Online Civic Participation Research Articles

Impact of Online Civic Participation on the Social and Labor Expectations of Peruvian University Students

Objective: Analyze the impact of online civic participation on the social and labor expectations of Peruvian university students, aiming to understand how digital engagement influences their future outlooks in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. Theoretical Framework: The research is based on concepts of digital citizenship, online civic participation, and the SDGs, using theories of media literacy, social engagement, and youth participation in digital spaces. It incorporates models of online civic (non)participation and a culturalist approach to digital interaction. Method: The study employs a quantitative-descriptive cross-sectional design, gathering data from 349 Peruvian university students through a 52-question survey. It explores students' digital behaviors, civic engagement, and academic and professional expectations, focusing on SDG-related outcomes. Results and Discussion: The findings show that while students are actively engaged in online civic activities, especially entertainment content, their participation and content creation are limited. A correlation exists between higher online engagement and lower academic and labor expectations, indicating a disconnect between digital activities, educational goals, and SDG alignment. Research Implications: The study highlights the need for educational strategies to improve digital literacy, balance online engagement with academics, and incorporate career development resources into digital platforms to align students' activities with their professional goals and the SDGs. Originality/Value: This research explores the link between online civic participation, socio-labor expectations of university students in a developing country, and the SDGs, providing practical insights for educators and policymakers to use digital platforms to enhance academic and career outcomes aligned with sustainable development.

Who cares? How personal political characteristics are related to online counteractions against hate speech

Abstract Although many Internet users have encountered hate speech online, interventions against those incidents are unlikely. To learn more about online counteractions against hate speech, which we conceptualize as a form of online civic participation, we conducted an online survey representing adult German Internet users (N = 2,691). We investigated what distinguishes users who intervene against hate speech, focusing on associations between citizens’ prior counteractions and their personal political characteristics, their attributed responsibility for intervening against hate speech to social and political actors, and their institutional trust. Results indicate that especially Internet users’ personal political characteristics (e.g., internal political efficacy, political opinion leadership) as well as trust in regulative political institutions are positively associated with counteracting against online hate speech. While social media use and previous experience with counteractions increased the likelihood of users counteracting against hate speech, authoritarian attitudes and attributing responsibility for intervening to platform operators decreased it.

CIVIC PARTICIPATION IN CHINA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN WECHAT AND DOUYIN AS A DEMOCRATIC ARENA

Online media platforms have become an arena for activists to engage with political discourses. Since COVID-19, an increasing number of citizens have begun to actively participate online to express their ideas towards political issues. Various types of user-generated content were circulated on various social media platforms: they wrote textual content on Wechat with various metaphors and created user-generated videos on video-streaming platforms to express their opinions. In this context, this study examines how citizens express democratic opinions against ideological discourse, what role social media platforms play as an arena for activists’ participation, and what social media factors facilitate active online civic participation. Adopting a cross-platform perspective, this study compares how Douyin and Wechat facilitate civic participation differently and how people engage with political content differently on these two different media platforms. I employed digital ethnography, augmented by the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), and qualitative content analysis to examine how WeChat and Douyin play different roles in civic participation. This study argues that the social networking platform WeChat provides more in-depth participation and has more resistant forms than Douyin, especially for expressing counter-ideas to mainstream discourses. Among the various forms of resistance, sharing WeChat articles is one of the most visible and effective ways to express democratic opinions in mainstream discourse.

Representation with Incomplete Votes

Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of the participants, as their outcomes may affect the health of the conversation and inform impactful downstream decisions. To that end, we draw on the literature on approval-based committee elections. Our setting is novel in that the approval votes are incomplete since participants will typically not vote on all comments. We prove that this complication renders non-adaptive algorithms impractical in terms of the amount of information they must gather. Therefore, we develop an adaptive algorithm that uses information more efficiently by presenting incoming participants with statements that appear promising based on votes by previous participants. We prove that this method satisfies commonly used notions of fair representation, even when participants only vote on a small fraction of comments. Finally, an empirical evaluation using real data shows that the proposed algorithm provides representative outcomes in practice.

Advancing Communication Infrastructure Theory: The Moderating Roles of Citizen Journalism Practice and Political Trust on Online Civic Participation

ABSTRACT The study integrates multiple theoretical perspectives of communication infrastructure, social capital, and citizen journalism to examine the interplay of interconnected community storytelling networks, social trust, and citizen contribution to the public sphere on civic participation. An analysis of nationwide survey data indicates that citizens’ integration into community storytelling network and citizen journalism practice alike contribute significantly to their civic activity. The findings reveal significant interactions between one’s integrated connection to storytelling network, their citizen journalism practice, and their political trust on online civic participation. Most notably, the three-way interactions suggest that the positive interaction between the integrated connection to storytelling network and citizen journalism practice is more pronounced among those who hold a high-level of political trust.

Civic Life in Rural America Revisited: The Role of Social and Mobile News on Civic Participation

ABSTRACT Rural America has been suffering from insufficient civic resources and is often characterized as a “civic desert.” Drawing upon the Communication Infrastructure Theory, this study surveys residents in Oregon (N = 564) and explores the ways in which social and mobile news use, along with other traditional storytelling networks, relate to rural and non-rural residents’ civic participation. Results showed that the types of communities moderated the effects of social and mobile news usage on online civic participation. This study expands upon scholarly concerns about the possible side effects of emerging media storytelling networks on civic life in local community contexts.

Serious Grappling with Satire: Rhetorical Genre Affordances and Invitations to Participation in Public Controversy

Rhetorical genres play a structuring role in public discourse by framing issues and influencing argumentation norms. In public controversy, struggles for dominance between genre frameworks can accompany substantive argumentation. This article presents a case study of the interconnected controversies about the Swedish school application system and public service legitimacy following a news satire programme Svenska Nyheter episode. It introduced a web tool simplifying applications, circumventing what was argued to be segregating effects of a fragmented first-come-first-serve system. The satiric framing invited carnivalesque civic engagement, while the private school sector’s response promoted a forensic debate on the programme’s legitimacy, with its own invitational pull. While these competing genres dominated different institutional media arenas, they significantly blended in online civic participation. Satirising techniques were appropriated to create agency in the “serious” forensic discourse and vice versa, indicating that boundaries of carnivalesque and serious modes are not as maintained by engaged citizens as by institutional actors.

HOW MOBILE MEDIA ENABLED AND LIMITED ONLINE CIVIC PARTICIPATION AMONG LOW-INCOME U.S. YOUNG PEOPLE DURING THE PANDEMIC

This paper presents comparative research from two youth-centered interdisciplinary ethnographic research projects in media studies, social work, and education. Originally designed as in-person interventions meant to provide digital media literacy and civic leadership development activities for 35 Latinx, Black, Indigenous, Asian American and White young people between ages 15-20 living in low-income neighborhoods, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic forced both projects to take place online. Whereas each project found some benefits to holding endeavors in an online rather than an in-person environment, this paper centers on similar patterns that emerged across the projects in how and why differing participants dropped out over the one-year period between March 2020 through March 2021. The central research question of this paper is: what are the prospects for and barriers to online civic participation activities in the everyday lives of young people who, along with their families, are experiencing economic precarity and other forms of marginalization? The paper explores how mobile media were put to use for coping with everyday life during the pandemic, revealing some assumptions about both coping and online civic engagement that were dismantled.The analysis of these experiences force a reckoning with structural inequities that existed prior to the pandemic and that were further exacerbated because of it. The paper thus unearths new questions regarding how to design online civic participation activities involving young people with multiply intersecting experiences of both marginalization and resilience.

Community Storytelling Network, Expressive Digital Media Use, and Civic Engagement

Grounded in Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT), this study tests the moderating roles of expressive digital media use through the Internet, social, and mobile media between community storytelling network and civic engagement. Based on online survey data of U.S. adults in an ethnically homogenous metropolitan area, this study finds that community storytelling network and expressive digital media use significantly predict the level of civic engagement. In particular, expressive digital media use serves as a necessary condition for community storytelling network to further promote online civic participation and collective efficacy among community residents. This study thus advances CIT with an integrated approach to expressive digital media use by testing the extended theoretical framework in a different local community context. Findings offer practical applications and policy implications regarding communication, citizenship, and civic community.

Social Media as a Civic Mobilizer: Community Storytelling Network, Social Media, and Civic Engagement in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study advances communication infrastructure theory by testing the effects of an integrated community storytelling network (ICSN) and social media as a newly emerging community storytelling agent on civic engagement. A nationwide survey in South Korea indicates that, while ICSN is a robust driving force for civic engagement, social media news use and social media news expression played a vital role in promoting collective efficacy as well as neighborhood belonging and online civic participation, respectively. In particular, social media news use moderated the effects of ICSN on offline and online civic participation. These findings suggest that social media as an emerging storytelling network in the CIT framework can play distinct yet selective roles in predicting civic engagement.

An examination of the effects of rescue workers meaning transfer, attitudes and subjective norms towards being voluntarily involved in civic activities on civic engagement intention

The present investigation used the transfer‐meaning model to assess the influence of rescue workers meaning after a major catastrophic event. Specifically, we examined the influence of rescue workers meaning on subjective norms and attitudes towards being voluntarily involved in civic activities and the influence of these on online and offline civic engagement intention. 300 Mexican undergraduate and graduate students completed a battery of questionnaires assessing meaning transfer, subjective norms, attitudes and behavioural intentions towards offline and online civic engagement. Results showed a significant positive effect of rescue workers meaning on subjective norms and attitude towards being voluntarily involved in civic activities. In addition, subjective norms and attitudes were significant antecedents of offline and online civic participation intention. The theoretical and managerial implications of our results were discussed.

The internet as a global playground: young citizens and informal spaces of agency, a Portuguese case study

ABSTRACTThe recent rapid expansion of digital technologies brought with it the promise that these technologies would bring citizens, and especially youth, closer to political decision-making processes. But studies on youth participation and technology suggest that this promise has failed to materialize. The present article looks at nontraditional and informal online forms of civic participation to better understand students’ civic agency when using the Internet. Results from a countrywide survey of 11th- and 12th-grade students in Portugal suggest that their informal online civic participation (e.g., posting and sharing civically relevant items) is positively correlated with their formal civic participation offline (e.g., in community groups and school decision-making), perceived opportunities to participate offline, and formal online civic participation. In addition, students tend to react to and share civic content on online social networks more often than they perform more structured and formalized civic actions. The results suggest that the Internet is a space of youth civic agency and participation – a global playground – contrasting with formal institutional and formal online spaces, where youth lack a voice.

Facebook and political participation in Cambodia: determinants and impact of online political behaviours in an authoritarian state

ABSTRACTAlong with the explosive growth of Facebook in Cambodia in recent years, analysts have noted the rise of online civic and political participation among Cambodians on this social networking platform. Empirical research focusing on the nature and effects of such online behaviour, however, remains scarce. Through a face-to-face survey of 500 urban residents, this study explores the forms, determinants and impact of online political participation by Cambodians on Facebook. Results suggest that while online political participation on Facebook took a variety of forms, the levels of engagement varied from one form of online activity to another. The study also demonstrates that some key sociodemographic, psychological and Facebook-related behavioural factors were associated with intense online participation, including socioeconomic status, age, online political efficacy and online news consumption habits. The findings, in addition, indicate that online political engagement on Facebook was a robust predictor of offline political behaviour in Cambodia. This study adds to a growing understanding of the determinants of online political participation, while also providing insights into the potential of Facebook in raising citizens’ political engagement, particularly in authoritarian political settings.

Digital Literacy Through Digital Citizenship: Online Civic Participation and Public Opinion Evaluation of Youth Minorities in Southeast Asia

The field of critical digital literacy studies has burgeoned in recent years as a result of the increased cultural consumption of digital media as well as the turn to the production of digital media forms. This article extends extant digital literacy studies by focusing on its subfield of digital citizenship. Proposing that digital citizenship is not another dimension or axis of citizenship, but a practice through which civic activities in the various dimensions of citizenship are conducted, this article critically considers how the concept of digital citizenship can furnish further insight into the quality of online civic participation that results in claims to and acts of citizenship. Through interdisciplinary scholarship, drawing from critical media and cultural theory, and media psychology, and deriving new empirical data from qualitative digital ethnography and quantitative focus group and survey studies, it presents original case studies with young people in Southeast Asia, including young Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia and youth public opinion on LGBTs in Singapore. It argues that Southeast Asian youth digital citizenship foregrounds civic participation as emergent acts that not only serve to make society a better place, but also enacts alternative publics that characterise new modes of civic-making in more conservative, collectivistic Southeast Asian societies.

Digital Access is not Binary: The 5'A's of Technology Access in the Philippines

AbstractOnline political participation has been presented as a possible solution to declining levels of trust in traditional politics. However, the most marginalised communities are often the least connected and participate least in digital citizenship programmes. Much existing literature rests on a binary understanding of citizens as being either connected or unconnected. Progress is therefore often understood simply as a process of “connecting the unconnected.” This paper presents primary empirical research from the Philippines, which suggests that such binary understandings disguise more than they reveal. We argue that it is descriptively more accurate and more analytically useful to recognise that multiple classes of technology access exist, which limit digital citizenship in multiple ways. Qualitative methods were used to learn from non‐users and the least connected about the barriers to online civic participation that they experience. The 5'A's of Technology Access was employed as a framework to analyse those barriers and reveal the social and economic factors that they reflect, reproduce, and amplify. Findings suggest that nonbinary and nontechnical understandings of the barriers to digital inclusion are essential to any effective attempt to remove the remaining obstacles to genuinely inclusive digital citizenship.

The Effectiveness of Online Citizen Evaluation of Government Performance: A Study of the Perceptions of Local Bureaucrats in China

Since the 1990s, more local governments across China have launched Internet-based citizen participation in government performance evaluation. However, we know little about how it is perceived by bureaucrats whose attitudes are critical in determining the outcome of this citizen participation. In this article, we present an analytical framework to identify major factors influencing bureaucratic perceptions of the effectiveness of online citizen participation. We use survey data collected from local government bureaucrats in Guangdong Province, China, to test our research hypotheses. The results suggest that the effectiveness of online civic participation is primarily a function of citizens’ capacity and motivation, inter-agency difference, and administrative burden. This article concludes with a discussion about how our study extends previous research on citizen participation and the implications for practitioners and future research.

Does ‘clicking’ matter? The role of online participation in adolescents’ civic development

This study focuses on the role of online civic participation in the civic development of adolescents. We build on the assumption that online civic participation differs from more traditional offline civic participation in several key characteristics, namely lacking proximity to other actors, possible disconnection between civic actions and their outcomes, and a reduced hierarchy within the online environment. Considering these specifics, the study examined the longitudinal effect of online participation on the development of civic identity, political self-efficacy, and attitudes toward social authorities. Concurrently, we contrasted the impact of online participation with the impact of offline civic participation. Data from a survey-based two-wave panel study conducted in Spring 2014 and Autumn 2015 in the Czech Republic were utilized. The sample comprised 768 adolescents (aged 14-17 in T1; 54% females). The results showed that online participation predicted increased challenging attitudes towards social authorities, while offline participation had the opposite effect. Furthermore, online participation had no effect on political self-efficacy or civic development, but offline participation positively predicted civic identity. The findings are discussed with regard to the specific benefits and limits of online civic participation.

Policy conflicts on the move: a ‘mobilities’ case study of neoliberal postsecondary policy

In light of multiple, dispersed forms of online civic participation, we must reconceptualize how public intervention into policy production and enactment takes place. This study examines a case of academic and operational restructuring termed ‘TransformUS’ that took place at a Canadian university in Saskatchewan from 2013 to 2014. Our analysis centers on a sequence of high profile events in May 2014 at the University of Saskatchewan, sparked by the firing of a tenured dean who publicly criticized TransformUs. We examine the mobilization of this policy conflict, and specifically, how discourses and actors were implicated in its movement, alongside articulations of neoliberalism/anti-neoliberalism and academic freedom. We analyze data posted by Twitter users (tweets), in combination with hyperlinked articles, to examine content and methods of communication. We argue that broader mobilization of TransformUs was enabled through the decontexualization of a localized conflict situation and its recontextualization as an issue of academic freedom.

Civic Technology and Community Building: Interaction Effects Between Integrated Connectedness to a Storytelling Network (ICSN) and Internet and Mobile Uses on Civic Participation

This study draws on communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to examine the extent to which expressive uses of Internet and mobile devices moderate the relationship between integrated connectedness to a storytelling network (ICSN) and offline and online civic participation. Data collected through a Web survey of a U.S. national online panel (N = 1201) reveal that the relationships of ICSN with offline and online civic participation are conditioned by locality-oriented expressive uses of Internet and mobile media. With these findings, this study discusses theoretical insights, policy implications, and practical applications.

The tweet goes on: Interconnection of Twitter opinion leadership, network size, and civic engagement

Opinion leaders tend to possess particular characteristics, such as high social status, wide social networks, and they are highly engaged in civic affairs. This study revisits the concept of original opinion leadership and examines the characteristics of Twitter opinion leaders and leadership by conducting an online survey of 648 college students in the United States. The results reveal that Twitter opinion leadership is rarely predicted by socio-demographics. Twitter opinion leadership is more strongly associated with online network size than offline network size. The study also finds that Twitter opinion leadership is significantly and positively associated with online civic participation. Lastly, the current study finds that Twitter opinion leaders can be categorized as two types – frequent tweet posters and frequent retweeters.