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Abstract
In this paper, the authors define political individualization as a form of networked individualism. This process consists of two components: social individualization and political networking. Social individualization means that people are becoming less strongly connected to traditional communities and experiencing highly differentiated sociability. Political networking refers to the shift from stable connections to formal political movements to dynamic connections to issue networks. This article attempts to investigate whether this process of political individualization is positively related to the use of new media such as the Internet and mobile telephones. There could be two arguments why these two would be positively related. First, the use of new media drives political individualization; the use of new media stimulates individualization since it creates opportunities for individuals to create social connections outside of existing communities. New media also facilitate the formation of political networks. Second, the use of new media and political individualization are both manifestations of a broader process of societal change. The process of modernization results in increasing autonomy of individuals and growing use of technology. This paper does not test these two explanations but rather investigates whether the grounds for both arguments actually exist. The authors have formulated the following research question: Do the new media create opportunities for political individualization and how are these opportunities used? Data from an international survey (918 web questionnaires) of young people in two European cities – Florence and Utrecht – has been used to investigate the research question.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article was presented at the ECRP General Conference in Potsdam (Calenda & Meijer 2009b) in the Panel entitled ‘the digital paths of political individualization: does technology matter’. We want to thank the participants for their comments and contributions to the debate that developed around the following main question: ‘how can the concept of political individualization best be clarified in relation with the Internet and other digital networked devices?’. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. A short note on the cooperation: although the authors share responsibility for the whole article, Albert Meijer was the main author of paragraphs 1, 2.2, 2.3 and 3; Davide Calenda was the main author of paragraphs 2.1 and 4. Paragraph 5 was written by both authors.
Notes
We are aware that this indicator is only a proxy measurement of social individualization; nevertheless it is able to capture quite an important aspect of the institutional differences embedded in the two national social models discussed in this article and that refer especially to family's structure and family's policies (see section 4).
For the aim of this research, we considered that the inclusion of the Spanish sample would represent unnecessary redundancy and we thus focused only on the Italian sample as a representative case of Southern Europe.
This argument is based on Esping-Andersen's well-known typology of welfare regimes. Following his argument, we assume that family in Italy is still central for protecting against social risks, while in the Netherlands, the state supports more families in this task. One consequence is that young people in the Netherlands receive protection and benefits both from families and the state; the fact that young people in The Netherlands leave family home earliest compared with the Italian young people has to be understood within these different institutional frames.
The survey was carried out before the enormous growth of Web 2.0 technologies for content-sharing and online social networking. An international survey carried out between 2006 and 2008 by Universal McCann Citation(2008) based on a sample of 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries shows that in 2006 only 11.3 percent of the Italian sample said to have created a profile on a new social network; this proportion increased up to 40.8 percent in the survey held in 2008 against the 61.4 percent of the Netherlands. Our survey focused on the established patterns of Internet use and the use of other media (most importantly the mobile phone).
In Florence, there are two main social centers developed in abandoned areas (squats) that were very active in the late 1980s and 1990s and that are now reshaped by young generation.
We correlated all the indicators listed in Table 6 and we found that the correlation between discussing of politics in chat/blog/discussion groups (0–2 values) and online memberships (0–3 values), which aggregates the indicators of membership listed in the table, scores highest (0.3**). Besides, online discussion and online membership are correlated with online actions, respectively 0.26** and 0.2**. Based on this evidence, we decided to keep discussion and membership indicators together as a measure of the engagement in network politics.
A similar research conducted at the beginning of the 2000 showed more consistency between offline and online political participation styles (Calenda & Mosca Citation2007).