Unequal at the starting line: Creating participatory inequalities across generations and among groups

We investigate how inequalities in political participation are shaped across generations by considering the influence of family background-in particular, parents' education and political involvement-on political participation. We pursue this issue, first, for individuals, investigating the effects of parental characteristics on the participatory profile of their offspring. Then, we use what we have learned to understand how group differences in political participation-between women and men and among Latinos, African Americans, and Anglo Whites-are rooted in the legacy of class and political background and in experiences throughout the life cycle. They are co-authors of The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) which was the co-writer of the Victoria Schuck Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book on gender and politics of its year.     

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.     

A Voice,but not a Vote: A Youth Generation at Risk?

The aim of this paper is to address risks young people in the late 20th and 21st century are exposed to with regard to political participation. Based on qualitative data and ordinary language interviews with 27 Norwegian pupils in upper secondary school, we address how the construction of the political space is understood by young people themselves. By analysing how young people define political interest and engagement, the findings indicate that a gap exists in the perception of ‘own’ and ‘institutionalised’ political participation. This paper concludes that exploring the understanding of politics among the young may reduce vulnerability of this particular group in their democratic participation as well as facilitate their political empowerment.     

Political participation and web 2.0 in Europe: A case study of Facebook

The goal of this paper is to obtain the model for political participation on social network sites in Europe with a focus on European politics. We want to find out if and how European citizens are interested in using Facebook in political communication on the European level and if that can lead to more participation and more inclusion of citizens in the political processes on the EU level. We are interested in discovering more about the interconnection of political participation in the ‘offline’ world and the use of web 2.0 for political communication purposes.     

Demonstrating in the internet age: a test of Castells’ theory

ABSTRACT

Some social movements researchers argue that the Internet globalises protest and equalises cross-national inequalities in opportunities for activism. Critics warn against such techno-optimism, highlighting continued individual-level inequalities and country-level variation in protest participation. In this paper, we operationalise Manuel Castells’ theory of social movement development to test the extent to which contemporary demonstrators share the characteristics of global activists. We also examine how country-level economic and political institutions affect levels of protest and moderate the relationship between individual-level predictors and activism. We find support for Castells’ contention that use of online media is a significant predictor of protest. However, we also find that having a sense of global connectedness does not significantly affect one’s likelihood of engaging in demonstrations. Protest participation continues to be stratified by traditional markers of social privilege including education and gender. Moreover, national political and economic contexts have independent effects on protest and moderate how individual-level political and economic grievances affect civic engagement.     

Connected political consumers: transforming personalized politics among youth into broader repertoires of action

This study explores political consumerism motivations in an effort to understand the complex ways in which this lifestyle practice fits into the broader participation repertoires of young citizens. We begin by outlining the psychological motivations for political consumerism, and theorize how they might orient political consumers toward (and away from) online expressive, political, and civic participation. In particular, we examine how the desire to gratify distinct psychological needs shapes navigation of the digital media environment in search of information and connection, and how this, in turn, shapes participation. Results of a national survey of young adults show that value-expressive, social-identification, and social-approval motivations for green living relate differently to participation, and that online community embeddedness mediates these relationships. The findings suggest that connecting to likeminded others via digitally-enabled communities can transform individual concerns into collective concerns, and extend participation from the private spheres of everyday life into the public sphere.     

How responsiveness works in mainland China: Effects on institutional trust and political participation

This study investigated whether and how institutional responsiveness, a constitutive element of dialogic communication, influences institutional trust and political participation among members of the public in mainland China. A total of 4068 respondents from mainland China completed questionnaires. Results demonstrated that institutional responsiveness indirectly reduced publics’ destructive non-institutional political participation by building institutional trust. Extending the public relations literature on dialogue, we found that this indirect relationship is conditional on online political information seeking rather than online political expression among members of the public. For people who frequently use the Internet to seek political information, institutional responsiveness is more likely to boost institutional trust, which decreases the likelihood of participation in offline political activities.     

A typology of political participation online: how citizens used Twitter to mobilize during the 2015 British general elections

This study investigates how, and to what extent, citizens use Twitter as a platform for political mobilization in an electoral context. Conceptualizing political participation as a process, we develop a typology of political participation designed to isolate mobilizing calls for action from the rest of the political discussion online. Based on Twitter data collected one week prior to the 2015 British general election, we then identify the top 100 most retweeted accounts using the hashtag #GE2015, classify them by actor type, and perform a content analysis of their Twitter posts according to our typology. Our results show that citizens – not political parties – are the primary initiators and sharers of political calls for action leading up to the election. However, this finding is largely due to an uneven distribution of citizen-driven mobilizing activity. A small number of highly active users, typically supporters of nationalist parties, are by far the most active users in our dataset. We also identify four primary strategies used by citizens to enact mobilization through Twitter: in-text calls for action, hashtag commands, sharing mobilizing content, and frequent postings. Citizens predominantly expressed political calls for action through Twitter’s hashtag feature, a finding that supports the notion that traditional conceptions of political participation require nuance to accommodate the new ways citizens are participating in the politics of the digital age.     

TAXING POLITICAL LIFE:

Previous research has shown that participation in voluntary associations, including those labeled nonpolitical, increases political participation. Using data gathered from 2,517 interviews for the American Citizen Participation Study, we complicate this understanding by exploring the relationship between voluntary association involvement and political activity in a more nuanced manner–separating association involvements according to the level of exposure to political dialogue and information, even within organizations typically considered apolitical. We find that the extent to which association involvement predicts political participation is dependent upon the level of political activity that transpires within these otherwise nonpolitical organizations. In order for participation in voluntary associations to lead to increases in political participation, participants must have exposure to political discourse. It is not the generic act of participation that supports political life but rather the opportunity to engage with politics that serves as an impetus for political activity. In light of this, we offer a critical exploration of existing federal tax policies governing nonprofit organizations.     

The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.     

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.     

From consumer to producer: motivations,internet use,and political consumerism

Our understanding of how political consumerism relates to broader civic engagement has been clouded by the myriad ways in which it has been conceptualized in the literature. In this study, we draw a distinction between the use of socially conscious consumption practices in everyday life and participation in organized boycotts and ‘buycotts.’ We argue that whether political consumerism is enacted as lifestyle politics or as contentious politics may depend, at least in part, on the motivations that underlie political consumerism and the way in which they orient behavior in the online environment. Results of a national survey of U.S. adults show that while both value-expressive and social-identification motivation facilitate comparable levels of content consumption, only the latter facilitates the more involved act of posting and sharing original content. Moreover, results show that while both uses of internet, in turn, facilitate lifestyle and contentious political consumerism, content production facilitates significantly greater levels of both. This was especially pronounced for contentious political consumerism. These findings suggest that content production may be an important vehicle for channeling motivations for political consumerism rooted in social-identification needs toward participation in more organized and collective modes of consumer action. Implications for understanding the potential political consumerism holds as a gateway to participation in conventional political activities are discussed.     

The march for gender equality of Algerian women: The struggle for spatial and historical recognition

Social and political anti-government movements have been major headlines across the globe in recent years, with a noticeable participation of women. In the MENA region, such movements spanned Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Lebanon among others. Through an ethnographic inquiry into the Algerian pro-democracy movement Hirak (2019–2021), we delve into women's experiences of the Hirak to show how women remain marginalized politically, economically, and socially despite their heavy and praised participation. Using a recognition theory lens, we unveil dialectics of unity and division in the struggle for recognition among women in Algeria, a post-colonial context charged with conflicting ideological stances. We detect two structural dimensions of the struggle, a spatial/physical dimension and a historical/temporal dimension that help surface different gender positionalities and their dynamics as they vie for recognition. We stress the importance of not homogenizing women's political struggles, especially in the Global South.     

青年网民网络政治现状调查

网络现已成为公民政治关注和政治参与的重要平台。青年作为网民的主力军和国家的未来,他们在网络中对政治的关注度和参与度一定程度上关系着国家未来的社会政治文明的发展。当今,中国青年网民对网络政治资汛关注度高,信任主流媒介．但他们的政治参与度与政治关注度形成强烈反差,这需要从法规制度的健全、网民政治素养和能力的提升和网络政治参与途径的拓展等方面多管齐下,才能切实解决问题．从而在总体上保障人民当家作主管理国家和社会事务的权利得以实现。     

A children’s election—Dilemmas of children’s political participation

In this article, we explore how fifth graders (9–10-year-olds) and their teachers view children's participation in a parliamentary election for children arranged by Save the Children Norway in 2017. The participants draw on available discursive resources when making sense of children's political positions in society. In the discursive resources, longstanding tensions surrounding children, childhood and politics come to the surface. We conclude that although children's position in politics remains marginal, there are ways to move beyond the tensions to be able to imagine children as political actors.     

Productive aging and civic participation

We argue that civic participation is one form of productive aging. We explore how age is related to different types and levels of civic participation among adults in Boston, MA. To accomplish our analysis, we employ recently released survey data from the Boston Area Study (BAS). Our results indicate that voting is the most common form of civic expression among Bostonians, followed by attending local government meetings. Volunteering for political organizations and candidates is the least common form of activity. Educational status is a strong predictor of most forms of civic-oriented activity and it is consistently related to activity for those persons 60 years old and older. Further, we evaluate a model of civic participation that shows a curvilinear relationship between age and various activities; this pattern holds after controlling for a number of other covariates. We discuss the contributions and limitations of our research and indicate additional steps that should be taken in future research to address some unresolved issues.     

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.     

Media use and transnational political and civic participation: a case study of Mexicans in the USA

Although communication is largely understood as a prerequisite for transnational activity, little research explores exactly how transnational communities use media and what the implications of media use are for transnational civic and political participation. Research from communication studies suggests that media can affect civic and political participation in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. In an effort to merge literature from transnational and communication studies, in this study I focus on the case of Mexicans in the USA, offering secondary analyses of two datasets concerning their communication habits and civic and political participation in Mexico. Results suggest differential effects on participation based on preferences for certain media and pre‐existing attitudes.     

Rethinking mediated political engagement: social media ambivalence and disconnective practices of politically active youths in Hong Kong

Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people’s political engagement, most notably by providing a conducive platform for political expression. There has been comparatively little attention, however, to the possible pitfalls for young people when they engage in politics on social media. In this study, we seek to redress the overemphasis on the strengths and connectivity of social media by attending to how young people negotiate their drawbacks and disconnectivity. Through in-depth interviews with young participants of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we examine the choices and motives regarding mediated (non-)participation among a group of politically active youths. Our findings revealed that these young people’s social media ambivalence emerged from the major participatory experience. Despite their active and open informational sharing and political expression on social media alongside their in-person participation during the eventful protest, many young participants became wary of such expressive use owing to their perceptions of de-energization, disconnectedness, and disembodiment. Instead of completely withdrawing from political activities on social media, these politically inclined and technologically savvy youths embraced “disconnective practices” – passive engagement (lurking), selective expression (moderation and exposure-limitation), and offline participation (embodied collective action) – to avoid the overwhelming, fractious, and inauthentic conditions of mediated participation.