Disconnected democracy: political attitudes and algorithmic information flows in dissonant public spheres

• Autores: Pablo González González
• Directores de la Tesis: Homero Gil de Zúñiga Navajas (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad de Salamanca ( España ) en 2025
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Carlos Elías (presid.), Isabel Inguanzo Ortiz (secret.), Karolina Koç-Michalska (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estado de Derecho y Gobernanza Global por la Universidad de Salamanca
• Materias:
  • Ciencia política
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
• Resumen

  • The prevalence of social media and algorithms has been argued to divide the public sphere, shifting information flows from shared news agendas to semi-public spaces. This shift raises new questions about how citizens encounter, process, and engage with political information, marked by the emergence of more passive consumption habits, where individuals increasingly expect important information to reach them without active effort. By employing survey and experimental data, this dissertation examines how citizens political orientations and patterns of information consumption are shaped within this backdrop through three articles and a set of complementary analyses, contextualized in the United States, Chile, and Southern Europe (Italy, Portugal, and Spain). The first article and complementary analyses examine how individuals with stronger populist attitudes are more likely to adopt the `News-Finds-Me (NFM) perception, relying on peers and platforms to obtain political information and disconnecting themselves from active news seeking. The second article explores how the NFM perception nurtures positive attitudes toward and reliance on algorithmic news gatekeeping, as well as social media political homophily, which reinforces ideological echo chambers and accelerates fragmentation: a defining feature of todays dissonant public spheres. And lastly, the third article examines the adoption of misperceptions about election fraud and their correction, studying how the dissemination of misleading political information in today's fragmented information ecosystems can undermine citizens' trust in the democratic process. Although these misperceptions are resilient, their adoption can be mitigated through corrective interventions on social media. By exploring these attitudinal and informational features, this dissertation contributes to understanding the fragmentation of dissonant public spheres.