Loughborough University
Browse
Vaccari & Valeriani - Sage Open.pdf (253.08 kB)

Digital political talk and political participation: comparing established and third wave democracies

Download (253.08 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2018-08-14, 08:08 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Augusto Valeriani
We 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 Open

Volume

8

Issue

2

Citation

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

2018-05-18

Publication date

2018-06-26

Notes

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

2158-2440

eISSN

2158-2440

Language

  • en