Elites and Political Leadership in the Digital Age: Disruption, Transformation, and Democratic Futures

Contemporary democracies face unprecedented challenges to traditional patterns of political leadership. The convergence of long-term structural trends—personalization, party decline, and presidentialization—with rapid digital transformation has fundamentally altered how leaders emerge, connect with citizens, and exercise power. Political parties, once the primary vehicles for leadership recruitment and ideological signaling, increasingly function as hollow shells dominated by charismatic figures. Voters prioritize personality over programs, outsiders challenge establishment elites, and traditional intermediaries lose their gatekeeping role. This transformation manifests in two divergent yet interrelated phenomena: the rise of populist leaders who claim direct, unmediated representation of "the people," and the emergence of technocratic leaders who prioritize policy expertise over democratic responsiveness. Digital technologies and artificial intelligence amplify these dynamics, enabling "platform leaders" to cultivate privatized relationships with followers while deploying sophisticated micro-targeting strategies. These tools facilitate both democratic mobilization and authoritarian manipulation, horizontal networking and vertical control, civic engagement and political polarization. The implications for liberal democracy are profound. Digital platforms enable political entrepreneurs to bypass institutional filters, creating more fluid but potentially unstable representation linkages. While some leverage these technologies to challenge elite dominance through grassroots mobilization, others exploit them to concentrate power and radicalize discourse. The resulting de-institutionalization of political recruitment and the volatility of digitally mediated leadership pose fundamental questions about democratic stability, accountability, and legitimacy. This section welcomes diverse theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches examining how digital technologies reshape political leadership across all democratic contexts and regions. Proposed Panels: 1. Leaders and Citizens in Digital Spaces: Changing Patterns of Political Connection. Papers exploring any aspect of how digital technologies transform leader-citizen relationships, including social media engagement, online mobilization, digital campaigning, virtual town halls, and emerging forms of political communication across different political systems. 2. Pathways to Power: Political Recruitment and Career Trajectories in Digital Times. Contributions examining how politicians build careers in the digital age, including studies of outsiders, insiders, populists, technocrats, activists, influencers, and any forms of political emergence across local, national, and transnational contexts. 3. Platform Politics and Leadership Styles: Diverse Experiences and Approaches. Research on how leaders use digital platforms, including comparative studies, single cases, success stories, failures, democratic innovations, and authoritarian uses, welcoming perspectives from all regions and political contexts. 4. Political and Economic Elites: Intersections, Networks, and Power Relations. Papers addressing relationships between political leaders and economic actors in digital contexts, including tech entrepreneurs, traditional business elites, media owners, and economic influences on political leadership from various theoretical and empirical perspectives. 5. Social Movements, Digital Activism, and Emerging Leaders. Contributions on grassroots mobilization, protest movements, civil society leadership, youth activism, minority representation, gender dynamics, and any forms of bottom-up political organization using digital tools. 6. Democratic Quality and Leadership Performance: Multiple Perspectives. Research examining how digital transformation affects democratic governance, including studies of accountability, transparency, citizen satisfaction, institutional change, democratic backsliding, or renewal, using any methodological approach. 7. Global South Perspectives and Non-Western Experiences of Digital Leadership. Papers specifically focusing on digital leadership in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other non-Western contexts, including indigenous approaches, postcolonial perspectives, and regional variations in digital politics. 8. Open Panel: Emerging Themes in Digital Leadership and Democracy. An inclusive space for innovative research that doesn't fit traditional categories, including interdisciplinary work, experimental methods, normative theory, future scenarios, and any creative approaches to understanding political leadership in digital contexts.