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Two decades after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, the three small nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have emerged as a steadfast and resilient Baltic political, cultural, and geographic region. Influenced by the political and economic liberalization of the early 1990s, the small nations have undergone significant systemic re-structuring and transformations, accompanied by socio-cultural volatility and contemporary vulnerabilities such as escalating inequalities, signs of populism and polarization, and indications of social discontent standing out amongst the most emblematic ones. Adopting a 'process-focused' approach, this paper aims to depict how democratic institutions in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, with a specific emphasis on conventional news media, aspire to uphold distinctive characteristics of a shared democratic culture amidst intensified information disruptions, including the surge of online disinformation, information manipulations and a decline in institutional trust. It presents evidence based on the two pillars of what is referred to as the so-called 'Baltic resilience': the media's institutional position and the agentive aspect, which refers to the public's self-efficacy and perceptions, emergent to counter manifold 'inforuptions' in the Baltic region.
Balčytienė et al. (Mon,) studied this question.