Wired Voters: The Effects of Internet Use on Voters’ Electoral Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper examines whether voters’ use of the Internet as a source of political news affects the extent to which they are certain of their vote choice in national-level elections. We employ data pertaining to the 2011 general election in Ireland, linking geographical information on broadband coverage with individual-level public opinion data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study. The resultant dataset allows us to adopt a quasi-experimental approach in our examination of the effects of online political newsgathering on voters’ electoral uncertainty. Implementing instrumental variables, we find consistent evidence of a causal relationship between use of the Internet as a source of political information and increased levels of political uncertainty among voters, ceteris paribus. Our findings are robust to a range of model specifications and alternative operationalizations of dependent and independent variables.