Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President

Jamieson's book made a controversial argument at the time of publication: that Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was not merely attempted but consequential — that the combination of hacking, selective disclosure, social media manipulation, and strategic amplification by domestic actors produced measurable effects on voter behaviour and electoral outcomes. The argument was contested then and remains so, but Jamieson marshals the evidence more rigorously than most commentators.

The methodological contribution is as important as the empirical one. Jamieson models how to think about influence operation effects — distinguishing between persuasion, demobilisation, and the amplification of existing attitudes, and examining the conditions under which each is likely to occur. For analysts working on election integrity, the book remains a foundational reference for how to reason about the relationship between influence operations and electoral outcomes.