Introduction

In his survey of reviews of the state of democracy during the latter part of 2019 and early part of 2020, Matthew Flinders finds that “the anxieties that have surrounded democracy for at least half a century have in recent years grown in scale, complexity, and intensity.” This is “linked to the emergence of a clear populist signal, the growth of anti-political sentiment and—critically—the emergence of a clear “trust gap” between the governors and the governed.” (Flinders, 2021, p. 486). It is easy to see that such circumstances lend themselves to a mode of politics where fake news, disinformation, and manipulation are legion.

We can take Flinders’ statement to suggest that there are two quite different readings of the democratic implications of the fake news, disinformation, and manipulation challenge: on the one hand, as the rise of a certain type of political actor that claims that established politicians and their conduct of politics have lost touch with ordinary people and their concerns, and in addition, actively seeks to undermine confidence in science and scientists. Thus, the factual and evidence-based foundation of democratic politics is challenged by the rise of a particular species of populist politician and populist parties marked by a distinct style and relatively unencumbered by conventional party politics (Moffitt, 2016). If these phenomena can be identified with and confined to a specific set of actors, parties, and their supporters, then the political challenge is how best to contain or isolate them.

The other reading of Flinders’ statement approaches the democratic challenge from a more structural angle and searches for the roots of anti-political sentiment and the trust gap in the circumstances surrounding policy-making and politics. One important set of factors pertains to structural changes in the party system, not only in terms of new cleavages or a reconfiguration of the cleavage basis, but more fundamental changes in the very social and political anchorage of political parties (Mair, 2013). The implication is that the central role of parties as mediators between civil society and the political system is changing. These changes are in turn related to the emergence of new media forms and important changes in political mediation. They feed on and are stimulated by other changes in the structure and conduct of policymaking and politics, and in globalisation-related reconfigurations of political orders. Key to this is a dislocation or reshuffling of the policy–politics configuration, which is driven both by globalisation and regional integration, as well as changes in party systems and partisanship.

The two readings suggest different causal dynamics in terms of how fake news, disinformation, and manipulation affect democracy. If structural changes are important sources of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, then the rise of populism is hardly the only source of fake news and disinformation. If so, the irony in focusing on the most blatant manifestations of fake news as espoused by populist politicians is that it may detract attention from those factors that helped create such traits in the first place.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how, and the extent to which, we may consider fake news, disinformation, and manipulation as bellwethers for the health of democracy. I do that by means of developing a scale that ranges from democracy to autocracy where the scale is explicitly aligned along fake news, disinformation, and manipulation lines. The assumption that informs the scale is that the more pronounced the role of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation the less democratic the country or political system. This is received wisdom, and there is no reason to doubt that a decline in democracy is positively correlated with the rise of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. Such a deliberate stance is what we normally associate with so-called populist politicians (in line with the first reading above).

The second structural account of democratic decline raises questions about the role of actors’ objectives and possible unintended effects. Further, the structural account opens up the possibility that a decline in democracy may occur without a significant rise in fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. On this latter point, Norway is a critical case: it scores very high on international democracy indexes, is not a pronounced case of fake news and disinformation, and yet has an affiliation with the EU that represents a major challenge to constitutional democracy. The Norway case brings up the question of whether fake news and disinformation is an adequate measure for discerning democratic decline.

The Constitutional-Democracy Pathology Scale

When discussing democratic pathologies in contemporary society, we confront a wide range of concepts and real-life cases. They straddle from illiberal democracy to authoritarian populism to technocracy, to fully fledged authoritarian regimes. An important distinction is between those systems where leaders actively propound fake news, disinformation, and manipulation but nevertheless insist that their political systems are democratic and those systems where there is no reference to democracy. In Western societies, subversive forces very often try to uphold a democratic façade, or the semblance of democracy, whilst at the same time actively suppressing efforts to sustain democracy.

A further distinction is between those societies and political systems that have well-devised and functioning corrective devices to counter fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, and those that do not. Political systems where leaders deliberately resort to fake news, disinformation, and manipulation will either lack proper corrective devices or the leaders will actively seek out whatever corrective devices there are as targets. It follows that in such societies, the leaders play a central role in orchestrating democratic decline. Even in functioning democracies where leaders are not actively targeting corrective devices, these may not function effectively. In such instances, we need to look for unintended consequences of actions and structural changes that provide scope for fake news, misinformation, and manipulation.

What, then, are corrective devices to counter fake news, disinformation, and manipulation? Such devices would be closely associated with those institutional and procedural arrangements that are necessary for ensuring input, throughput, and output legitimacy.Footnote 1 At the level of input legitimacy, we refer to properly functioning: public spheres and media; political parties and other channels that link citizens to the political system; and elected bodies that translate citizen input into decision-making. At the level of throughput legitimacy, we refer to proper and transparent procedures for decision-making and due process. At the level of output legitimacy, we refer to those factors that enable the political system to fashion and carry out policies that will prove capable of solving problems and handling conflicts in equitable and transparent manners.

In addition to these largely institutional and procedural elements, it is important to underline the role of political culture, especially trust in government (vertical) and in fellow citizens (horizontal). In general, we may posit that the higher the level of trust the greater society’s buffer against fake news, disinformation, and manipulation.

An important methodological challenge is to establish how these various elements function as corrective measures, especially in relation to fake news and mis(dis)information. In some instances, the causal links can get quite long. Nevertheless, there may be mutually reinforcing effects across factors, which may generate democratically favourable or democratically deleterious spirals. Some constellations of factors are more prone to be mutually reinforcing—in a positive as well as in a negative manner—than are other ones.

These two dimensions, commitment to functioning democracy and presence/absence of corrective devices, are the two key dimensions that make up the pathology scale. We can then imagine three different scenarios: (a) commitment to democracy and well-established corrective measures; (b) paying lip-service to democracy whilst undermining corrective measures; and (c) authoritarianism, which entails rejecting democracy. The scale is based on the assumption that there is a direct link between decline in democracy and rise of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, and where this rise is an effect of deliberate political action. Since we want to pay attention to unintended effects and instances where there is a decline in democracy without a rise in fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, we need to introduce a further category, here below listed as Level II. This modified scale can then be used to rank political systems in ascending order on a pathology scale with four values:

  • Level I—Functioning democracy with well-established corrective measures.

  • Level II—Functioning democracy albeit with inadequate corrective measures.

  • Level III—Formal democracy without corrective measures (illiberal democracy).

  • Level IV—Authoritarian regime.

Whereas we may find instances of fake news, misinformation, and manipulation in political systems that can be located on Level I, these are isolated incidents and inconsequential for the proper democratic functioning of the political system. The scale is constructed in such a manner that the magnitude—and deleterious effects—of fake news and manipulation increases as we go up the scale from I to IV, and there is a noticeable shift from misinformation to disinformation. As already noted, fake news, disinformation, and manipulation are hallmarks and defining features of authoritarian systems (Level IV), but they also figure in systems grouped on Level III and to some extent Level II. For our purposes, it is important to establish whether the incidents of fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation are sufficiently pronounced for us to establish that a given political system belongs on Level II or Level III on the scale. That provides us with a means for establishing how salient fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation are for the democratic functioning of contemporary societies.

In the following, I will elaborate on the entries in the scale. Level IV is of no interest to us here, neither is Level I. Therefore, I will focus on Levels III and II.

Level III Pathologies

It is natural to start with this level because it refers to political systems that are democratic in name only and there is a strong connection between democratic decline and rise of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. Such instances are normally the result of a largely leader-led (and directed) process of democratic deterioration of the basic institutional-constitutional and political cultural support structure of democracy (the structural arrangements and the norms guiding perceptions and conduct). The decline of the latter can have serious effects on institutional arrangements. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018, pp. 7–8) note:

Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those that do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rule of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it. (pp. 7–8)

Level III pathologies are found in those political systems, which are clearly on a de-democratising path and where their political leaders are careful not to abandon the democratic label, because that helps them to downplay the magnitude of change, and they can buy off or intimidate critics that point to the widening gap between democratic theory and actual practice. We can expect that to last as long as democracy remains the hegemonic legitimation principle in the world. If authoritarianism gains further ground as an alternative in ideational terms, the need for such legitimation dwindles accordingly.

There are also those that “innovate” on the democratic label to make it sit better with the specifics of their political setting. That is certainly the case with Victor Orbán’s Hungary, and his invocation of the notion of “illiberal democracy”. Orban’s oxymoronic notion of illiberal democracy opposes Christian democracy to liberal democracy, with the former pertaining to certain policy choices and ideological stances:

1) liberal democracy favours multiculturalism, whilst Christian democracy “gives priority to Christian culture”; 2) liberal democracy “is pro-immigration, whilst Christian democracy is anti-immigration”; and 3) liberal democracy “sides with adaptable family models” rather than the Christian family model. With respect to each of these three issues, Orbán emphatically states that the Christian view can be categorised as an “illiberal concept.” (Plattner, 2019)Footnote 2

The process of instituting illiberal democracy entails radically altering the constitution; weakening checks on majority rule; asserting control of courts and the media; and orchestrating the behaviour of civil society. These measures amount to blatant attempts to undermine corrective measures and hence give the government a free hand, as much as possible, to manipulate public opinion to its ends. Nevertheless, the retention of the democratic label means that many of the instituted measures are given the shine of being democratic. This insidious approach adds to the manipulative tone and amounts to efforts to undermine democracy “from within” rather than from without, so-to-speak.

The question that many populist scholars have raised is how far this cloaked authoritarian turn extends. Jan-Werner Müller argues that at the heart of populism is an anti-elitism that is combined with a rejection of pluralism. Populists, according to Müller, do not reject representative politics; “they just insist that only they themselves are legitimate representatives” (2016, p. 101). This combination means that populists in power can turn authoritarian. Müller therefore considers populism as a threat to democracy. It follows that populism cannot be considered a corrective to liberal democracy in the sense of bringing politics “‘closer to the people’ or even reasserting popular sovereignty… But it can be useful in making it clear that parts of the population really are unrepresented…” (2016, p. 103).

Nadia Urbinati (2019) notes that when populism is in power it seeks to establish a new form of representative government that is at the same time a disfigured version of democracy. The new form of government typically draws on the key populist distinction between the people and the elite. The populist leader plays a central role in shaping this distinction and in the process transforms the political system from party democracy to populist democracy. The populist leader espouses an anti-establishment position and rhetoric that presents the people as pure and the establishment political elite as morally corrupt. The leader plays a central role in “people-forming” because the leader seeks to establish a close connection to a part of the people that the leader seeks to sustain. In doing so, the leader claims to incarnate the people against a treasonous political elite (the political establishment).

Urbinati underlines that in her view populism is “not an ideology or a specific political regime but rather a representative process, through which a collective subject is constructed so that it can achieve power” (2019, p. 5). This collective subject is not the entire people, but only a part of the people. She goes on to say that:

[p]opulists want to replace party democracy with populist democracy; when they succeed, they stabilize their rule through unrestrained use of the means and procedures that party democracy offers. Specifically, populists promote a permanent mobilization of the public (the audience) in support of the elected leader in government; or they amend the existing constitution in ways that reduce constraints on the decision-making power of the majority. (Urbinati, 2019, p. 4)

This process represents a revocation of party democracy: the populist party is clearly a vehicle for the leader to ascend to power. Nevertheless, once in power the relationship between the leader and the audience or adherents is what matters. The party is placed on the back-burner, and elections are mere acclamations or declarations of support for the leader. New media aid the leader in establishing and sustaining this direct relationship with the audience.

Level III of the pathology scale is reserved for political systems whose leadership actively and deliberately engages in fake news, disinformation, and manipulation to subvert democracy. The claim is that these repressive measures are done in the name of the people or to sustain democracy.

Level II Pathologies

The democratic pathology scale is constructed on the basis of a direct link between democratic decline and the rise of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. The main difference between Level II and III is that the political leadership—and the political class—does not deliberately attempt to undermine democracy. This level of the scale, then, either encompasses political systems that fail to take proper remedial measures or where democratically deleterious acts are unintended consequences of actions or results.Footnote 3

One example of the latter is the policy accumulation and democratic responsiveness trap, which refers to conditions for policy-making in functioning democracies that in serving democratic ends nevertheless can have pathological effects. Adam et al. (2019) note that:

responsiveness is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably involves policy accumulation. … Policy accumulation renders policy content increasingly complex, which crowds out policy substance from public debates and leads to an increasingly unhealthy prioritization of politics over policy. Secondly, policy accumulation comes with aggravating implementation deficits, as it produces administrative backlogs and incentivizes selective implementation. Finally, policy accumulation undermines the pursuit of evidence-based public policy, because it threatens our ability to evaluate the increasingly complex interactions within growing policy mixes. (p. i)

These problems, as long as they remain, the authors note, provide fertile ground for populist actors to point to systemic flaws. They may offer unique opportunities for populists to try to frame problems or challenges as crises that require exceptional measures (and power concentration, hence the hankering towards authoritarianism).

The problems and challenges associated with policy accumulation are not caused by the rise of populism and the fake news wave. In this instance, the causal sequence may, if anything, be the opposite. The presence of policy problems, backlogs, bottlenecks, and so forth, in an otherwise responsive political system, can be exploited for manipulative ends. The sheer complexity of the issues makes it difficult to arrest fake claims; hence, the situation lends itself to manipulation. Leaders are acting responsively. They are not trying to undermine democracy and do not deliberately take measures that seek to weaken citizens’ rights and constitutional protections. We therefore cannot assume that political systems that suffer from the policy responsiveness trap will necessarily be without corrective measures. The push factors for responsiveness in modern democracy are many, from civil society, from experts (diagnosing and proposing cures for social ills), from the volatile capitalist system and its disruptive effects, from global challenges such as the environment, and so forth. This means that we need to look at the who, the how, and the what of policy discourse. Are truth-claims considered, debated, assessed? Whose concerns are addressed and how are they framed? Are there accepted independent (expert) arbiters to assess the veracity of claims? Do interlocutors acknowledge mistakes or misperceptions and propose rectifying measures?

In the case of the policy responsiveness trap, rather than populists causing policy pathologies, we may perhaps say that these pathological traits are particularly present in the rhetoric and actions of populist politicians. Populists may then work as good bellwethers for the state of democracy. If they are blatantly pursuing a policy of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation; manage to frame the issues; are able to steer the political agenda; and manage to have their stances and issue definitions adopted into concrete policies, then we see explicit movement towards Level III.

The example of the policy responsiveness trap shows that there are features of working democracies that lend themselves to manipulation, less by design and more by default. Those actors bent on manipulation—especially political leaders—then need to seize the moment and actively take advantage of the problems to forward their manipulative ends. If so, it is difficult to see the actors that we associate with fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation as the main originators of such processes. Instances of fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation would then be better understood as indicators that such a process is unfolding than as underlying or originating causes.

In effect, the responsiveness trap is one particular manifestation of how policy-making gets dislocated from politics. My claim is that a more systematic assessment of instances of politics without policy, and policy without politics will show how structural changes produce effects that are democratically deleterious without a concomitant rise in fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. The structural changes in question we may refer to as a changing context of correction.

A Changing Context of Correction: Globalisation and the Policy–Politics Constellation

This notion has been inspired by Vivien Schmidt’s argument to the effect that the EU is about policy-making without much politics whereas the obverse is the case with the member states. This problem is in my view far more pronounced in the EEA context.

As we see, for instance from Dani Rodrick’ trilemma, the basic assumption is that globalisation will have negative implications for the policy–politics constellation, in other words, the ability of politics to function as an action coordination mechanism. With the policy–politics constellationFootnote 4, I refer to how politics and policy are structurally configured in modern democracy. Politics refers to the distribution of preferences and interests, their contested nature, and claims for (re)distribution, recognition, and representation, whereas policy refers to problem-solving terminating in collectively binding decisions. I highlight two basic dimensions in the relationship between policy and politics of direct relevance for fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation. One pertains to the basic assumption that certain forms of politics lend themselves better than others for supporting problem-solving and conflict resolution. It is well-known that politics that is bounded—confined by norms, rules, and procedures—is more amenable to the ready pursuit of policy solutions than politics that is unbounded and unfolds as a struggle for power and interest.Footnote 5 The former is also more readily reconcilable with knowledge and expertise and hence with factually and scientifically based problem-solving. Politics as the pursuit of conflicting values is generally more conflictual and irreconcilable than politics as a pursuit of interests (Hirschman, 1977). The other dimension pertains to the territorial level or scale of governing: the relationship between policy and politics is most productive when reconciled at the same territorial level or scale.Footnote 6 When, for instance, one governing level prioritises politics, the other policy, the result is generally pathological.Footnote 7 This latter point is important to consider in relation to the process of restructuring of governing that is driven by globalisation and Europeanisation.Footnote 8

When we consider the constitutional-democracy pathology scale against this process of restructuring of governing, we may posit that the higher on the constitutional-democracy pathology scale we get the more out of synch the two politics–policy dimensions get. At Level I, we find a productive relationship between policy and politics; at Level II, there is some disconnect, but politics is not deliberately designed to subvert democracy. At Levels III and IV, politics is framed, shaped, and conducted to subvert democracy. Nevertheless, such regimes may seek to retain effective policy-making and insist that effectiveness is not a function of a democratically supportive politics. That is precisely what autocratic regimes propound: that democratic politics is not necessary for effective policy-making. Nevertheless, such regimes ultimately depend on suppression of politics through fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, and there is always a risk that such systems will collapse due to their pathological politics.

For our purposes, the dislocation of policy–politics is particularly interesting for understanding the manner in which political systems slide from Level I to II, from well-functioning to somewhat deficient systems, either as part of the decline in or weakness of corrective measures or through unintended consequences.

These observations on policy and politics have direct bearings on what we consider as corrective measures: they are not only about channels of access and political participation; proper procedures; and responsiveness. As noted above, underpinning these measures is a well-functioning political culture based on a distinct conception of what politics is and what politics is for. A well-functioning democracy is premised on the notion that politics is understood and conducted in such a manner as to serve policy-making and conflict handling and that policy-making is such structured and conducted as to enable politics to play a conciliatory and action-coordinating role (Crick, 1992). These issues, again, must respond to the politics of scale: political systems must be such scaled as to ensure that politics and policy can operate in a mutually productive and beneficial manner.

The policy–politics constellation can get out of synch through politics being replaced by other steering media: law or the market, or a distinct combination of the two. The common denominator is an explicit process of de-politicisation where the scope for politics is hemmed in so that it cannot play a productive role in policy-making. Law’s ability to direct action is highly dependent on a mode of politics, and a political process, that together manage to create a culture of trust, cooperation, and conciliation.Footnote 9 Over-reliance on law as an action coordination mechanism leads to untrammeled juridification. Law that is only backed up by coercive power is unstable and reflects the failure of politics to serve as an adequate action coordination mechanism. Strong reliance on the market as an action coordination mechanism has political effects that, if not dealt with in political processes and forums, will find other less constructive manifestations, often associated with a rise in distrust.

In today’s world, a conciliatory and productive mode of politics is under a double squeeze: (a) economic globalisation and technocracy crowd out the space for politics; and (b) populists are disrespectful of the conciliatory, accommodating, and solution-oriented approach to politics that allows a viable engagement with policy substance.Footnote 10 A combination of factors associated with globalisation, the rise of cartel parties, the social dislocation of parties, the policy accumulation and democratic responsiveness trap, and a host of other factors have generated a new constellation marked by the combination of “policy without politics” and “politics without policy”. Each gets associated with a distinct set of institutional arrangements and forums: the former policy without politics is characteristic, for instance, of the EEA agreement where the EEA members Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein incorporate EU laws and policy measures basically without participating in the makings of these laws and regulations. There is therefore, generally speaking, very little public discussion (and legitimation) of these laws and regulations. The latter, politics without policy, reflects how political actors—often associated with populist politics—conduct and enact a mode of (symbolic) politics largely dislocated from policy substance. The political discussions that unfold have little or no bearing on the process of policy-making and the nature of the policies in place. Brexit may figure here, both as an attempt at reclaiming national sovereignty and through grandstanding, manipulation, distorted renditions of the process and those involved, and so forth. The fact that the two—politics and policy—are not made to meet up in meaningful ways, entails that each—policy-making and political contestation—unfolds without the requisite corrective mechanisms. The situation is thus rife for actors to pursue a mode of politics saturated by fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation. We can from this see that politics as a viable action coordination measure presumes a certain—constructive—relationship between politics and policy.

In the following, I will provide a brief case study of the EEA as a particularly pronounced instance of a reconfigured policy–politics constellation.

Europeanisation and the Case of the EEA

Norway is interesting in terms of the relationship between decline in democracy and fake news and misinformation. Norway is one of the few countries in the world that obtains a full score in Freedom House’s report (100).Footnote 11 Norway is thus in relation to the constitutional-democracy pathology scale considered a Level I country (lowest degree of fake news, etc.) in these international democracy assessments. There are no explicit attempts to undermine democracy, and Norway is considered to contain very well-entrenched corrective measures, such as, for instance, a high level of public trust in government (Olsen, 2017). At the same time, Norway’s EU affiliation makes it a de facto EU rule-taker (Eriksen & Fossum, 2014, 2015). In this circumstance, the more the EU integrates—especially when this bears on the fundamentals of Norwegian constitutional democracy—the more problematic becomes the affiliation. What does this tell us about the veracity of the constitutional-democracy pathology scale?

There are three possible interpretations here. One is that the constitutional-democracy pathology scale’s assumed link between fake news, disinformation, and manipulation and democratic decline is unsubstantiated. In other words, we can have democratic decline without much of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. Democratic decline may be a largely unintended effect of other developments.

A second possible interpretation is that political systems confine and delimit fake news, disinformation, and manipulation to a few particularly problematic issues and seek to prevent spillover effects to other issues. Political systems may practice silence by deliberately putting a lid on the discussion of particularly thorny issues. Fake news, disinformation, and manipulation are about how talk and spread of information undermine democracy; democratic decline, however, can also ensue through silence, by refusing to talk about and engage with particularly controversial issues.

A third possible interpretation is that restructuring governance across levels of governing can reconfigure the policy–politics constellation with negative effects on a society’s corrective measures against fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation. This form of restructuring is then clearly not picked up by democratic rating agencies such as Freedom House.

There are aspects of Norway’s EU affiliation that speak to all three interpretations. Norway’s EU affiliation is dynamic, complex, and so comprehensive [it consists of around 70 different agreements (NOU, 2012)] that it is bound to have bearings on Norway’s policy–politics configuration.Footnote 12 Further, the issue of Norwegian EU membership has figured as one of, if not the most, politically divisive issue in Norway, at least since the Second World War.Footnote 13 This conflict does not go away, and it must be somehow managed. As I will show, the way in which this is managed is itself reflective of the problems of bridging an arrangement where the policy–politics relationship is upended by globalisation-induced restructuring of governance.

Norway’s dynamic EU affiliation (Norway is as closely affiliated as it is possible to be for a non-member) serves as a constant reminder of the EU’s presence in all walks of life. Nevertheless, the paradoxical situation is that despite the contested nature of Norwegian EU membership, Norway’s close EU affiliation has evoked surprisingly little conflict (Eriksen & Fossum, 2015; Fossum, 2019; NOU, 2012). An important reason is that the Norwegian governing party constellations have instituted a set of gag rules to keep the EU membership issue off the political agenda (Fossum, 2010).Footnote 14 That onus on silence over talk, in turn, has facilitated the process of EU adaptation.

These traits of Norway’s EU affiliation speak to a clear case of “policy without politics”. Norway’s representative-democratic institutions are barred from shaping the formation of the rules and norms it incorporates from Brussels. Norwegian representative-democratic institutions are hard-wired to deal with these issues as foreign-policy ones, whereas EU member states’ representative-democratic institutions are hard-wired to deal with these issues as domestic concerns and hence engage their populations much more directly. The absence of political participation in EU decision-making bodies is matched by the absence of a national Norwegian process of democratic will-formation behind the shaping of these rules and norms. Norway has only a limited repertoire of means for politically affecting how these rules and norms shape and condition Norwegian socio-economic and political development, and Norway’s means are generally operated through the political and administrative system, at a clear remove from popular influence and oversight. The limited scope for political influence biases this arrangement towards policy and rule import. That is amplified by the sheer scope of policy and rule import; by the significant element of spillover built into the dynamic EEA agreement; by the fact that the process of policy import is dominated by government executives and technocrats with limited scope for popular voice; and by the manner in which the Norwegian political system handles the policy and rule import. As noted, the policy without politics dimension is readily apparent in the fact that the Norwegian political system has developed gag rules and other mechanisms for preventing the EU membership issue—a matter of constitutional and constitutive high politics—to intervene and shape the process of EU adaptation. Norway is compelled to work out conflicts and problematic aspects of incorporated rules at the domestic level, under circumstances where conflict handling is disconnected from policy-making/legislation (Fossum, 2019). There is also a disconnect from other societies and their discussions of the EU.

Further, Norway’s EU affiliation fosters “politics without policy” at the domestic Norwegian level. The structure of Norway’s EU affiliation has a built-in propensity for disconnecting the political scene from policy substance. Many of the issues that incrementally and cumulatively shape Norway are worked out at the EU level with Norway accepting them with minimum domestic engagement and influence. When policy and politics are properly connected, there is a political process whereby citizens are made aware of what is at stake; are presented with the relevant range of options and their implications; and are invited to participate in the decision-making. Instead, in Norway there is very limited popular engagement at the level of policy initiative and during the decision-making stage.

This policy–politics dislocation has deleterious democratic implications, which suggests that we need to place Norway at Level II on the pathology scale rather than at Level I. For our purposes, it is important to establish whether, or to what extent, the policy–politics dislocation undermines corrective mechanisms against fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation. No such systematic study has thus far been undertaken.

Some EU opponents will say that the EEA agreement is a case of manipulation, since the agreement that was entered into in 1994 was very different; today’s arrangement is far more comprehensive in depth and breadth than anyone had imagined in 1994. The EU membership issue was decided in a referendum; the EEA agreement was not. Hence, the claim of “doctored de facto EU membership via the EEA”. The gag rules and the generally depoliticised EU affiliation are seen as means for consolidating and sustaining this instance of structural manipulation. Nevertheless, almost all political parties have been part of governments that have been formally committed to this arrangement and very little has been done to change the status quo.

There is a fairly prevalent propensity by government actors as well as by EEA supporters to understate the effects of the nature and implications of Norway’s EU relationship. A case in point is the law division in the Justice Ministry’s doctrine on limited intervention (“doktrinen om lite inngripende tiltak”), which justifies using a low constitutional threshold for incorporating EU laws and regulations. This is facilitated by a lack of attention to the accumulated effects of EU law incorporation. Legal scholars have voiced strong criticisms against this form of legal reasoning (Holmøyvik, 2015). What does the retention of such a practice in light of heavy criticism from highly qualified experts count as? The “NAV scandal”, where a large number of persons were incarcerated for unemployment benefits fraud because they had not remained in Norway to seek jobs, is interesting. The social benefit agency NAV deemed it unlawful to receive benefits whilst being outside of Norway. These cases and rulings were inconsistent with EU legal provisions that Norway had incorporated, but the practice continued for many years. A government investigation basically concluded that most involved actors were complicit. The report was criticised for pulverising responsibility. It is acknowledged that there was an informal norm inside the Norwegian political and administrative system in favour of confining unemployment benefits to persons within Norway (Pavone & Stiansen, 2022). Is this simply a matter of lack of knowledge? Or does it count as misinformation? A further example is how politicians’ framing of the EU as polity follows their political convictions: EU proponents have generally cast the EU mainly as an economic organisation to downplay its politically intrusive effects, whereas EU opponents have framed it as a supranational juggernaut or a European super-state to underline its politically damaging effects. Further, Norway’s gag rules are meant to facilitate conflict handling; do they end up fostering pathological forms of politics?

These examples suggest that the reconfigured policy–politics relationship creates a lot of space for actors to construe public policy as manipulation, whether that is the case or not. Decision-makers struggle with reconciling the expectation of sovereign rule from the status of non-membership with the expectation of EU compliance from the nature of the current EU affiliation.

We may also hypothesise that the policy–politics dislocation has bearings on political discourse and the political agenda. In addition to instituting silence on the most controversial EU membership issue, and when faced with significant constraints on their realm of action, it is quite natural to assume that politicians will veer towards and prioritise issues and concerns that they can effectively deliver on, rather than those that matter most for Norwegian society. This suggests that there is a clear bias in political discourse and in how elections are fought in favour of issues that politicians know that they can make a difference on. The pathological feature would come across insofar as these issues are confined to local affairs or are insubstantial; hence, elections lose salience as means for staking out Norway’s future direction in a rapidly changing world.

Another complementary hypothesis is that established Norwegian politicians are particularly hamstrung; hence the stage is open for “political entrepreneurs” who feel less bound by international commitments and therefore can criticise the other parties for failing to address key issues. The only reason this has not given a more substantial boost to populist politicians thus far is that there has not been any viable alternative to the EEA agreement (except EU membership which is excluded by gag rules) and Norway is quite well-aligned with the EU. The hypothesis that requires systematic comparison with EU member states is that Norway is particularly hard-wired in favour of populist politics. This is not confined to right-wing populist parties but runs through the political system (note, in particular, the role of the Centre Party). Nevertheless, if Norway is particularly structurally induced, the puzzle is why there is not more populist grandstanding.

The argument thus far is that the particular policy–politics constellation that marks Norway’s EU affiliation could render Norway particularly exposed to fake news, misinformation, and manipulation. I have provided some suggestions to that effect, but these are weak cases. It is perhaps more important to spell out the reasons why there is not more. A key element here is clearly the high level of trust in government. This trust does, however, appear to rely on a fairly conventional conception of sovereignty and constitutional democracy that the EU is in the process of reconfiguring. This suggests that the trust is based on rather shaky ontological foundations.

Conclusion

This chapter took as its point of departure the widely held notion that there is a direct link between democratic decline and the rise of fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation, and the more salient the role of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation the more pronounced the democratic decline. In response to that, I devised a constitutional-democracy pathology scale with four levels, which ranged from democracy to autocracy. The scale would serve two main functions. It was designed to reflect the assumed link between democratic decline and the severity of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation. Further, it was used to discuss how closely we can associate democratic decline with fake news, disinformation, and manipulation by including Level II on the scale.

On the former function, I showed that there are clear merits to gradating democratic decline along severity of fake news, disinformation, and manipulation, as reflected, for instance, in the distinction between levels I, II, and III on the scale. Nevertheless, I also showed that movements on the scale, for instance from level I to level II, cannot solely be attributed to a rise in fake news and disinformation, as the policy accumulation and democratic responsiveness trap showed us. This trap is part of a broader pattern of dislodging of politics and policy that relates to changes in the structure of party systems and the process of globalisation-induced governing restructuring. These structural changes provide scope for the rise of politicians and parties espousing fake news and disinformation. The implications of these structural changes for democracy extend well beyond those actors espousing fake news and disinformation. That was illustrated with reference to the case of Norway, which scores high on international democracy indexes, albeit has become situated in an EU affiliation that is problematic for constitutional democracy. In Norway’s case, democratic decline is as much a function of silence as talk (the talk that we associate with fake news and disinformation). The Norway case showed that silence, gag rules, and constitutional abeyances (Foley, 1989) can have democratically deleterious effects.

The upshot is that we cannot rely on fake news, mis(dis)information, and manipulation as the main bellwether for the health of democracy. We need to pay attention to important structural features and, as suggested in this chapter, the policy–politics dislocation.