Digital Literacy and the Electoral Support for Populist Candidates: A Preliminary Bibliometric and Political Analysis

The technological progress creates a great range of opportunities that can improve every aspect of our lives. The latest evolutions allow most of the citizens, especially in the Global North, to easily solve issues that otherwise required a great amount of time and energy. Our existence is more comfortable and dynamic because of the innovations brought by the most recent phase of the Industrial Revolution. However, there are also notable downsides to this new reality. In the academic field, there is a growing interest in the manner in which social media and the internet affect our attention span, our mental health, or the way in which we relate to other people. One of the main goals of our study is to establish if there is a similar interest for the impact of technology on voting behavior and political participation as well. An incipient bibliometric helps us in framing an overview on this topic. In the second phase of the study, based on Francis Fukuyama’s arguments regarding the causality between the growing importance of the online environment and the global surge of populist movements, we focus on the possible interconnections between the level of digital literacy and the electoral strength of populist presidential candidates. We build our conclusions on three case studies: the latest presidential elections in Romania, Lithuania, and France. Although our study has several limitations, it provides useful insights for a wider academic debate on the future of political radicalism in the age of social media and large language models.