Langs digitale weg dan maar?: patronen van internetgebruik en politieke participatie bij Vlaamse jongeren

Abstract

The rise of online communication possibilities has revived the debate on the impact of media on political participation, and this especially with respect to young people who are considered to be prime users of online communication technologies. On the one hand, new media are thought to facilitate innovative and more accessible forms of political participation. More pessimistic views, however, hold that new media contribute to personal isolation, loss of social capital and an endorsement of existing individual prejudice and delusions. Not surprisingly, then, the relationship between new media and political participation has already been the topic of several empirical studies. This paper improves upon the existing literature in two ways. First, although it is argued that new media have primarily created new opportunities for non-institutional forms of political participation, most studies use one single indicator for offline political participation. In this paper we distinguish between institutional forms of participation and alternative or less institutional forms of participation. Secondly, among young people important differences can be found with regard to the purposes of internet use. In this paper we relate these different patterns of internet use to more traditional media (radio, television, magazines) and compare their mutual effects on the two forms of political participation. For our analysis, we rely on survey data from Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) gathered in 2013, containing questionnaires of 3133 adolescents aged 14 – 30.