YOUNG PEOPLE, THE INTERNET AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

Abstract

Do young people participate in politics? Some claim that young people are not as much involved in politics as their parents were, others argue that young people are interested in politics but in a different way than previous generations. The Internet is said to play an important role in ‘new politics’. This raises the question whether the Internet triggers new forms of political participation by young people. We use the results of a large scale web questionnaire, among 2,163 students in three countries (Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) to answer this question. We conclude that the Internet reinvigorates political participation but does not trigger a shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ politics. Traditional politics has managed to rethink its communication formats and therefore plays an important role in political participation by young people on the Internet.

Keywords:

• Europe
• young people
• political participation
• web survey

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Barba (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) for organizing the data collection in Barcelona, Ioana Codoban, Luca Capannesi, Nicola Malloggi and David Parlanti (Università di Firenze), Gijs-Jan Brandsma (Utrecht School of Governance) for their comments on previous versions of this paper and Bestnetlab for technical support of the survey. For their useful comments, a special thanks goes to Paola Bordandini, Lorenzo Mosca, Darin Barney and Stephen Coleman and to many other participants at the iCSs Symposium ‘Changing Politics Through Digital Networks’ that took place at the University of Florence in October 2007, where this paper was firstly discussed. A short note on the cooperation: although the authors share responsibility for the whole article, Albert Meijer was the main author of paragraphs 1 and 2; Davide Calenda was the main author of paragraphs 3 and 4. Paragraph 5 was written by both authors.

Notes

The data were collected through a web questionnaire. The questionnaire was hosted on a website of the University of Florence. It was presented in four languages (Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch). There was no time to translate the questionnaire into Dutch but Dutch students are generally fluent in English. Students in Florence, Utrecht and Barcelona were asked to fill out a questionnaire and this was accessible from September to December 2005. Comparison was one of the aims of the research and we will report these differences in other papers. This paper presents our overall argument and aims to enhance our understanding of online participation in general and does not focus on differences between the countries. We collected 276 questionnaires from Florence (12.4); 1,278 from Barcelona (57.5) and 670 form Utrecht (30.1). Sixty-eight per cent of the respondents are women; 79.5 are aged between 18 and 24. Study's fields of respondents: social sciences (37.6), humanities (24.0), engineering and computer sciences (8.5), bio-medicine (8.1), natural sciences, physics and mathematics (7.1), economics (6.7), other (8.9); missing (1.1). The survey was self-selected: students could choose whether they wanted to fill in the questionnaire. This may have resulted in two biases: more students with high Internet use and more students with an interest in politics. This means that we can not generalize our findings to the whole populations of students in the three countries. We used the Two-Independent-Samples test (Mann–Whitney U test) where a dichotomous variable was crossed with an ordinal variable and the Kendall's Tau-b for correlation. In the article, ‘n.s’ means non-significant.

We referred to the European Elections in June 2004; in the Italian version of the questionnaire we also referred to local elections that took place in the same period; in the Spanish version we also referred to the general election that took place in March 2004.

We are aware that this choice has two limits: (a) receiving emails does not necessarily mean that the students are voluntary linked to the senders, in our case parties and movements; (b) the main actors of electoral campaigns are parties and we assume that students interested in politics will refer to parties and candidates resources online, beyond their political orientations. Said that, we found significant associations between political orientations of students and the online resource they used during the electoral campaigns.