What do we know about digital public debate? Technological affordances and democratic dilemmas

Digital platforms have become ubiquitous arenas of public debate, changing the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions. On the one hand, digital technologies offer enhanced possibilities for citizens’ participation in public debate, but on the other, they destabilise democratic institutions. In this conceptually informed literature review, we take stock of what we know about digital public debate. To do so, we posit technological affordances – that is, technologies’ latent action possibilities – as a lens through which to study digital public debate. We establish a typology based on human-centric, issue-centric, and technology-centric forms of participation, each of which can be engaged bottom-up by citizens or top-down by democratic institutions. We illustrate the resulting six types of participation through a review of empirical studies based in the Nordic context. We summarise what we currently know about digital public debate in a key democratic dilemma: increasing digital participation goes hand in hand with decreasing institutional trust.