Browsing by Subject "e-demokratia"

Western democracies are facing a complex and a harmful phenomenon because of influence operations on social media. This master’s thesis assesses the connection between Finnish citizens’ political trust and their experienced feeling of threat towards influence operations. It has been discussed in the public that the goal of a successful influence operation is to undermine citizens’ trust towards its democratic institutions and actors. Because there is an insufficient amount of academic research on this topic, the aim of this thesis is to rectify it by revealing the true nature of the link between political trust and citizens’ experience. The theoretical framework consists of Harvard University’s Pippa Norris’ theory of E-democracy. It introduces the virtual political environment in the 21th Century. Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam’s theory of social capital describes the trends of interpersonal trust in the modern history. Collège de France’s Pierre Rosanvallon’s theory of counter-democracy provides a theoretical bridge between Norris’ virtual political system and influence operations as seen, for example, in the United States’ presidential election in 2016. A survey sample of 1000 participants analyzed in this master’s thesis was originally collected by the think tank Magma in 2017. “Finnish Views on Democracy and Political Issues 2017” sample was collected to describe Finnish citizens’ views on multiculturalism and attitudes towards bilingual policies. However, the sample has more elements in it, for example, citizens’ views on democracy and security policies. Hence an exploratory factor analysis was conducted, and it revealed four latent attitudes from the sample: political trust, resilience and stances towards multiculturalism and minorities. The research was continued by transforming the identified factors to factor scores, meaning new variables. After that a logistic ordinal regression was conducted to provide insight into the relationship between the political trust and Finnish citizens’ views on the threat of influence operations. The connection was not identified between them in this master’s thesis. Other factor scores, resilience and stances towards multiculturalism and minorities had a statistically significant connection with Finnish citizens’ views on the threat of influence operations. This research - contrary to expectations - failed to show a clear relationship between political trust and Finnish citizens’ experienced feeling of threat towards influence operations. It might tell that socio-economic background might be a stronger factor defining the individual’s tendencies to the phenomenon compared to the political trust. Then again, influence operations could impact in a different dimension than where citizens’ affiliations with democratic institutions and actors exist. This topic requires more interdisciplinary research to find the answer to the societal challenges Western democracies are facing with influence operations using social media.