Data Sheet 1_Regenerating democracy in a captured media environment: student protests and hypermedia mobilization in Serbia.docx

Democratic backsliding in the 21st century is increasingly sustained through media capture, which constrains public deliberation and undermines accountability without eliminating formal democratic procedures. This article examines how grassroots actors regenerate democratic values and practices under such conditions through a case study of the Serbian student protests of 2024–2025. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative design with descriptive quantitative checks that combines comparative media framing analysis, semi-structured interviews with student organizers, protest participants, and independent journalists, and contextual democratic indicators, the study analyzes how protest meanings were constructed and contested across state-aligned, independent, and movement-generated media ecosystems. The findings show that state-aligned media systematically delegitimized or depoliticized the protests through frame-level strategies of neutralization, order-oriented problem definition, and responsibility displacement, while independent and student-produced media articulated justice-oriented narratives centered on accountability, civic responsibility, and democratic renewal. Operating within a captured and asymmetrical media environment, protest actors developed a form of hypermedia mobilization that combined digital platforms with symbolic, visual, and embodied practices to sustain visibility, coordination, and collective identity beyond mainstream channels. The article contributes to scholarship on democratic backsliding and social movements by demonstrating that democratic regeneration can emerge from below through communicative and symbolic practices, even in contexts of constrained media pluralism, and by specifying hypermedia mobilization as a key mechanism through which civic agency is enacted under conditions of informational control.