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Abstract
This study seeks to assess the implications of the social use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for online political participation. Past research investigating the link between ICTs and political participation has emphasized the informational use of ICTs, overlooking their communication-enabling potentials for facilitating political talk in interpersonal spaces and subsequently, political participation in public domains. To understand further how ICTs as a means of communication may relate to political participation, we use data from the 2008 Taiwan Social Change Survey (N = 1076) to examine the relationship between the Internet and online political participation by looking at online media use for social interaction and engagement in civic talk online. Our findings suggest that interpersonal factors such as online civic talk and media multiplexity are positively associated with online political participation. Individuals who discuss politics with their friends via the Internet and those who use more types of online media for social interaction are more likely to contact legislators and elected officials directly via the Web and articulate their political thoughts in online public spaces such as forums, blogs, and websites of news media. We further offer an assessment of the findings' implications for political participation, political communication, and digital inequality.
Notes
1. Internet traffic ranking is based on statistics from Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ptt.cc). The ranking may be fluctuating given that Alexa updates their tracking statistics daily.
2. The survey questionnaire was designed by the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica Taiwan.
3. In the first stage, cities and counties were randomly selected based on a seven-tier stratum classifying their traits of geography and urbanization. In the second stage, a random sample of townships from selected cities and counties was drawn. In the third stage, a random sample of individual household addresses was drawn from the household registration records of selected townships.
4. For example, emailing letters to editors or commenting news articles on the news media website.
5. We apply logarithmic transformation to the monthly personal income to adjust its distribution to normality.
6. The general rule of thumb is that, a VIF factor larger than 10 indicates a multicollinearity problem. A low threshold (VIF = 5) is often used for a more robust detection (O'brien, Citation2007).
7. Given the low predicted probabilities for those who did not discuss politics with social ties online (online civic talk = 0), the discrete change (from 0 to 1 in online civic talk) in predicted probability for both outcome variables of online political activities does not correspond closely to the constant factor change in probability. For more details, please see Long (Citation1997).
Additional information
Yuli Patrick Hsieh is a doctoral candidate in the Media, Technology & Society program at Northwestern University's School of Communication. His research interests concern the implications of ICTs for social interaction and social relationship, as well as their inequality implications for social, psychological, and economic well-being. Specifically, his current research focuses on how people use various ICTs to maintain their personal networks and access social support. [email: [email protected]]
Meng-Hao Li is currently participating in a doctoral program in the Department of Public Administration at the University of llinois at Chicago. Digital inequality, e-government, innovation theory, science policy and social network analysis are among his areas of interest. His research focus aims to understand how technologies are invented and diffused and therefore, influence citizens’ political life. [email: [email protected]]
