Reluctance to Talk About Politics in Face-to-Face and Facebook Settings: Examining the Impact of Fear of Isolation, Willingness to Self-Censor, and Peer Network Characteristics

Abstract

This study examines citizens’ willingness to publicly express support for a political party or candidate face-to-face and on Facebook during an election. Findings from a survey showed that fear of social isolation (FSI) exhibited a negative indirect effect on public expression about the election through willingness to self-censor (WTSC) for both communication environments. The indirect effect through WTSC was contingent on perceived political disagreement within homophilous peer networks contributing to a hostile opinion climate. Moreover, in face-to-face interactions those with higher levels of FSI were less likely to express support in heterogeneous offline networks with high levels of disagreement but were more likely to do so in homophilous networks that share similar political views. The study demonstrates the utility of combining a dispositional approach and friendship-based reference groups to the examination of key spiral of silence mechanisms at the individual level.

FUNDING

This work was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK/459713).

Notes

¹ Of course, the scope of participation is constrained by a country’s political system. For example, Chinese citizens cannot elect its national government. The key point here is that those who express political views on social media are more likely to engage in offline and online politics within the boundaries of the respective political systems.

² The lone exception was China, an insignificant result attributed by the authors to the highly collectivist nature of Chinese society. However, given that the correlation was .46 for South Korea, another collectivist society, the nonsignificant relationship may be due to China’s authoritarian one-party political system rather than its collectivist orientation. In this regard, Hong Kong aligns much closer to South Korea than China because it has a dynamic semidemocracy where citizens can vote in district and legislative elections. In any case, the key point is that if SoS is a universal phenomenon as claimed by its adherents, there should be a relationship between FSI and WTSC in Hong Kong.

³ It should be noted that their findings were based on separate regression models rather than a single mediation model with analyses of indirect effects.

⁴ HK$10,000 is roughly equivalent to US$1,300.

⁵ Alternatives to the more established regression-based approach for testing moderated mediation have been proposed in recent years, such as the latent moderated structural equation procedure based on structural equation modelling (SEM; see Cheung & Lau, in press; Sardeshmukh & Vandenberg, in press). In general, SEM approaches offer some advantages compared to regression approaches, such as taking into account measurement error through latent variable modelling, as well as model comparisons. However, the use of the latent moderated structural equation procedure is still in its infancy, and there is as yet little consensus on the best approach for testing and interpreting moderated mediation models. Therefore, the present study adopts the more established and parsimonious regression-based approach to test moderated mediation while acknowledging its general limitations relative to a SEM approach.

⁶ The index was statistically significant for Model 1 even though neither the MV and MQ interactions shown in Table 1 were statistically significant. This is possible because a significant moderation involving the variable(s) that constitute the indirect effect is not a prerequisite for inferring moderated mediation (see Hayes, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK/459713).

Notes on contributors

Michael Chan

Michael Chan (Ph.D., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the social and political outcomes of media use and discussion.