DECENTRALIZED NETWORKS AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA ERA: A SYNTHETIC LITERATURE REVIEW
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Abstract
This academic article aims to review and synthesize the body of knowledge on decentralized network-based political communication in the social media era. It focuses on analyzing the transition from a centralized model of political communication, in which political parties or political organizations primarily determine political messages, to a networked model in which multiple actors participate in producing, disseminating, interpreting, modifying, and reconstructing the meanings of political messages. This article employs a synthetic literature review by integrating the concepts of connective action, produsage and produser, encoding and decoding, social media affordances, political fandom, and social network analysis in order to explain the relationships among political parties, political messages, supporters, social media, and network structures. The synthesis reveals that contemporary political communication is not merely a linear process of transmitting messages from political parties to citizens. Rather, it is a circulatory process in which messages move through networks of supporters, volunteers, content creators, and social media users who can decode, select, reproduce, amplify, or contest political messages continuously. Social media, therefore, functions not only as a channel for message dissemination but also as a structural space that shapes visibility, circulation, and user aggregation. At the same time, supporters play a significant role as political produsers who connect party messages with their own emotions, identities, experiences, and political expectations. This article argues that the study of contemporary political communication should view politics as an ecosystem of message production, interpretation, participation, and the co-construction of meaning through social media, rather than viewing communication merely as a linear process of transmitting messages from political parties to citizens.
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