Digital Democracy

Digital democracy scholarship has expanded substantially, yet its intellectual structure, thematic development, and treatment of internet-enabled political participation remain fragmented across disciplines. This study aims to map how Scopus-indexed scholarship examined digital democracy and internet use in relation to modern political participation. A scientometric review was conducted using bibliographic records retrieved from Scopus for the period 1995 to 2023, with the final search conducted on November 19, 2023. After screening journal articles published in English and applying inclusion criteria related to digital democracy, internet use, and political participation, 479 documents were retained for analysis. The metadata were analyzed using RStudio and the BibliometrixR package through its Biblioshiny web interface to examine publication trends, country collaboration, author keywords, thematic mapping, thematic evolution, and conceptual structure. The results show a sustained increase in scholarly output after 2011, indicating growing attention to the political implications of digital technologies. Keyword and thematic analyses identify democracy, political participation, social media, digital democracy, e-democracy, governance, fake news, and online political participation as recurring conceptual nodes. The thematic map shows that governance, fake news, and online political participation function as motor themes, whereas social media and democracy remain basic but less fully developed themes. Thematic evolution indicates a shift from early optimism regarding internet-enabled participation toward more skeptical and nuanced scholarship concerning misinformation, digital inequality, platform governance, and the uneven relationship between online engagement and offline participation. The study contributes by clarifying the bibliometric structure of digital democracy research and identifying future research directions for understanding context-dependent relationships between digital media and democratic participation.