On this podcast, we’ve come back again and again to questions around mis- and disinformation, propaganda, rumors, and the role that digital platforms play in anti-democratic phenomena. In a new book published this summer by Oxford University Press called Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy, a group of scholars from varied research traditions set out to find new ways to marry more traditional political science with computational social science approaches to understand the phenomenon of democratic backsliding and to bring some clarity to the present moment, particularly in the United States.

Justin Hendrix had the chance to speak to two of the volume’s editors and two of its authors:

• Steven Livingston,  a professor and founding director of the Institute for Data Democracy and Politics at the George Washington University;
• Michael Miller,  managing director of the Moynihan Center at the City College of New York;
• Kate Starbird,  a professor at the University of Washington and a co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public; and
• Josephine Lukito,  assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and senior faculty research associate at the Center for Media Engagement.