Vaccari & Valeriani - Sage Open.pdf (253.08 kB)
Digital political talk and political participation: comparing established and third wave democracies
journal contribution
posted on 2018-08-14, 08:08 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Augusto ValerianiWe 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.
Funding
The research presented in this article was funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research under the “Future in Research” Initiative, 2013-2016 (project code RBFR12BKZH).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
SAGE OpenVolume
8Issue
2Citation
VACCARI, C. and VALERIANI, A., 2018. Digital political talk and political participation: comparing established and third wave democracies. SAGE Open, 8 (2), 14pp.Publisher
SAGE Publications © The Author(s)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-05-18Publication date
2018-06-26Notes
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).ISSN
2158-2440eISSN
2158-2440Publisher version
Language
- en