Context, Digital Consumption, and Political Participation: A Global Examination

• In Event: Social Media and Political Participation: A Comparative Look

Abstract

There is a substantial literature examining the relationship between internet use and civic engagement. Much of this research argues that internet use has a positive relationship with political participation, but the results are irregular, sometimes large and other times small and capricious. The problem is that there is very little explanation about what source of this variation. We suspect that country level institutional and cultural factors (i.e. regime type, voting system, and democratic history/culture) drive it. Many of these factors have been explored but not in a large-scale comparative study. Rather research often centers on data from a single country. We plan to remedy this using survey data gathered by Gallup that includes nearly every country around the globe, has batteries of questions centered on both civic engagement and internet use, and that we are fortunate enough to have exclusive access. Aside from the advantages offered by the large N here, it is important to note that we also are able to make cross-country comparisons because of the uniformity of the survey questions. The batteries are identical. Ultimately, our plan is to estimate a series of multi-level models that assess the level one relationship between individual internet use and civic engagement, and test whether institutional and cultural differences across countries account for level two variation in the y intercepts and slopes of the internet use estimate.

Authors

• Jason Gainous, Duke Kunshan University

• Grant T. Buckles, Gallup

• Kevin Wagner, Florida Atlantic University