The use of digital technology in the 2016 election “represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of legacy institutions<br />that had set bounds for American politics in the postwar era,” Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, writes in a forthcoming paper, “Can American Democracy Survive the Internet?”<br />According to Persily, the Trump campaign was “totally unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics.” He argues that<br />this type of campaign is only successful in a context in which certain established institutions — particularly, the mainstream media<br />and political party organizations — have lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world.<br />Along parallel lines, Cristian Vaccari, a reader in politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, argued in an email<br />that social media have contributed to the sudden emergence of candidates and parties running the ideological gamut:<br />Matthew Hindman, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of “The Myth of Digital Democracy,” said in a phone interview<br />that “if you took the label off, someone looking at the United States would have to be worried about democratic failure or transitioning toward a hybrid regime.”<br />Such a regime, in his view, would keep the trappings of democracy, including seemingly free elections,<br />while leaders would control the election process, the media and the scope of permissible debate.<br />In a forthcoming paper “Outsourcing Politics: The Hostile Takeovers of Our Hollowed Out Political Parties,” Samuel Issacharoff,<br />a law professor at New York University, writes about how the erosion of political parties played out in 2016:<br />Neither party appeared to have a mechanism of internal correction.
