Digital Media and Traditional Political Participation Over Time in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

Research shows that digital media use is positively related to political participation. However, this relationship does not appear in all studies. To date, researchers have generally treated inconsistent findings from study to study and from election to election as an empirical problem that reflects differences in measurement and model specification. In this article, we question the assumption that a consistent relationship between Internet use and political participation should exist over time. We test this expectation using 12 years of data from the American National Election Studies. Our findings support the expectation that a general measure of Internet use for political information is not consistently related to six acts of traditional political participation across elections.

Keywords:

• Digital media
• Internet
• participation
• political behavior
• social media
• voting

Notes

1. Original data from the American National Election Studies are publicly available from the International Consortium for Political and Social Research at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/. In addition, replication data for only those variables employed in this study are available at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/jitp.

2. See Note 4 for a minor exception.

3. The question wording for these three binary questions was as follows: “During an election year people are often asked to make a contribution to support campaigns. Did you give money to an individual candidate running for public office? Did you give money to a political party during this election year? Did you give any money to any other group that supported or opposed candidates?” We coded our measure 1 if the respondent answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, and 0 if the respondent answered “no” to all three.

4. There was a wording change in 2008, when the measure for seeing political information online changed from a dichotomous question to a frequency question.

5. In one variation, we included measures of watching programs about the campaigns on television and reading about the campaigns in newspapers, although these are not available for 1998. Including these measures produces only trivial differences in coefficients on the Internet variable and in predicted probabilities. We also tested our model for only people aged 35 and under. For this group, there are fewer significant relationships with the Internet measure, and the overall patterns are similar.