Intensification of democratic practices and informational privileges of political elites in the context of social media development

Based on the assertion that with the development of social media, political elites lose some of their information privileges, the author tries to identify the mechanisms underlying this trend. After conducting a content analysis of specialized literature and case studies, he identifies two causal mechanisms: eliminating the information benefits of elites in the face of an acute political crisis and intensifying democratic practices that contradict the elite models of managing society. These mechanisms are part of the author’s analytical model, which will subsequently be applied to analyze the corresponding empirical material. Having concentrated his attention on the second mechanism in this paper, the author comes to the conclusion that its essence is that social media create additional opportunities, firstly, to express political opinions, secondly, to increase the level of political learning and, thirdly, for political participation itself. Each of these processes changes the rules of the game: new actors, new topics for political discussions, as well as new formats for articulating interests and civic activism, which together threaten the information privileges of political elites, appear in the information space.