ACTIVATING ACTIVISTS

Abstract

Digital political participation is an emerging phenomenon that has attracted the attention of a great number of researchers. In most cases, digital political participation (DPP) has been treated as an independent variable in order to attempt to understand other phenomena such as, for instance, changes in offline political participation. However, empirical studies have failed to demonstrate this relationship. In this article, we try to revert this approach, as we attempt to analyse to what extent citizens' political activism can help us explain DPP in Spain. Through a factorial analysis, we organize into dimensions the different types of offline political practices and we use these dimensions as independent variables in a regression model where DPP is the dependent variable. The results obtained serve as a basis for discussing the politically innovative nature of DPP.

Keywords:

• Internet and politics
• digital political participation
• new political practices
• information society

Notes

In this article we have used a set of digital political practices representative of DPP. These are: contacting with a politician or political party through the Internet, contacting with the public administration through the Internet to log a complaint, communicating through the Internet with an association or organization, donating or raising funds through the Internet for a campaign or for an organization or association, writing comments in a blog or forum with social or political content and signing an online petition.

In this article and for the sake of brevity, we shall refer to this set of political practices as offline political participation. Thus, our intention is to distinguish these practices from the online practices subject to analysis in this article.

Multi-stage sampling, stratified by conglomerates. Non-proportional allocation. The use of the sampling as a whole has implied the use of weighting. For a level of confidence of 95.5 per cent (two sigma) and P = Q, the real margin of error is ±1.64 per cent for the whole of the sample and in the case of simple random sampling. (Source: CIS Technical Details of Study 2736).

Some of the questions included have been formulated with a view to finding out the presence or absence of a given conduct (example: Q43), or the way in which a given phenomenon is presented (example: Q11_9). This implies the use of dichotomous variables or categorical variables to measure many of the characteristics of the subjects. In fact, applying the Kolmogorov Smirnov test, it was seen that the distribution of the variables was significantly different from normal distribution. Therefore, when it came to applying a factorial analysis (Lewis-Beck 1994), we excluded factor extraction methods that require multi-normality of data, like that of maximum verisimilitude.

The KMO sampling adequacy index has a value close to 1 (KMO = 0.768). This tells us that the partial correlations between the variables are sufficiently small for a factorial analysis to be carried out. In addition, the determining factor of the correlations matrix is sufficiently low (determinant = 0.16) as to be able to indicate the intercorrelation between the variables included in the analysis. Moreover, Bartlett's test of sphericity is significant (χ ² = 3066,520, DF = 78, sig = 0.000) which rules out that the correlations matrix does not coincide with the identity matrix.

Abstention as a form of protest (Q43) has a negative influence on this factor as a whole. From our point of view, this tells us that citizens who engage in this activity are critical of this form of political participation.

See theoretical framework.

However, here we steer away from the debate regarding normalization or ‘new mobilization’ given that we are not concerned with the impact of digital participation on offline participation, but rather we treat the former as a political practice in itself and we speculate regarding its effect on the representative political system.