Abstract
We investigate whether and how informal political talk on digital media contributes to citizens’ political participation with unique surveys based on samples representative of Internet users in seven Western democracies. We show that political talk on both social networking sites and mobile instant messaging platforms is positively associated with institutional and extra-institutional political participation. However, the relationship between talk on social networking sites and both types of participation is significantly stronger in established democracies (Denmark, France, United Kingdom, and United States) than in “third wave” democracies (Greece, Poland, and Spain). By contrast, the strength of the relationship between political talk on mobile instant messaging platforms and participation is not significantly different when comparing established and more recent democracies. These findings suggest that informal political talk on digital platforms can contribute to citizens’ participatory repertoires and that different institutional settings, in combination with different technological affordances, play an important role in shaping these patterns.
Highlights
In a democracy, citizens are entitled to freely express themselves but, to some degree, they are expected to do that in both formal and informal contexts
Results of Models 1a-b suggest that online political talk on both SNS and messaging platplatforms (MIMS) has a positive and significant relationship with institutional and extra-institutional participation
The interplay of citizens’ informal political talk, technology, and the quality of democratic governance is a central theme in contemporary scholarly and public discussions, to which this study has offered various contributions
Summary
Citizens are entitled to freely express themselves but, to some degree, they are expected to do that in both formal and informal contexts. We test our hypotheses based on surveys conducted in each country on samples representative of Internet users, where we asked standardized questions to measure informal political talk on different digital platforms, various modes of institutional and extra-institutional participation, political attitudes, and demographic characteristics. To ensure consistency in the results across our two main independent variables, and to better take advantage of Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM; on which see below), we recoded the variable measuring political talk on SNS as dichotomous, coding as 0 respondents who “never or almost never” discuss politics on social media and as 1 all others (treating “don’t remember” as missing values). We report standard errors corrected for clustering on country to account for intracountry correlations not captured by our models (Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2011)
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