Digital politics after Trump

Abstract

This essay offers a retrospective review of three major recent books in the field of digital politics – Andrew Chadwick’s The hybrid media system: Politics and power, Zizi Papacharissi’s Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics, and Daniel Kreiss’s Prototype politics: Technology-intensive campaigning and the data of democracy – in light of Donald J. Trump’s surprising 2016 electoral victory. Rather than critiquing these books for failing to predict Trump, the essay asks how the second editions of these books might differ if they were being written post-Trump. The central purpose of the essay is to think through how the research literature is likely to change in light of this major, disjunctive event.