Democratic resilience and sociotechnical shocks

Abstract

We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the United States and offers potential policy interventions from a dynamic system’s perspective. We propose that micro-level heterogeneity across individuals within crucial institutions leads to vulnerabilities of election support systems at the macro scale. Our analysis provides comparative statistics to measure the fragility of systems against targeted harassment, disinformation campaigns, and other adversarial manipulations that are now cheaper to scale and deploy. Our analysis also informs policy interventions that seek to retain public officials and increase voter turnout. We show how limited resources (e.g., salary incentives to public officials and targeted interventions to increase voter turnout) can be allocated at the population level to improve these outcomes and maximally enhance democratic resilience. On the one hand, structural and individual heterogeneity cause systemic fragility that adversarial actors can exploit, but also provide opportunities for effective interventions that offer significant global improvements from limited and localized actions.