Revolution in the making? Social media effects across the globe

ABSTRACT

Social networking sites are popular tools to engage citizens in political campaigns, social movements, and civic life. However, are the effects of social media on civic and political participation revolutionary? How do these effects differ across political contexts? Using 133 cross-sectional studies with 631 estimated coefficients, I examine the relationship between social media use and engagement in civic and political life. The effects of social media use on participation are larger for political expression and smaller for informational uses, but the magnitude of these effects depends on political context. The effects of informational uses of social media on participation are smaller in countries like the United States, with a free and independent press. If there is a social media revolution, it relates to the expression of political views on social networking sites, where the average effect size is comparable to the effects of education on participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• political behavior
• cross-national
• meta-analysis
• Facebook

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Stephanie Belland for her research assistance on this project and Leticia Bode for comments on an early draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Shelley Boulianne earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She conducts research on media use and public opinion, as well as civic and political engagement, using meta-analysis techniques, experiments and surveys [email: [email protected]].

Additional information

Funding

The project was funded by MacEwan University [March 2016].