Social capital online: Collective use of the Internet and reciprocity as lubricants of democracy

This article puts the democratic potential of using the Internet into perspective through an analysis of how collective uses of the Internet promote social capital. Research results reveal that social capital online (i.e. trust and reciprocity) is enhanced by involvement in collective use of the Internet such as participation in online communities and use of the Internet among informal groups in everyday life. This process could counter negative aspects of Internet use. Further, accumulated online social capital can be a powerful predictor of online political participation, i.e. online reciprocity has a positive effect on intention to participate in online civic discussion. Finally, the authors' analyses indicate the possibility of a spillover of online social capital into offline arenas. It is concluded that collective use of the Internet can be a lubricant for democracy.     

Groups or Gatherings? Sources of Political Engagement in 19th Century American Cities

There is broad agreement that citizen participation is critical for successful democracy. Recently, scholars have linked such political participation with the notion of social capital—community-level resources, such as trust, norms, and networks, that foster collective action. Much uncertainty remains regarding the sources of social capital, however. Here we examine two different features of community life that are believed to nurture social capital, and political participation in turn: public venues where relative strangers can meet anonymously, socialize, and share information and opinions (i.e., venues for informal interaction); and venues for organized exchange between familiars, such as voluntary organizations and social clubs. Using quantitative data from America's largest cities at the end of the 19th century, we examine the relationship between both supposed sources of social capital and respective rates of voter participation. We find little support for the role of informal interaction in fostering an active and engaged citizenry. We do, however, find evidence that citizen participation was related to some types of associationalism (or organized exchange). In particular, associations that fostered high levels of mutual interdependence among members seemed the most strongly linked to higher levels of political participation.     

Negotiating civic identity across different political contexts: Immigrant participation in social movements and political incorporation

This article examines the understudied intersection between migration and contentious politics, focusing specifically on immigrant participation in social movements within their host societies. Drawing upon data from the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement in Hong Kong, it illuminates the process through which Chinese immigrants become politicized, evolve collective identities, and mobilize against civil dominance. Further, it underscores the transformative potential of social movements in facilitating immigrant political incorporation. However, it also recognizes the unilateral acceptance determined by mainstream society, which often leaves immigrants sidelined in discussions regarding their qualifications for unconventional political participation. To address civil inequality, immigrants establish their civil identities, challenge dominance, and amass political capital for future incorporation. This study extends the migration and social movements literature by shedding light on the political dynamics of immigrant participation and the hurdles they encounter during their journey toward political incorporation. It also underscores the significant role of progressive social movements in fostering immigrant political participation. Furthermore, the research highlights the unique immigrant political identity that emerges and evolves through participation in social movements, contesting exclusion and monopolistic dominance over democratic realization.     

What Drives Progressive Policy? Institutional Politics,Political Mediation,Policy Feedbacks,and Early U.S. Old‐Age Policy

What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutional conditions, bureaucratic development, election results, and public opinion. Political mediation theory holds that social movements can have influence over progressive policy under favorable political conditions. Policy feedback theory holds that programs will be self‐reinforcing under certain conditions. The article goes beyond previous research by including and analyzing public opinion in institutional political and political mediation models and addressing positive policy feedbacks. We appraise five models derived from these three theories through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses of the generosity of early old‐age policy across U.S. states at two key moments. We find some support for each theory, and the results suggest that they are complementary. Left regimes or social movements can initiate progressive policy, which can be reinforced for the long term through positive policy feedback mechanisms. We discuss the implications for current U.S. politics and for progressive policy elsewhere.     

Does Facebook increase political participation? Evidence from a field experiment

During the last decade, much of political behaviour research has come to be concerned with the impact of the Internet, and more recently social networking sites such as Facebook, on political and civic participation. Although existing research generally finds a modestly positive relationship between social media use and offline and online participation, the majority of contributions rely on cross-sectional data, so the causal impact of social media use remains unclear. The present study examines how Facebook use influences reported political participation using an experiment. We recruited young Greek participants without a Facebook account and randomly assigned a subset to create and maintain a Facebook account for a year. In this paper we examine the effect of having a Facebook account on diverse modes of online and offline participation after six months. We find that maintaining a Facebook account had clearly negative consequences on reports of offline and online forms of political and civic participation.     

Mediated and moderated effects of political communication on civic participation

Australian scholars and politicians have long been concerned about politically uninformed and inactive young Australians. However, few efforts have been made to explain how the use of traditional and online media may affect youth’s participation in politics. Our research utilises the citizen communication mediation model and extends the expected mediation chain by an additional examination of the possible interactions between news media use and political discussions, as suggested by the differential gains model. Using representative data from Australian 10th graders, we examine whether and how news media usage (newspapers, television, radio, and the Internet) affects expected participation in a range of civic and political activities conditional of discussions about political issues (with family, friends, and online). Path models account for additional mediators (civic knowledge and civic efficacy) and control variables to explain future civic and political participation. The results suggest that news media use stimulates political discussions, although different media exert differential effects. Yet, news exposure hardly influences the second mediators (civic knowledge and civic efficacy) in a direct manner. In fact, civic knowledge and efficacy mediate the relationships between political communication and participation, both directly and sequentially. Moderation analyses clarify that despite the mediating role of political discussions, news media exposure also influences (future) civic participation contingent of students’ engagement in (primarily Internet-based) discussions about political and social issues. We emphasise the significance of these results with reference to previous research, discuss potential directions for future research, and draw conclusions for civics and citizenship education.     

Political activation and social movements: Addressing non-participation in Aotearoa New Zealand

The decline of participation in traditional civic political processes, like voting in elections and writing to elected representatives, continues to deepen in contemporary liberal democracies. However, civics comprise only one avenue for political participation. Social movements also play a key role in influencing political affairs by exerting pressure on established institutions from outside rather than within. ‘Political activation’ is key to understanding and addressing non-participation in both movement and civic settings alike, yet activation in movement settings, like non-participation more generally, remains under-researched. This article seeks to address this imbalance by exploring ways of using political activation theory to synthesise research on the fields of political participation and non-participation, in both civic and social movement contexts. After reviewing the literature on activation, which favours political participation in civic settings, I then juxtapose this existing scholarship with a case study focused more on non-participation and social movements as they are understood by movement organisers in Aotearoa New Zealand. In so doing, I demonstrate how civics, social movements, participation and non-participation can be better understood together to advance scholarship on why people do or do not engage with politics.     

Civic involvement in deprived communities: A longitudinal study of England

This study aims to understand how community material deprivation is related to associational membership amongst neighbourhood residents. We posit that aside from personal characteristics and willingness to engage, experiences of neighbourhood deprivation are strongly correlated with how much people devote themselves to associational membership. We identify three mechanisms through which community deprivation can determine individual participation in political, civic, and work voluntary associations: social cohering, norms of obligation, and activated dissatisfaction. We link individual panel data from Understanding Society from 2010 to 2019 with the English Index of Multiple Deprivation at the neighbourhood level. This study finds that neighbourhood deprivation is associated with lower norms of civic obligation which, in turn, lowers a person's propensity for engagement. Individuals with low income and education are less likely to participate in voluntary associations in the first place, therefore the contextual role of neighbourhood deprivation exerts a further external negative pressure on civic participation. We find that membership in political organizations is an exception whereby it is positively associated with neighbourhood deprivation. The results imply that given the many economic and social capital benefits of associational involvement (Putnam, 2000), collective deprivation can produce an additive pattern of economic disadvantage which is reinforced through a lack of social participation.     

Closing the gap: gender parity in political engagement on social media

Historically, major gender differences exist in both political engagement and online content creation. Expanding on these literatures, this study considers the extent to which men and women engage in politics specifically in social media. Novel survey data are employed to test for any gendered differences in encountering and responding to political content via social media. Despite measuring a robust set of political behaviors within social media, few gender differences emerge. Where differences do emerge, they are most likely among the most visible political behaviors, suggesting that women may strategically engage in less visible or less-likely-to-offend political behaviors, as compared to men. This poses important questions regarding political participation, representation, and gender.     

The Willingness to State an Opinion: Inequality,Don't Know Responses,and Political Participation

Most explanations of inequality in political participation focus on costs or other barriers for those with fewer economic, educational, and “cognitive” resources. I argue, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's work on “political competence,” that social position in the form of income also structures political participation through differences in the sense that one is a legitimate producer of political opinions. I test whether income differences in participation persist net of costs by examining nonparticipation in a setting in which barriers to participation are low: answering political survey questions. Lower‐income people are more likely than others to withhold political opinions by saying “don't know” net of differences in education, “cognitive ability,” or engagement with the survey exercise. Further, political “don't know” rates predict voting rates, net of other predictors. Efforts to democratize participation in American politics must attend not only to the costs of involvement but also to class‐based differences in individuals' relationship to political expression itself.     

Designing effective corporate social advocacy campaigns using valence,arousal, and issue salience

Corporate social advocacy (CSA) is a growing communications practice that involves corporations taking a public stance on a controversial social issue. Some CSA campaigns have failed in the past (e.g., Pepsi’s 2017 Live for Now Moments Anthem video) by generating public backlash and damaging corporate reputation. To test how to design CSA campaigns that are beneficial for both the corporation and the advocacy issue, the current between-subjects experiment (N = 508) employed a 2 (issue salience: moderate vs. high) X 2 (valence: negative vs. positive) X 2 (arousal: moderate vs. high) factorial design to test the effects of salience, valence, and arousal on memory and four persuasion outcomes: company attitudes, purchase intentions, political participation intentions, and social media intentions, while also analyzing the mediation of information processing. Findings support prior research suggesting that negative valence increases persuasion in CSA contexts. A high-salience issue and high-arousal language increased political participation and social media intentions but had no effect on company attitudes or purchase intentions. Practical implications for CSA campaign designers highlight the persuasive potential of negative valence in CSA messages, and the utility of high-salience and high-arousal for political action and social media engagement.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DEMOCRACY IN A NEW DEMOCRACY

Taiwan made the transition from political authoritarianism to democracy in the late 1980s. Data from representative samples of the Taiwan population in 1992 and 1997 show how, in the early phase of democratization, citizens varied in the extent of their democratic political behavior and attitudes. I attempt to explain these variations on the basis of variables drawn from social capital theory (participation in voluntary organizations and trust), controlling for the individual's position in the social structure (sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, socioeconomic status, and social class). The findings of the multivariate analysis support only one of the social capital hypotheses: The more organizations one participates in, the more one engages in various forms of democratic political behavior . However, organizational participation has no effect on democratic political attitudes . There is no positive reciprocal relationship between the two key social capital variables of organizational participation and trust. Trust, instead of having a positive effect, either has no net effect (on some forms of democratic political behavior) or a significant negative effect (on democratic political attitudes and petitioning a government agency). The political context of Taiwan may explain why people who distrusted Taiwan's political system were more democratic and more tolerant in their attitudes than those who had more political trust.     

Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms,Crises, Organizational Characteristics,and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.     

Social media,political expression,and participation in Confucian Asia

This study reviews and analyzes the published empirical research on the role of social media in promoting political expression and participation in Confucian Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to providing a narrative review of the literature, our analyses show clear numerical estimates of the relationships among different types of social media use (i.e., informational, expressive, relational, and recreational), political expression, and participation in Confucian states. The findings reiterate the importance of the expressive use of social media, showing its moderately strong relationship with participation. The findings also show weak positive relationships with informational and relational uses. We also examine the role of political systems in these relationships and conclude that the strongest relationships are in democratic states, followed by hybrid and authoritarian systems.     

MASTERING THE ART OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Online communication has become a central part in the communication repertoires of political actors in Western mass democracies. In Switzerland, where broadband, internet use, and media literacy are amongst the highest in the world, all major political parties run their own website and are active on social media. This article seeks to show how Swiss political parties deal with social media, how they implement it and how they use social media. The study builds on empirical data from a structural analysis of party websites, the official Facebook sites, and Twitter feeds. These social media sites were analysed for their resonance, update frequency, and thematic clusters focusing on information, mobilization, and participation. A weekly assessment of the user numbers illustrates the development of user resonance throughout the 2011 election year. While political parties claim to appreciate the dialogue and mobilization potentials of social media, they mainly use social media as an additional channel to spread information and electoral propaganda. The overall resonance is still on a very low level. The data seem to sustain the normalization hypothesis, as larger parties with more resources and voters are better able to generate effective communication and to mobilize online than small and marginal parties.     

Campus politics,student societies and social media

The university campus has often been seen as an important site for the politicization of young people. Recent explanations for this have focused attention upon the role of the student union as a means to enable a ‘critical mass’ of previously isolated individuals to produce social networks of common interest. What is missing from these accounts, however, and what this article seeks to address, is how these factors actually facilitate the development of political norms and the active engagement of many students. Drawing upon qualitative data from three countries we argue that it is the milieu of the smaller student societies that are crucial for facilitating the habitus of the student citizen. They provide the space for creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital. Moreover, we contend that these processes of politicization are increasingly enacted through social media networks that foreground their importance for developing political habitus in the future.     

Contradictory tendencies in the political culture of Croatian youth: unexpected anomalies or an expected answer to the social crisis?

A successful democratic consolidation of post-socialist societies depends, among other things, on their citizens’ political culture, younger generations included. Moreover, youth civic engagement today and in the future is a guarantee of the continuity and development of democracy, which means that scientists need to gain insight into young people’s political culture. In this paper we look at political values, institutional trust and participation as relevant components of the civic political culture. The analysis is based on quantitative data collected in the empirical studies of Croatian youth, carried out between 1999 and 2013. Based on longitudinal study results, a downward trend is identified regarding selected political culture indicators: acceptance of liberal-democratic values, trust in social and political institutions, interest in politics and party preference. However, there is a simultaneous increase in participation in various types of organizations, especially political parties. The interpretation of established tendencies is placed in a broader context of an inherited democratic deficit, economic recession and social crisis. Current trends are both indicators and consequences of young people’s inadequate political socialization as well as weaknesses of political institutions and various actors during the transition and consolidation period.     

Social media use and democratic engagement: a comparative study of Hong Kong,Taiwan, and China

Recent studies in political communication have found a generally positive role of social media in democratic engagement. However, most research on youth’s social media use in relation to their political engagement has been conducted in the context of American and European democracies. This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the effects of the uses and structural features of social media on democratic engagement in three different Asian political systems: Taiwan (young liberal democracy); Hong Kong (partial democracy); and China (one-party state). The findings showed that sharing political information and connections with public actors consistently predicted offline participation (i.e., civic and political participation) and online participation (i.e., online political expression and online activism) in the three political systems. Although social media use for news, network size, and network structure did not consistently predict political outcomes, they played significant roles in influencing different engagement in the three political systems. The comparative approach used in this study helped to demonstrate the role of social media in the democratic engagement of youth in three places with similar cultures but different political contexts.     

From "Us" to "Them": Diasporic Linkages and Identity Politics

Global diasporas-a type of social formation mediating economic, political, and cultural affairs across borders-have been a focus of globalization researchers for some time. However, up to now, little knowledge exists on how social identification affects business participation in diaspora communities and how such participation modifies social identification. This article, based on empirical research on diasporic linkages between Taiwanese transnationals and ethnic Chinese overseas, serves to illustrate a) how globalization has enhanced the practical and economic roles of diasporas, and b) how economic practices and ethnic identification interact within diasporic communities. The author argues that ethnic membership still remains contested, despite diasporas serving as flexible forms of social organization in the mediation of capital flow.