Does Social Media Promote Democracy? Some Empirical Evidence

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between social media and democracy in a cross-section of over 125 countries around the world. We find the evidence of a strong, positive correlation between Facebook penetration (a proxy for social media) and democracy. We further show that the correlation between social media and democracy is stronger for low-income countries than high-income countries. Our lowest point estimates indicate that a one-standard deviation (about 18 percentage point) increase in Facebook penetration is associated with about 8-point (on a scale of 0-100) increase for the world sample and over 11 points improvement for low-income countries.

Keywords: Democracy; Information; Facebook; Internet; Social Media

JEL Classification: D72; D83; O1