Internet Use and Understanding Democracy in Africa

This paper examines the impact of using the Internet and social networks as sources of information on individuals’ understanding of democracy. The analysis draws on data from the sixth round of the Afrobarometer survey, conducted in 2014 across a sample of African countries encompassing both democratic and non-democratic regimes. Despite its importance for shaping political preferences and behavior, this topic has received limited attention in the economic literature. The sixth round of Afrobarometer is particularly well suited to this analysis, as it is the only wave that includes both openended and closed-ended questions on individuals’ understanding of democracy. We prioritize open-ended responses, which we argue better capture respondents’ conceptual understanding, while using closed-ended questions to assess robustness. Open-ended answers are systematically structured and analyzed using the ChatGPT tool to extract meaningful information. Our identification strategy exploits the interaction between lightning activity and 3G coverage. Lightning-induced disruptions generate exogenous variation in Internet access, enabling causal inference. The results show that reliance on the Internet and social networks as information sources is, on average, associated with a negative bias in the understanding of democracy. This distortion extends to perceptions of freedom of expression and institutional corruption, while perceptions of electoral fairness are positively affected. Importantly, these effects are highly heterogeneous across information environments. The negative bias is driven primarily by countries that are more exposed to censorship and information control, where online content is more likely to be filtered or distorted. By contrast, in low-censorship environments, Internet use has a positive and statistically significant impact on the understanding of democracy. Given the strong positive association we document between democratic understanding and preference for democratic systems, these findings suggest that the political consequences of Internet diffusion critically depend on the degree of censorship and media openness. Rather than uniformly shaping political attitudes, Internet use can either undermine or reinforce democratic preferences depending on the surrounding information environment. JEL Codes: G2, G32, L25, L6, Q53