Women’s online political participation: Empowerment through a feminist identity?

• In Event: Tweets, Posts, and Shares: Gender, Social Media, and Political Struggles

Abstract

Citizens in modern democracies have a continuously expanding set of tools at their disposal through which they seek to exercise influence on politics and policies, including digital modes of participation (Theocharis & Deth, 2018). But despite initial hopes that the Internet would provide a more egalitarian access to participation, when it comes to political actions on the Internet - as well as offline -, women significantly lag behind men (Wen et al., 2013; Córdova & Rangel, 2017). However, this gap does not spread equally across all types of political behavior (Coffe & Bolzendahl, 2013) nor across womanhood as a whole . One element that has been shown to positively influence the willingness to participate are political attitudes like feminism (Almond & Verba, 1963; Swank & Fahs, 2017). Heger and Hoffmann (2019) found different paradigms of feminist orientations to have differing effects on women’s online political participation (OPP), indicating that a woman’s feminist identity and her feminist political orientations can empower her to be more politically engaged on the Internet. While feminist orientations are understood as beliefs that agree with feminism when it comes to specific (gender-related) issues, a feminist identity evolves around a person’s self-understanding as a feminist (Weis et al., 2018). Disentangling the effects of these aspects of feminism and their impact on political engagement on the Internet establishes a more nuanced and differentiated scholarly reception of an understudied set of political orientations that has an impact on the political participation and efficacy of women, in particular.
Based on a survey conducted in Germany in 2018, we build on this work to identify the empowering potential that lies in the three types of feminist orientations (based on three “waves” of feminist thought) established by Heger and Hoffmann (2019) on the one hand, and two types of a feminist identity (individual and collective) on the other hand. We developed two scales: one measuring individual feminist identity (IFI; α = .855) with three items reflecting a person’s self-identification as a feminist and the other measuring collective feminist identity (CFI; α = .838) which consists of four items covering the communal aspect of a feminist identity, such as the importance of being a member of a political group . These concepts were tested with regard to the impact they have on two types of online political participation, namely an index of regular OPP activities (α = .938) that do not focus on a specific issue, and gender-focussed OPP activities , hereafter referred to as G-OPP (α = .951), that include a gender-related political dimension. Control variables were age, education, income, political knowledge, political interest, time spent online and activities pursued online.
We find that both forms of feminist identity strongly correlate with each other – but interestingly, both only correlate with a feminist orientation based on the “third wave” paradigm, but not first or second wave feminism. Linear regression analysis testing the impact of three types of feminist orientation as well as IFI and CFI on OPP and G-OPP (OPP adj. R² .341; G-OPP adj. R² .355), demonstrates how, for women, CFI seems to play a highly significant (OPP p < .001; G-OPP p < .01) and also much more important empowering role (OPP ß .294; G-OPP .410) than IFI.
This finding sheds light on two mechanisms: First, it reveals that a feminist identity, particularly a collective one, can be considered an important driver of women’s political online engagement. A feminist identity can be shown to engender a stronger empowering effect than even manifest feminist orientations. Second, we find that a feminist identity is closely related to a political orientation based on the “third wave” feminist paradigm. It appears that supporters of the “third wave”, a label under which a variety of post-colonial, post-structural and queer feminist theories are being subsumed (Frey and Dingler, 2001; Hernandez-Truyol, 2011), are most prone to not only identify as feminists but also as members of a political group. This does not seem too far-fetched as this paradigm establishes a person’s identity (e.g. cultural, sexual or gender identity) as a core trait to determine their political situation. It also introduces the concept of intersectionality, the overlapping of different characteristics, as a root for added discrimination against and marginalization of specific identities. In times where identity politics are subject to an increasingly critical public discourse, the implications of the strong empowering potential a collective feminist identity comes with, deserve attention. Our findings provide the basis for future research, particularly into the antecedents of individual and collective feminist identity and their impact on women’s political participation.

Authors

• Katharina Heger, Free University of Berlin

• Christian Pieter Hoffmann, University of Leipzig