In this commentary, Filippo Palmieri examines how digital platforms are reshaping the political socialization of young Europeans. As mass parties decline, politics is increasingly encountered through personalized feeds, influencers, recommendation systems, and fragmented online publics. Palmieri argues that this transformation does not make populism inevitable, but it creates an environment in which populist appeals to immediacy, personalization, and distrust of intermediaries can travel more easily. Drawing on the concepts of “mass individualism” and “bubble democracy,” the commentary explores how digital participation can broaden political engagement while weakening durable forms of representation and accountability. The central democratic challenge, Palmieri suggests, lies in the growing gap between political expression, collective organization, and meaningful representation.
By Filippo Palmieri*
A political message on TikTok rarely arrives alone. It appears between a song, a comic sketch and a creator’s account of an ordinary day. On Instagram, a carousel explaining an election may be followed by an advertisement or a friend’s holiday photograph. For many young Europeans, this is no longer a secondary route into politics. It is where politics is first encountered.
The European Parliament’s Youth Survey 2024 gives a measure of the change. Among Europeans aged 16 to 30, 42 percent name social media as a main source of information on political and social issues. Television follows at 39 per cent (European Parliament, 2025). These figures do not prove that young people have lost interest in public affairs. They tell us something more precise: a generation is forming its political habits inside spaces built around personal profiles, recommendation systems and an endless competition for attention.
The consequences reach beyond communication. Politics learned through a feed has a different pace, different intermediaries and a different sense of proximity. This helps explain why populist language often moves easily across digital platforms. It does not mean that social media manufacture populists. The relationship is less direct, and more interesting, than that.
What the Party Used to Provide
The decline of mass parties is often measured through membership figures or electoral volatility. Those indicators matter, but they capture only part of what has disappeared. A party once offered a place where separate experiences could be translated into common claims. It trained activists, selected leaders and connected local disputes to an interpretation of society. The process was slow. It was also unequal: hierarchies were rigid, internal dissent could be suppressed, and many citizens remained outside the organizations that claimed to represent them. Yet the intermediary was visible. It had offices, rules, officials and a name.
Mauro Calise describes the new configuration as “mass individualism.” The collective actor once organized by party machines has broken into a multitude of connected individuals (Calise, 2025). The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Users act through personal accounts, but they do so before mass audiences. They can speak and mobilize at a scale that would once have required an organization, while the content reaching each of them is increasingly personalized.
This distinction matters most for those who did not acquire political habits before the digital turn. A twenty-year-old may discover a housing protest through a short video, learn its vocabulary from a creator, share it with friends and join a demonstration organized in a group chat. Information, expression and participation take place on the same device, sometimes within a few hours. As Ohme and his colleagues observe, digital environments have brought exposure to news and political action unusually close together (Ohme et al., 2022).
That can produce real participation. Climate strikes, campaigns against gender violence and mobilizations over university costs have travelled through networks that traditional parties struggled to reach. But the same mobilization may dissolve when attention moves to another issue. A hashtag can assemble a public without building an organization able to negotiate, decide or remain accountable after the peak of visibility has passed.
There is no single European “digital generation” either. A study covering nine countries found marked class differences among young people’s conventional, community-based and online participation (Grasso & Giugni, 2022). Education, resources and political confidence still shape whose voice becomes public. Cheap access to a platform does not make political influence equally available.
Disintermediation Without the Disappearance of Intermediaries
Social media are regularly described as instruments of disintermediation. The term suggests that parties, journalists and associations have been removed from the relationship between citizens and power. Only half of that story is true. Older gatekeepers have weakened; mediation itself has not vanished. It has changed hands.
TikTok’s recommendation system decides which political clip travels beyond its original audience. Instagram gives visual advantage to claims that can be compressed into a reel or a sequence of cards. Influencers translate public controversies into the language of personal experience, while visible counts of likes and shares make some positions appear socially dominant before a user has examined them. None of these mechanisms is politically neutral, even though none resembles a party headquarters or a newspaper editorial meeting.
Damiano Palano’s notion of “bubble democracy” offers a useful description of the result. Palano argues that the public associated with earlier forms of representative democracy is fragmenting into multiple, partly self-referential audiences (Palano, 2019). A bubble is not a sealed room. Users still meet disagreement, and content moves unpredictably between networks. The deeper change concerns the distribution of attention. A controversy that feels unavoidable on one feed may be almost absent from another. Citizens do not simply reach different conclusions; they may begin from different political events.
This is why the familiar image of the echo chamber is insufficient. The problem is not only that people prefer information consistent with their beliefs. Platform publics are temporary and uneven. They gather around an election, a scandal or a war, then rearrange themselves. Public opinion begins to resemble the intermittent convergence of several streams rather than a single national conversation.
Representative politics has always involved distance. Nadia Urbinati argues that representation does not require citizens and representatives to become identical. It depends on a continuing relationship in which decisions can be judged, contested and revised (Urbinati, 2010). Social media create the impression that this distance has closed. A leader speaks from a phone, replies to followers and comments on events before the evening news. The tone is intimate. Power may remain highly concentrated.
Why Populist Narratives Travel Well
Populism fits this environment because it turns representation into a promise of direct presence. A leader speaks as the authentic voice of “the people”; whoever stands between the two can be presented as an obstacle. Parties distort. Experts complicate. Journalists hide. Procedures delay. These accusations long predate TikTok and Instagram, but platforms allow them to be repeated daily, adapted to audience reactions and attached to an individual face.
Personalization is part of the advantage. A recognizable leader circulates more easily than an organization with competing factions and a detailed programme. Speed matters too. Every event can be framed as an urgent test of whether institutions are listening. Conflict completes the pattern: the distinction between an authentic community and those allegedly frustrating its will is well suited to systems that reward reaction.
Still, there is no universal digital law favoring populists. Davidson and Enos examined more than 400 European parties between 2010 and 2020. Populist parties received more engagement than their competitors on Facebook, but the same advantage did not appear consistently on Twitter. It also varied between countries and was concentrated especially among right-wing populists (Davidson & Enos, 2025). Platform architecture matters. So do political culture, party strategy and national context.
Research from the Netherlands adds another complication. People with populist attitudes were more likely to react to political content, yet their use of social media did not consistently trap them in a populist electoral funnel (Jeroense et al., 2022). A feed is not a machine with a predetermined political output. It changes the incentives under which politics is communicated: some claims become easier to circulate, some actors become more visible, and directness acquires a persuasive value of its own.
For young citizens, this is also a question of familiarity. If politics is first experienced through personal profiles and short cycles of attention, the leader’s direct appeal may not look like a rebellion against ordinary democratic practice. It may look like ordinary democratic practice. Bargaining, party organization and institutional compromise then appear distant and evasive, even though they remain necessary whenever a demand must be converted into a collective decision.
A Different Experience of Democracy
It would be misleading to tell this story as a fall from a democratic golden age. Mass parties often demanded obedience and filtered out inconvenient voices. Digital media have allowed experiences once ignored by established organizations to enter public debate. They have made rapid mobilization across cities and borders possible. Young Europeans have used them to force climate change, racial justice, gender equality and economic insecurity onto political agendas.
What has become fragile is the link between expression and representation. A post shared hundreds of thousands of times shows intensity, not necessarily durability or representativeness. A creator can become an influential political interpreter without accepting the obligations normally attached to political leadership. A digital campaign may be remarkably effective at naming a problem and much less able to determine who can legitimately negotiate in its name.
Young Europeans have not abandoned politics. They are learning it in a public sphere whose boundaries move from one issue to the next and whose most powerful intermediaries seldom present themselves as political institutions. This does not make populism inevitable. It makes the populist promise of immediacy easier to recognize and the suspicion of mediation easier to understand.
The relevant question, then, is not whether young people are democratic enough. It is what democracy comes to mean when it is first encountered as a stream of personalized messages rather than as membership in a collective organization. The passage from mass parties to digital bubbles is therefore more than a shift in political communication. It is a change in the everyday experience through which representative politics becomes intelligible.
(*) Filippo Palmieri holds a master’s degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences, specializing in Politics and International Security, from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, political representation, the transformation of political parties and the effects of digital communication on contemporary democracy. His master’s thesis examined the changing analytical value of the concept of populism in twenty-first-century democracies. He has presented research on democracy, populism and illiberalism at academic events hosted by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Italian Political Science Association and Venice International University. Email: filippo.palmieri3@studio.unibo.it
References
Calise, M. (2025). Opinione pubblica e individualismo di massa. Il Mulino, 74(4). https://doi.org/10.1402/118619
Davidson, T. R. & Enos, J. (2025). “Engaging populism? The popularity of European populist political parties on Facebook and Twitter, 2010–2020.” Political Communication, 42(1), 171–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2369118
European Parliament. (2025). Youth survey 2024. Eurobarometer. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3392
Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. (2022). “Intra-generational inequalities in young people’s political participation in Europe: The impact of social class on youth political engagement.” Politics, 42(1), 13–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211031742
Jeroense, T.; Luimers, J.; Jacobs, K. & Spierings, N. (2022). “Political social media use and its linkage to populist and postmaterialist attitudes and vote intention in the Netherlands.” European Political Science, 21(2), 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00306-6
Ohme, J.; Andersen, K.; Albæk, E. & de Vreese, C. H. (2022). “Anything goes? Youth, news, and democratic engagement in the roaring 2020s.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221093008
Palano, D. (2019). La democrazia alla fine del “pubblico”: Sfiducia, frammentazione, polarizzazione: verso una “bubble democracy”? Governare la paura, 35–92.
Urbinati, N. (2010). La democrazia non ha un altrove. Il Mulino, 59(2), 225–241. https://doi.org/10.1402/31572
From Mass Parties to Digital Bubbles: How Young Europeans Encounter Politics
In this commentary, Filippo Palmieri examines how digital platforms are reshaping the political socialization of young Europeans. As mass parties decline, politics is increasingly encountered through personalized feeds, influencers, recommendation systems, and fragmented online publics. Palmieri argues that this transformation does not make populism inevitable, but it creates an environment in which populist appeals to immediacy, personalization, and distrust of intermediaries can travel more easily. Drawing on the concepts of “mass individualism” and “bubble democracy,” the commentary explores how digital participation can broaden political engagement while weakening durable forms of representation and accountability. The central democratic challenge, Palmieri suggests, lies in the growing gap between political expression, collective organization, and meaningful representation.
By Filippo Palmieri*
A political message on TikTok rarely arrives alone. It appears between a song, a comic sketch and a creator’s account of an ordinary day. On Instagram, a carousel explaining an election may be followed by an advertisement or a friend’s holiday photograph. For many young Europeans, this is no longer a secondary route into politics. It is where politics is first encountered.
The European Parliament’s Youth Survey 2024 gives a measure of the change. Among Europeans aged 16 to 30, 42 percent name social media as a main source of information on political and social issues. Television follows at 39 per cent (European Parliament, 2025). These figures do not prove that young people have lost interest in public affairs. They tell us something more precise: a generation is forming its political habits inside spaces built around personal profiles, recommendation systems and an endless competition for attention.
The consequences reach beyond communication. Politics learned through a feed has a different pace, different intermediaries and a different sense of proximity. This helps explain why populist language often moves easily across digital platforms. It does not mean that social media manufacture populists. The relationship is less direct, and more interesting, than that.
What the Party Used to Provide
The decline of mass parties is often measured through membership figures or electoral volatility. Those indicators matter, but they capture only part of what has disappeared. A party once offered a place where separate experiences could be translated into common claims. It trained activists, selected leaders and connected local disputes to an interpretation of society. The process was slow. It was also unequal: hierarchies were rigid, internal dissent could be suppressed, and many citizens remained outside the organizations that claimed to represent them. Yet the intermediary was visible. It had offices, rules, officials and a name.
Mauro Calise describes the new configuration as “mass individualism.” The collective actor once organized by party machines has broken into a multitude of connected individuals (Calise, 2025). The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Users act through personal accounts, but they do so before mass audiences. They can speak and mobilize at a scale that would once have required an organization, while the content reaching each of them is increasingly personalized.
This distinction matters most for those who did not acquire political habits before the digital turn. A twenty-year-old may discover a housing protest through a short video, learn its vocabulary from a creator, share it with friends and join a demonstration organized in a group chat. Information, expression and participation take place on the same device, sometimes within a few hours. As Ohme and his colleagues observe, digital environments have brought exposure to news and political action unusually close together (Ohme et al., 2022).
That can produce real participation. Climate strikes, campaigns against gender violence and mobilizations over university costs have travelled through networks that traditional parties struggled to reach. But the same mobilization may dissolve when attention moves to another issue. A hashtag can assemble a public without building an organization able to negotiate, decide or remain accountable after the peak of visibility has passed.
There is no single European “digital generation” either. A study covering nine countries found marked class differences among young people’s conventional, community-based and online participation (Grasso & Giugni, 2022). Education, resources and political confidence still shape whose voice becomes public. Cheap access to a platform does not make political influence equally available.
Disintermediation Without the Disappearance of Intermediaries
Social media are regularly described as instruments of disintermediation. The term suggests that parties, journalists and associations have been removed from the relationship between citizens and power. Only half of that story is true. Older gatekeepers have weakened; mediation itself has not vanished. It has changed hands.
TikTok’s recommendation system decides which political clip travels beyond its original audience. Instagram gives visual advantage to claims that can be compressed into a reel or a sequence of cards. Influencers translate public controversies into the language of personal experience, while visible counts of likes and shares make some positions appear socially dominant before a user has examined them. None of these mechanisms is politically neutral, even though none resembles a party headquarters or a newspaper editorial meeting.
Damiano Palano’s notion of “bubble democracy” offers a useful description of the result. Palano argues that the public associated with earlier forms of representative democracy is fragmenting into multiple, partly self-referential audiences (Palano, 2019). A bubble is not a sealed room. Users still meet disagreement, and content moves unpredictably between networks. The deeper change concerns the distribution of attention. A controversy that feels unavoidable on one feed may be almost absent from another. Citizens do not simply reach different conclusions; they may begin from different political events.
This is why the familiar image of the echo chamber is insufficient. The problem is not only that people prefer information consistent with their beliefs. Platform publics are temporary and uneven. They gather around an election, a scandal or a war, then rearrange themselves. Public opinion begins to resemble the intermittent convergence of several streams rather than a single national conversation.
Representative politics has always involved distance. Nadia Urbinati argues that representation does not require citizens and representatives to become identical. It depends on a continuing relationship in which decisions can be judged, contested and revised (Urbinati, 2010). Social media create the impression that this distance has closed. A leader speaks from a phone, replies to followers and comments on events before the evening news. The tone is intimate. Power may remain highly concentrated.
Why Populist Narratives Travel Well
Populism fits this environment because it turns representation into a promise of direct presence. A leader speaks as the authentic voice of “the people”; whoever stands between the two can be presented as an obstacle. Parties distort. Experts complicate. Journalists hide. Procedures delay. These accusations long predate TikTok and Instagram, but platforms allow them to be repeated daily, adapted to audience reactions and attached to an individual face.
Personalization is part of the advantage. A recognizable leader circulates more easily than an organization with competing factions and a detailed programme. Speed matters too. Every event can be framed as an urgent test of whether institutions are listening. Conflict completes the pattern: the distinction between an authentic community and those allegedly frustrating its will is well suited to systems that reward reaction.
Still, there is no universal digital law favoring populists. Davidson and Enos examined more than 400 European parties between 2010 and 2020. Populist parties received more engagement than their competitors on Facebook, but the same advantage did not appear consistently on Twitter. It also varied between countries and was concentrated especially among right-wing populists (Davidson & Enos, 2025). Platform architecture matters. So do political culture, party strategy and national context.
Research from the Netherlands adds another complication. People with populist attitudes were more likely to react to political content, yet their use of social media did not consistently trap them in a populist electoral funnel (Jeroense et al., 2022). A feed is not a machine with a predetermined political output. It changes the incentives under which politics is communicated: some claims become easier to circulate, some actors become more visible, and directness acquires a persuasive value of its own.
For young citizens, this is also a question of familiarity. If politics is first experienced through personal profiles and short cycles of attention, the leader’s direct appeal may not look like a rebellion against ordinary democratic practice. It may look like ordinary democratic practice. Bargaining, party organization and institutional compromise then appear distant and evasive, even though they remain necessary whenever a demand must be converted into a collective decision.
A Different Experience of Democracy
It would be misleading to tell this story as a fall from a democratic golden age. Mass parties often demanded obedience and filtered out inconvenient voices. Digital media have allowed experiences once ignored by established organizations to enter public debate. They have made rapid mobilization across cities and borders possible. Young Europeans have used them to force climate change, racial justice, gender equality and economic insecurity onto political agendas.
What has become fragile is the link between expression and representation. A post shared hundreds of thousands of times shows intensity, not necessarily durability or representativeness. A creator can become an influential political interpreter without accepting the obligations normally attached to political leadership. A digital campaign may be remarkably effective at naming a problem and much less able to determine who can legitimately negotiate in its name.
Young Europeans have not abandoned politics. They are learning it in a public sphere whose boundaries move from one issue to the next and whose most powerful intermediaries seldom present themselves as political institutions. This does not make populism inevitable. It makes the populist promise of immediacy easier to recognize and the suspicion of mediation easier to understand.
The relevant question, then, is not whether young people are democratic enough. It is what democracy comes to mean when it is first encountered as a stream of personalized messages rather than as membership in a collective organization. The passage from mass parties to digital bubbles is therefore more than a shift in political communication. It is a change in the everyday experience through which representative politics becomes intelligible.
(*) Filippo Palmieri holds a master’s degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences, specializing in Politics and International Security, from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, political representation, the transformation of political parties and the effects of digital communication on contemporary democracy. His master’s thesis examined the changing analytical value of the concept of populism in twenty-first-century democracies. He has presented research on democracy, populism and illiberalism at academic events hosted by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Italian Political Science Association and Venice International University. Email: filippo.palmieri3@studio.unibo.it
References
Calise, M. (2025). Opinione pubblica e individualismo di massa. Il Mulino, 74(4). https://doi.org/10.1402/118619
Davidson, T. R. & Enos, J. (2025). “Engaging populism? The popularity of European populist political parties on Facebook and Twitter, 2010–2020.” Political Communication, 42(1), 171–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2024.2369118
European Parliament. (2025). Youth survey 2024. Eurobarometer. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3392
Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. (2022). “Intra-generational inequalities in young people’s political participation in Europe: The impact of social class on youth political engagement.” Politics, 42(1), 13–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211031742
Jeroense, T.; Luimers, J.; Jacobs, K. & Spierings, N. (2022). “Political social media use and its linkage to populist and postmaterialist attitudes and vote intention in the Netherlands.” European Political Science, 21(2), 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-020-00306-6
Ohme, J.; Andersen, K.; Albæk, E. & de Vreese, C. H. (2022). “Anything goes? Youth, news, and democratic engagement in the roaring 2020s.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 557–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221093008
Palano, D. (2019). La democrazia alla fine del “pubblico”: Sfiducia, frammentazione, polarizzazione: verso una “bubble democracy”? Governare la paura, 35–92.
Urbinati, N. (2010). La democrazia non ha un altrove. Il Mulino, 59(2), 225–241. https://doi.org/10.1402/31572
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