages with politics, that is, by representing the political (the portrayal of explicitly political topics), revealing the political (where politics is read into the text and is communicated as ideology), politically positioning the audience (framing reality in a specific way and by contributing to the construction of collective identities), and dramatising political morality (and motivating political action). Similarly, Coleman (2008) explored the meaning of politics within the context of representation in the soap opera genre. He proposed a three-dimensional model to reconcile the personal nature of fictional storylines with the visibility of politics in entertainment. The model includes process politics (depicting political processes, politicians, and structures); issue politics (addressing real-world political issues); and everyday politics (exploring interpersonal power dynamics within private life). Christensen and Haas (2005) developed a typology based on two axes – political content and political intent – to dissect political messages transmitted by fiction and to foretell their potential impact (see Figure 2).
Typology of the political suggested by dimensions of content and intent
Source: adapted from Christensen & Haas, 2005: 8
Saunders (2019a) recently introduced a provisional classification of geopolitical television to stimulate discussions about contemporary world-building trends. He identified five structural subsets that have emerged consistently in Global North television fiction since the mid-2000s: 1) exotic-irrealist; 2) parliamentary-domestic; 3) procedural-localised; 4) historical-revisionist; and 5) speculative-fantastical. This typology supports the argument that (geopolitical) television fiction matters, particularly in the context of geopolitical interventions “beyond the restrictive categorisation of popular culture as propaganda” and “towards a more nuanced framework focused on popular culture as a means of geopolitically inflected world-building” (Saunders, 2019a: 694).
In the past decade, significant work has been done on reception-focused typologies, examining the potential effects of political television fiction on audiences. Nærland (2019a) identified five key functions through which engagement with fictional content can shape citizens’ political involvement: Charging (emotional investment in political issues), deepening (using television series to understand and reflect on real-life political events), and affinitive motivation (fostering a sense of belonging to communities that share political interests) highlight the experiential aspects of audience engagement; Introduction/extension emphasises how television series can spark or sustain interest in political matters over time; and solidification explores how the habitual viewing of television series, combined with other practices, strengthens overall political orientation.
While these typologies aim to define and organise research on politics within entertainment genres, they ultimately acknowledge the complexity of these intersections. Although the models vary, they share common traits. All assume that fiction influences an audience. Some models align with the notion that media play a role in democracy by shaping political opinions and encouraging public engagement, while also addressing issues like identity formation, sense of belonging, and political imagination. Rather than simply asserting that fiction can accomplish the above, in this article we seek to clarify the assumptions that define the relationship between fiction and politics.
With this systematic literature review, we aim to examine patterns in (quantitative and qualitative) empirical research on fiction, politics, and democracy, and to critically assess this body of literature in a holistic and qualitative way. We conduct a critical interpretive synthesis – a type of review that allows for theorisation as intended outcome (Booth et al., 2016: 256–258). We constructed our sample using peer-reviewed articles with fulltext available in the Web of Science database, considering this representative rather than exhaustive for the research conducted on this topic. The search string focused on the abstracts and included the words film, television, or TV, in combination with polit* (including politics, politicians, and other related words), democra* (including word variations), or the welfare state. We selected English, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish as languages but only one article in Norwegian was included; the rest were in English. The search extends from 1995 to 2024, as previous literature identified an increased interest in the topic starting in the mid 1990s (Aitaki, 2018).
Fiction is an elusive concept, so we chose to include studies analysing audiovisual content that the authors present as fiction, even if it is based on true events. We excluded content described as nonfiction, documentaries, news, social media, and advertising, as well as infotainment, politainment, or articles dealing with politics and television in general but not with fiction. Politics, an equally tricky concept to define, was treated in a similar manner. When the author of a study analysed a phenomenon as political, it was included. We have excluded articles dealing with cases of direct censorship or capitalism when these were not formulated as being political. We also decided to exclude articles dealing with fiction and war, while studies discussing foreign and international politics in relation to fiction were included.
The process yielded 1,783 results, from which we manually selected relevant articles based on their abstracts. During this process, we ensured that the selected articles dealt with fictional audiovisual content, that they included discussions of some aspect described as political, politics, or democracy, and that they included a discussion or an assumption about how fiction influenced an audience or in other ways stated a relationship between fiction and politics or democracy. We organised the resulting selection into different folders according to the following identified themes:
the relation between fiction and politics
fiction being used in debates or to sustain ideologies
representations of the political establishment
climate as a political issue
political dissent or critique
solidarity, community, and political subjects
audiovisual aesthetics in relation to democracy or politics
imagining nations
(de)politicisation
the welfare state
This left us with a total of 133 relevant articles that we read collaboratively. We constructed an Excel sheet based on existing typologies on audiovisual media and politics (Aitaki, 2018). The spreadsheet further included year of publication, academic discipline, geographical and cultural context, and methodology used in the study. For most topics, we experienced saturation because of recurring theoretical arguments or methodologies. Our versatile scholarly backgrounds influenced our reading: Maria Jansson is a professor in gender studies with a background in political science, Georgia Aitaki is a media and television scholar who works at the intersection of popular culture and politics, and Jono Van Belle studies critical and audience reception of film and television.
To organise our findings and guide our analysis, we constructed a model based on the conceptualisation of democracy as a relationship between the people and the governing system. We then incorporated fiction into this framework. This provided us with an analytical model (see Figure 3) for exploring how the connections between democracy and fiction are conceptualised in the corpus of the study. The corners of the model – the political system, audiences, and fiction – overlap, with each relationship influencing the others. For analytical clarity, we have separated these relationships in the results sections below. Before moving on to the empirical part, we want to point out that with respect to the relationship between the political system and the audience, there is ample discussion about terms such as opinions, attitudes, and behaviour (see, e.g., Oskamp & Schultz, 2004). While opinions and attitudes are sometimes treated as exchangeable, we define opinions as articulated beliefs related to a specific topic, while attitudes are less articulated and formed in relation to values, that is, the belief that an end-goal (such as equality) is better than something else. Opinions, attitudes, and values, along with other factors, can be argued to form political behaviour, which we define as more manifest than opinions and attitudes (see, e.g., Dalton & Klingemann, 2011).
Analytical model of the relationship between fiction, politics, and democracy
Comments: The figure depicts our model for analysing the relationships between fiction, politics, and democracy, where the audience “doubles” as the people in a democracy and the political is conceptualised as both the arena for deliberation of political issues and a system for decision-making and governing of the people and aspects of cultural production.
In this first section, we present metatextual information about the articles in our sample. Regarding the authors’ disciplinary affiliations, media studies – including television, film, animation, adaptation, and celebrity studies – are predominant, with just over half of our sample published in this field. The second-largest discipline is political science, which accounts for approximately 20 per cent of our sample. Another 15 per cent falls under area and language studies. The remaining 15 per cent is distributed among geography, cultural studies, history, geopolitics, fashion studies, sociology, criminology, psychology, and philosophy. Our selection ranges from 1995 to 2024 and there is a clear increase in the number of publications from 2008 onwards, peaking in 2020–2021 (see Figure 4).
Number of sampled articles, by year of publication
More than a third of the sample addresses North American cultural content or geographical contexts, while approximately 10 per cent focuses on the Nordic region. The remaining half encompasses a broad geographical range, representing countries from all continents. When divided by continent, a centre-periphery pattern emerges. Most studies are concentrated to Europe and North America, followed by Asia, with only a small fraction covering Africa and South America (see Figure 5). Although there is a selection-bias in favour of the Anglo Saxon and Scandinavian contexts, because of language selection, a general bias toward Western countries due to the selection of journals in Web of Science, and publication patterns in the journals included, it remains significant that two thirds of the corpus relates to the cultural context of Europe and the US.
Context of the studies, by continent
Most of the sample consists of qualitative research (90%), primarily textual analysis. Only 10 per cent of the qualitative studies focus on reception, employing either interviews (individual or focus group) or analysing news and media reception. With a few exceptions (e.g., Allbritton, 2014), quantitative research makes use of surveys and survey or lab experiments to infer conclusions on the influence of media on people’s political attitudes, opinions, and behaviour.
Most articles (65%) do not explicitly mention democracy. Among articles discussing Nordic Noir, however, 53 per cent refer to democracy. We found no differences between articles focusing on text or reception in terms of connecting their arguments explicitly to democracy. In the next section, we discuss in detail how democracy is addressed.
While a large portion of articles discuss geographical contexts which can be labelled as democracies, few explicitly mention the word democracy. However, most articles tend to assume that the political system is democratic. This is evident in studies that do not use the word democracy when discussing how political trust is increased or decreased (Young & Carpenter, 2018), how learning about politics in the US is affected by fiction (e.g., Rasul & Raney, 2021), or how a specific elected administration is depicted on screen (Fielding, 2014). These articles are often based on a naturalised idea about modern liberal representative democracy and what characterises it – such as elected representatives. The majority of the articles in the sample feature this sort of unarticulated taken-for-granted assumption about democracy.
The word democracy is used in four ways. First, it is used to describe or to contrast the political context in which the fictional content is produced. These cases often describe a context of transition into democracy, a newly established democracy, or resistance against or the reproduction of an authoritarian system (see, e.g., Bradfield, 2013; Ferreira, 2010; Ribke, 2021; Setiawan, 2017). A subcategory deals with democracy movements or demands for democratic rights in authoritarian regimes (see, e.g., Millington, 2021; Shen, 2020; Wu, 2017).
Second, several articles use the word to discuss how democracy, or its anti-thesis dictatorship, is represented in fictional content. This is often done in relation to notions of a “real” political situation being democratic or nondemocratic (see, e.g., Dallmann, 2020; Montgomery 2020; Randall, 2011; Saunders, 2020; Wijermars, 2016). A few studies discuss representations of democracy on screen in relation to political theory, such as exceptionalist interventions and democratic agency (e.g., Barringer, 2020), imperialism (Montgomery, 2020), the constitution of a democratic public sphere (Nezirevic, 2021), or democratic ethical dilemmas (Korte, 2018). An outlier in this category is Hiatt (2018), who examined how The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940) became a cultural object in Latin America, sparking debates about anti-democratic leadership. He argued that permitting or prohibiting the film’s screening posed both a dilemma and an opportunity for authoritarian leaders, as allowing it could present their (authoritarian) rule as democratic.
Third, some articles mention democracy in their aim to measure attitudes such as trust, belief in democracy or authoritarianism, or behaviours, most often voting (Jones & Paris, 2018; Shanahan, 1998).
And fourth, a group of articles discuss democracy in relation to their theoretical approach (Askanius, 2019; Hantke, 2011; Nærland, 2019b). Hantke (2011) theorised democracy in relation to ageing, whereas the other two in this category drew on democracy for analysing the link between politics and audiences. Nærland (2019b) used the concept of public connection, whereas Askanius (2019) differentiated between political and democratic engagement.
Articles that measure democratic attitudes and behaviours, as well as those that describe political contexts as democratic, often closely link democracy to political systems, rights, processes, politicians, and specific issues. In contrast, Askanius (2019) distinguished between engagement in democracy and engagement in politics, suggesting that a shared democratic identity, separate from political opinions and controversies, is essential. This differentiation between politics (conflict) and democracy (unity) is also reflected in other studies. For instance, discussing the lack of democratic identification, Nezirevic (2021) contended that fictional representations of Spanish democracy correspond with current fears of criminality and polarisation, indicating a crisis of democracy. Ideas about a democracy in crisis are also found in articles about Nordic Noir, which portray the Nordic identity as democratic, innocent, and closely connected to nature. However, these imaginaries are often complicated with reference to the actual political context, which results in a critique of the welfare state. The latter is often considered to be an inherent feature of Nordic Noir (Askanius, 2019; Dodds & Hochscherf, 2020; Hayward & Hall, 2021; Mrozewicz, 2020; Saunders, 2020).
To conclude, the majority of the articles in the sample do not mention democracy and, of those that do, most use the word in a taken-for-granted and non-defined way. Among the articles mentioning democracy, none define the concept in more detail or delineate a specific model of democracy, such as participant, deliberative, elite, or agonistic democracy (see, e.g., Held, 2006; Mouffe, 1999). In fact, most articles in the sample that mention democracy investigate rather specific aspects and seldom elaborate on how these relate to the model of democracy.
In this section, we analyse how politics is represented in fictional works and how the political context and decisions impact the conditions of production. It is important to recognise that audiovisual fiction is inherently part of the political system, at least if calling it a liberal democracy. Content creators express opinions protected by freedom of expression laws (La Caze, 2020). Some studies specifically examine film and television creators with clear political goals (e.g., Ceplair, 2018; Stougaard-Nielsen, 2020), while others argue that films are political regardless of the creator’s intent (Van Beek, 2023).
A significant portion of the sample focuses on the infiltration of political themes in audiovisual fiction. This includes representations of societal issues like organised crime, corruption, racism, and discrimination (Pezzotti, 2023; Tasker, 2012), as well as environmental concerns (Fagan, 2017; Seymour, 2011). Other studies focus on how fiction shapes collective identities (Brassard, 2012; Lewis, 2019), portrays political systems and politicians, particularly women (Cardo, 2011; Nikolaidis, 2011; Smith, 2020), and depicts crisis events (Wodak, 2010). Additionally, research on state censorship (Millington, 2021; Van Staden, 2017) and the strains for filmmakers working in authoritarian contexts (Lei, 2023) highlights production-related interventions and conditions. However, the reciprocal influence of fiction and politics remains largely unexplored. A deeper understanding of how the political environment and decision-making shape industrial contexts and audience perspectives – shedding light on the democratic role of audiovisual fiction – is still lacking.
Apart from studies of the portrayal of political topics and studies that “read” the political into the text – that is, the first two categorisations in Street’s (2012) typology – existing literature showcases studies that investigate how audiovisual fiction potentially dramatises political morality (Millington, 2021; Ledesma, 2013). Interestingly enough, most studies focus on cinematic rather than televisual fiction, indicating a value hierarchy among different forms of audiovisual media and fictional stories.
When considering streaming platforms, and in contrast to the political significance of cinematic representations, scholars have discussed stories on streaming services as potentially depoliticising. For example, Gilligan’s (2017) analysis of A Bigger Splash (Guadagnino, 2015) suggests that framing social reality as something that can be “turned off” diminishes the power of social critique and activism. Additionally, nostalgia as an aesthetic choice is considered a depoliticising factor (Bracke, 2011), with historical distance theorised to weaken ethical and political engagement.
Nordic Noir serves as a micro-case where the (geo)political is intensely activated, with existing literature covering both production and text-based research (primarily the latter). Defined as a crime genre linked to Scandinavia, characterised by a gloomy mood, dark visuals, strong characters, and compelling narratives (Hill & Turnbull, 2017), Nordic Noir is considered a multidimensional genre with political dimensions across production contexts, representational patterns, and audience reception. At the production level, politics is examined through intentional production strategies, policies, and imperatives. Researchers focus on the role of public service broadcasting, highlighting how the political is tied to public broadcasters’ commitment to supporting the regional film industry (Sand & Vordal, 2021), creating content that encompasses social critique (Chow et al., 2020), promoting transnationalism and Nordic collaboration as a regional (geo)political project (Hansen, 2020), and ensuring women’s creative control (Pinedo, 2021). Especially when it comes to public broadcasters’ mandate, Chow and colleagues (2020: 13) have argued that Nordic Noir’s distinctive feature and political relevance lies in its “double gaze” or “double plotting” rooted in the genre’s literary history: “besides the immediate plotline, there is another (or underlying) narrative premise that raises difficult questions which often impugn the state, corporations, society, and even the much-touted ‘perfection’ of the Nordic region as a whole”. In this sense, the literature on Nordic Noir is more apt than research studying other Western contexts to acknowledge the importance of public service as an enabler for producing this specific genre of fiction, as well as the potential for fiction to spur discussion about the welfare state.
Nordic Noir scholarship that employs direct textual approaches builds on the genre’s characteristics by highlighting its thematic incorporation of real-life political events and contexts. This includes references to concrete issues with economic, social, and political impacts, such as migration (Marklund, 2019), and broader reflections on the crisis of the welfare state, neoliberalism, and democracy (Chow et al., 2020; Hayward & Hall, 2021; Saunders, 2020). In this context, politics is often examined through the lens of international relations and geopolitical implications (Chow et al., 2020; Dodds & Hochscherf, 2020; Hansen, 2020; Saunders, 2020; Saunders & Bruun, 2021). Broadly speaking, this body of work is sensitised to the analysis of imageries, that is, the use of textual (genre, narrative, aesthetic) choices in order to promote specific geopolitical agendas, for example, national or regional unity, or world-building with an emphasis on potential geopolitical scenarios, such as future threats or polities (Hansen, 2020) and how these potentially influence “contemporary politics, society, and culture” (Chow et al., 2020: 12).
Nordic Noir research reflects a strong belief in fiction’s political implications, in terms of production incentives, textual conventions, and audience positioning. Most studies implicitly draw from the concept of deepening, using television series to explore real-life political events (Nærland, 2019a). However, some studies, such as Hayward and Hall’s (2021), argue that Nordic Noir also has depoliticising functions, highlighting a tone of political amnesia. While the arguments about Nordic Noir are valid for the Nordic context, they are difficult to generalise beyond it, as different production and sociopolitical environments may shape the critical edge and political implications of geopolitical narratives (see, e.g., the discussion regarding the Southeast Asian context by Chow et al., 2020: 24–25).
Overall, the emphasis in research on representational strategies and patterns demonstrates how politics thematically permeates fiction. However, it also shapes assumptions about how audiences might engage with these issues, a point that is more challenging to substantiate due to the scarcity of reception studies. While fiction influences potential understandings of politics, its impact on political processes or events remains unclear. When it comes to how politics influences fiction in other ways than as inspiration for its content, the impact of political context and decisions on the conditions for producing and circulating fiction is underresearched, apart from the literature on Nordic Noir.
Our literature sample strongly indicates that fiction plays a role in how audiences relate to politics. However, studies differ in how audiences and fiction connect, and how audiences are conceptualised: whether the viewers are passive receivers and whether it matters who they are and where they come from. Further, in this section we also discuss how assumptions about “what the audience wants” are conceptualised to affect fictional content.
In our sample, only one study discusses how fictional content is affected by perceptions about what political messages the audience wants or are perceived to accept. Fielding (2014) conducted a quantitative study mapping fictional content about politics during the Blair administration and posits that changes in production have led creators to align content with what they perceived as the viewers’ political ideas. This led to a portrayal of politics as corrupt and “sleazy”, and in a mutually reinforcing reproduction of stereotypes.
When it comes to how audiences are perceived as receivers of political messages in fictional content, the sample includes articles which consider audiences as passive and uniform as well as studies acknowledging audiences’ agency. Further, the latter category often emphasises “the interconnectedness of societal (economic, political, and cultural) and textual factors that influence viewers’ meaning making and appropriation of these texts” (La Pastina, 2004: 306–307). Between these poles, there is research that examines the conditions for audiences’ agency.
Textual analyses of television series and films tend to consider audiovisual fiction and its influence from a mediacentric perspective, assuming a unidirectional influence from text to audience, with the audience being implied rather than studied in itself (see, e.g., Coletti, 2018; Gibbs, 2021; Randall, 2011). Fictional content, in its most extreme interpretation, “forces the viewer into a position of subjugation, of being at the mercy of a larger structure which one cannot single-handedly change, no matter how much one might try” (Seymour, 2011: 47). Such studies seem to suggest that the article author’s reading is similar to everyone else’s reading: There is little space for resistance, differing interpretations, misinterpretations, or communication error between the text and its audiences.
Survey-based studies examine the relations between fiction and (changing) attitudes and opinions (Adkins & Castle, 2014; Butler et al., 1995; Hermann et al., 2023; Shanahan, 1998; Swigger, 2017). These studies rest on the assumption that audiences may or may not be influenced by fiction, hence awarding viewers the agency to accept or reject messages produced by fictional content. In theory, this line of inquiry often includes background variables such as gender, education, and age, but they do not always report on what variations these give rise to (see, e.g., Hermann et al., 2023).
A different type of survey study was presented by Jones and Paris (2018), where they advocated for a genre approach (sci-fi) (see also Young & Carpenter, 2018). In line with cultivation theory (see, e.g., Borah, 2016), they suggested that the frequency of exposure to specific narratives influences attitudes and opinions, arguing that people process fiction and non-fiction similarly, integrating both into their “real-world knowledge structures, emotional commitments, and subsequent behaviours” (Jones & Paris, 2018: 970).
Studies exploring how audiovisual depictions reproduce or challenge specific discourses (e.g., Bulut & Serinkaya Winter, 2023; Kato, 2015) or frames (e.g., Cardo, 2011) address broader societal contexts, often linked to group identities. For example, Cardo (2011) examined how fiction shapes ideas and values by reinforcing gender frames and stereotypes that impact women’s leadership in real life (for other studies on the interaction between gender stereotypes and fiction, see Haspel, 2010; Johnson & Funnell, 2022; Rasul & Raney, 2021; Smith, 2020; Sykes, 2021). Kato (2015) investigated how various media outlets influence political positions on whaling in Australia and Japan. Thus, fiction is seen as contributing to the (re)production of discourses. These studies operate under the assumption that fiction and audiences share the same discursive universe, with fictional messages and audience interpretations being equally shaped by existing discourses.
Intentional political messaging in fiction, and whether this leaves space for audiences to form their own opinions, has been explored by La Caze (2020), who argued that the political criticism in Wadjda (Al Mansour, 2013: 162) relies on contradictions that allow audiences to “interpret and respond as they will”. An opposite strategy of messaging was described by Daldal (2007: 407), who argued that Ararat (Egoyan, 2002) “implie[s] that, if the viewer fails to agree with the claims […], s/he is under the influence of that same malign force that had been quite successful in obscuring the facts”. Despite their differing approaches, both studies position the audience as negotiators of messages and highlight the sender’s power to influence or challenge audience opinions.
A more complex understanding of the relationship between fiction and audiences leaves more space for agency on behalf of the viewers and more space for polysemic readings when studying texts (Schulzke, 2017). Audience studies that include talking to people often see them as negotiating content depending on their identities, bodies, and contexts. These studies consider fiction as an arena where (moral) ideas can be shared and debated (Hantke, 2011; Korte, 2018). Social identities are conceived as entwined with media consumption, influencing one another on the individual (Johnson & Funnell, 2022: 245) and group (Smith, 2020: 144) level. For example, Yea (2015: 53) studied how fiction dealing with trafficking victims creates an activist anti-trafficking audience via the films’ storylines and cinematic performances, and the emotions these arouse in the audience: “common gendered, classed, and educational histories predispose them to shared affective responses”. Similarly, Carter and McCormack (2006: 235) described different bodies as “sites of particular collective affects”, noting that these affects can also be hindered.
The conceptualisation of the audience is crucial for understanding how the influence of fiction is received and potentially negotiated. While all studies grant more power to the creators and messages within fictional content than to the audiences, they differ in the extent of agency attributed to audiences in negotiating what they consume. Most studies view the influence as flowing from fiction to audiences, or as two parties, both subject to a discursive order. However, for an increased understanding of the role of audiovisual fiction in democracy, and what (lack of) agency audiences have in the face of fiction and politics, research needs to engage more with actual audiences.
The notion that the more manifest the influence from fiction plays out in the relationship between the political system and the audience, or citizens, the more central it is to democracy, can be discerned at least in studies made by political scientists. Butler, Koopman, and Zimbardo (1995) argued that in the end, audiences’ behaviour is what reveals how fiction influences politics. In this section, we deal with questions regarding whether fiction influences opinions, attitudes, or the propensity for political action, and how politicians make use of fiction, for instance, in political campaigning.
Regarding the latter, the role of fiction in political campaigns is quite seldom addressed, although Kato’s (2015) article on how fiction played a role in campaigning before decisions on whaling in Australia is an exception. Pender’s (2005) piece on how former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam featured in a fiction film to promote his legacy is yet an illustration on the direct interactions between politics and fiction.
Studies seeking to survey if and how fiction changes political attitudes and opinions are common (see, e.g., Butler et al., 1995; Jones & Paris, 2018; Rasul & Raney, 2021; Young & Carpenter, 2018). Unsurprisingly, much of this literature has been written by political scientists, although media scholars, geographers, and psychologists are also represented. A common theoretical entry point in these studies is a wish to modify Putnam’s (2015) conclusion that increased television consumption contributes to a decline in trust. This assumption stems from Putnam’s theory that more civic activities are a pathway to increased political trust. Countering, or perhaps nuancing Putnam’s theory, Nærland’s (2019b) extensive study of Norway concludes that depending on watching repertoires, social resources, and personal dispositions, fiction may indeed provide viewers with what he has called a “public connection”, defined as orientation toward the public sphere where decisions on common issues are made. However, a less favourable combination of those attributes may result in the opposite. Rasul and Raney (2021) reported results that indicate that watching biographical fiction about political characters, such as Malcolm X or Margaret Thatcher, leads to political learning and more positive attitudes toward women politicians. On the other hand, Butler, Koopman, and Zimbardo’s (1995) survey examines the effects of Oliver Stone’s (1991) film JFK on audience emotions and behaviour. They found that viewers not only express anger but also report being less likely to vote or fund political campaigns after watching the film.
In a study of dystopian fictional narratives, Jones and Paris (2018) concluded that watching such content does not reduce trust or political efficacy, but that a high consumption of dystopic narratives increases support for radical, especially violent, political actions. In a possibly contradictory finding to Jones and Paris’s, Young and Carpenter’s (2018) survey experiments indicate that extensive viewing of sci-fi, particularly involving AI warfare, is associated with greater opposition to autonomous weapons.
Qualitative studies often explore how depictions of historical events legitimise current policies, such as those of authoritarian Russia (Brassard, 2012; Wijermars, 2016) or the Clinton administration (Dufournaud, 2019). These textual analysis studies suggest that fiction reinforces political legitimacy by supporting narratives promoted by politicians, contrary to audience-focused research, which most often examines how new or unexpected framings in fiction can shift attitudes.
Turning to political activism, there are studies focusing on the mediaverse and how the new media landscape serves to “choreograph” (Mokkil, 2018) political activism. Examples such as how the movie Drishyam (Kamat, 2015) inspired the Kiss of Life campaign in Kerala, India (Mokkil, 2018), and the spread of symbols and language found in The Handmaid’s Tale to further feminist ideas (Howell, 2019), indicate that fourth wave movements (Munro, 2014) use fiction in combination with other media in their political mobilisation.
Textual approaches linked to activism are often based on assumptions about identity formation as a means for supporting subject positions that facilitate political action. A salient topic among these articles pertains to national identities in authoritarian contexts. For instance, Wu (2017) argued that an aesthetisation of poverty in Hong Kong–China co-productions tends to depoliticise identities and hence lessens the possibility for political action. Other studies examine post- and decolonial relations by exploring how the consumption of fictional representations of antidemocratic systems – such as South Africa under apartheid or the suffering of stateless Palestinians – shapes often ambiguous Western solidarity movements rooted in postcolonial sentiments (e.g., Burki, 2020; Setiawan, 2017).
This section has presented how more direct links between the audience and politics are described in the literature sample: notably, how political opinions, attitudes, trust, and legitimacy are influenced by fiction, but also how fiction contributes to and shapes political activism. The aim of several of these studies can be argued to deal with how fiction affects audiences’ cognitive processes and what politics means to people (Fielding, 2014). Combining the results from these studies indicates that the effects of fiction on audiences depend on factors such as access to social resources, personal dispositions, watching repertoires, and familiarity with specific fictional content.
The aim of this article has been to map extant research and identify taken-for-granted assumptions and gaps in the conceptualisation of the link between fiction and democracy. The studies included in this literature review cover all continents, though they are predominantly centred on the US and Europe. Although this may partly be a result of selection bias, it shows a gap in the research that most Western scholars consult. Most of the included research has been conducted by media scholars or political scientists, and the disciplinary background plays a significant role in shaping the approach to the link between fiction and democracy. Surprisingly, the word democracy is not used as frequently as we anticipated, and most articles are based on a presupposition of a democratic context and feature non-articulated and naturalised ideas about what (liberal) democracy is. In this respect, research on Nordic Noir presents a slightly different pattern, as it more often refers specifically to the word democracy. This differs from the rest of the sample in which, rather than speaking about democracy, the articles discuss specific features of democratic politics or the state, such as formation of political opinions and attitudes on specific issues, activism, election campaigns, or welfare states, political discourses, or identities related to democracy or equality as a core democratic value. Few studies discuss variations of democratic models or more overarching elements of democracy, with the exception of political trust.
We have argued that a core question for claiming that fiction plays a role for democracy rests with what is considered a relevant linking between the two. We have found two aspects especially relevant to understanding the various approaches in the studied articles. The first relates to the perceived directness of the linking between politics and fiction; the other relates to how the audiences, who in the politics–fiction nexus double as citizens, are conceptualised. These two aspects are to an extent intertwined. In studies of how fiction impacts peoples’ opinions, often performed by political scientists, audiences are suggested to have a crude form of agency, that is, they can either accept or reject messages: People watch fiction, change their opinions, and act on them. On the other hand, media, film and television scholars’ interpretative textual studies suggest that audiovisual fiction influences how viewers understand politics and shape their identities. In some of these studies, audiences are merely assumed and hence seen as rather passive, while in others, audiences are seen as active agents in their engagement with fiction. It can be concluded that political scientists studying opinion changes seek a more direct impact for fiction to be considered as influencing democracy than media scholars studying discourses and identities. While identity formation and discourses may be considered highly political (Glynos & Howarth, 2007), these processes are theoretically embedded, extended in time, and perceived as less manifest.
Among the gaps we have found, a general insight stemming from our approach, in which we treat the relationship between politics and fiction as reciprocal, has led us to find that how politics affects fiction is much less researched than how fictional content influences audiences’ political opinions, attitudes, or identities. Regardless of whether such conditions come in the form of authoritarian regimes and censorship, or the provision of producers, financiers, or distributors, such as public service television, or from other features of the political context. As noted by, for instance, Steve Neale (1981), the conditions for production have a significant influence on what audiovisual content is produced. Insights into how the political context of democracies or non-democracies affect the conditions and hence the output is accordingly crucial for understanding the connection between democracy and fiction. The exception here, and a good example, is the literature on Nordic Noir, which points to the importance of public service for the genre.
A second gap concerns the fact that few articles combine content or textual analysis with methods to study audience reception or societal circulation. Hence, the conclusions from these articles on how audiences’ identities and subject positions are created do not consider the context of audiences’ reception nor their negotiations of the audiovisual content. We argue, alongside some studies (Fielding, 2014), that further exploration is needed to understand how fiction influences the cognitive and emotional processes shaping audiences’ views on politics and democracy (Stoker, 2006).
In conclusion, what is known about audiovisual fiction and democracy? Briefly, the literature under examination shows that the political context provides a rich source of inspiration for creators of fiction when they portray political issues or relate to political discourses of pressing societal issues such as environmental degradation (Fagan, 2017; Seymour, 2011) or corruption (Pezzotti, 2023; Tasker, 2012). Further, inspiration is used for portraying politicians on screen (Cardo, 2011; Nikolaidis, 2011; Smith, 2020). Regarding how politics affects fiction, research problematises how the political context creates conditions for what is produced. Even if this dimension is generally underexplored, especially when it comes to democratic systems, such analyses feature to a relatively higher degree in research on Nordic Noir, where the political context is largely discussed with respect to production strategies, policies, and imperatives (Chow et al., 2020; Hansen, 2020; Pinedo, 2021; Sand & Vordal, 2021).
Research also shows that fictional representations of political issues under certain circumstances affect audiences’ attitudes and opinions. Nærland (2019b) argued that watching repertoires, social resources, and personal dispositions are crucial for if and how audiences negotiate the content in relation to broader societal issues. Other researchers have found that extensive consumption of certain genres affects viewers opinions. For instance, studies on heavy consumption of sci-fi and dystopian scenarios (Jones & Paris, 2018; Young & Carpenter, 2018) show mixed effects on views of violence and warfare: Young and Carpenter found it reduces support for AI warfare, while Jones and Paris linked it to increased support for violent political actions. We also know that fictional representations may enhance or disrupt political discourses and political identities. However, these results could go in several directions: They may increase audiences’ trust in – or desire for – democracy, encourage participation in democratic deliberation and activism, or, conversely, decrease trust in democracy, discourage participation, hinder discussions on certain political issues (Fagan, 2017), and foster resignation and passivity.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative inconclusiveness of the research, we argue that there is a need for more research on audiovisual fiction and democracy. This is especially important since technological developments underline not only how fiction plays a role in democracy, but how democracy and media, and fact and fiction, are increasingly becoming impossible to separate from each other. For instance, social media has led to higher visibility for the intimate public sphere (Berlant, 2009), showing glimpses of peoples’ everyday life. This has increased the circulation and intermingling of fiction, fact, and experiences from everyday life among so-called prod-users. Apart from the political potential resting with making the private public, it potentially increases a mix of fact and fiction to make sense of and shape experiences (Silverstone, 2007). This mingling of fact and fiction to shape opinion is evidently already present in political activism (Mokkil, 2018; Yea, 2015), as well as by politicians seeking support and legitimacy (Kato, 2015). Studies of the interconnectedness between fiction and democracy has perhaps never been more important, but we argue that it needs to take on a more audience-centred approach as well as dive deeper into the ways that politics, in a multitude of ways, creates conditions for what can be produced. Mediated fact and fiction are an essential part of the public space on which democracy depends for democratic deliberation, for the formation of informed citizens, for setting the political agenda, and for demanding accountability from those in government.