Digital Political Participation Research Articles

Digital Media and Traditional Political Participation Over Time in the U.S.

ABSTRACT Research shows that digital media use is positively related to political participation. However, this relationship does not appear in all studies. To date, researchers have generally treated inconsistent findings from study to study and from election to election as an empirical problem that reflects differences in measurement and model specification. In this article, we question the assumption that a consistent relationship between Internet use and political participation should exist over time. We test this expectation using 12 years of data from the American National Election Studies. Our findings support the expectation that a general measure of Internet use for political information is not consistently related to six acts of traditional political participation across elections.

ACTIVATING ACTIVISTS

Digital political participation is an emerging phenomenon that has attracted the attention of a great number of researchers. In most cases, digital political participation (DPP) has been treated as an independent variable in order to attempt to understand other phenomena such as, for instance, changes in offline political participation. However, empirical studies have failed to demonstrate this relationship. In this article, we try to revert this approach, as we attempt to analyse to what extent citizens' political activism can help us explain DPP in Spain. Through a factorial analysis, we organize into dimensions the different types of offline political practices and we use these dimensions as independent variables in a regression model where DPP is the dependent variable. The results obtained serve as a basis for discussing the politically innovative nature of DPP.

E-government in the context of monitory democracy: Public participation and democratic reform

In a networked environment characterised by communicative abundance, there are new opportunities for citizens to scrutinise and contest government actions and decisions. Governments are subsequently facing increasing civic demand for greater transparency, responsiveness and accountability. This article suggests that e-government mechanisms offer contexts through which governments can respond to growing external pressures and adapt to changing notions surrounding democratic participation. It explores efforts undertaken during Iceland’s constitutional reform process, where nation-wide public involvement was encouraged through a combination of digital and traditional political participation methods. The initiative undertaken in Iceland signals a shift away from the transactional activities often associated with government use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) towards more open and responsive e-government practices. This article argues that, to be effective, civic engagement through e-government should be an ongoing process that is integrated into the everyday operations of governments to support and supplement existing democratic practices.

Participación política digital y brecha digital política en España. Un estudio de las desigualdades digitales

Variables relating to attitudes and beliefs towards politics and sociodemographic variables are commonplace in stu- dies on political participation. We take these two traditions in order to study digital political participation. However, rather than doing so in order to explain activism, which is usually the case, we seek to explain a specific type of inequality in the information and knowledge society: the political digital divide. Given that digital political participation takes place through a medium that is not universally used, namely the Internet, it is important to know which citizens are in a position to opt for the advantages the political use of this medium represents. Studies exist analysing the way in which the political digital divide appears in terms of sociodemographic and attitudinal variables. Here, however, we try to present a model that helps us understand how these two groups of variables relate in terms of the relationship to digital political participation. The aim is to offer a fuller perspective of the sources of digital political inequalities.