News diets, social media use and non-institutional participation in three communication ecologies: comparing Germany, Italy and the UK

ABSTRACT

In the course of a three-year research project comparing social media and political participation across the European Union, we collected data on representative samples of internet users from Germany, Italy and the UK. Online users were surveyed just after the May 2014 European elections. The three countries have been selected as they differ not only in terms of institutional features but also in terms of the character of their media systems: ‘liberal’ in the UK, ‘democratic-corporatist’ in Germany and ‘polarized pluralist’ in Italy. Although previous studies have not put into direct relationship media systems with participatory patterns, we hypothesized that different types of media ecologies may generate peculiar incentives for non-institutional participation. Taking such differences into account, our paper sheds light on the linkage between digital media and unconventional participation across the three countries. Our hypothesis is that distinct news diets and different social media platforms may influence non-institutional participation in specific ways that reflect varying contextual characteristics. We assess the role of different news diets on unconventional participation, distinguishing our respondents according to their main sources of information (occasional, traditional univores, digital univores and omnivores). We then consider the association between the use of different social media (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) and non-institutional participation. Finally, we take into account the indirect effect of national contexts by running interaction models. Our findings show that news diets and social media use matter in the three countries, but that substantial differences are hard to find across them.

KEYWORDS:

• Unconventional participation
• news diets
• social media
• contextual characteristics
• online surveys

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lorenzo Mosca is associate professor at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore. [email: [email protected]]

Mario Quaranta is post­doctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at LUISS ‘Guido Carli’ in Rome. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Lorenzo Mosca http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3248-0489

Mario Quaranta http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4056-8998

Notes

1 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.ht. Accessed 19 May 2015.

2 Our sample includes 1750 respondents per country. Technical reports are available from the authors.

3 See the Appendix (see Supplemental data) for a full description of the variables. Due to space constraints, we will not comment the estimates of the control variables.

4 The probabilities are computed as the means of the covariates and are based on the models shown in the Appendix (see Supplemental data).

5 Confidence intervals are not shown for the sake of clarity.

6 We excluded ‘Null’ and ‘Don't Know’ from the analysis. In the other countries, respondents are less polarized within this category, although the most voted parties by digital univores were the United Kingdom Independence Party in UK (32%) and Die Grünen in Germany (22%).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Italian Ministry of Education ‘Future in Research 2012' initiative (project code RBFR12BKZH) for the project titled ‘Building Inclusive Societies and a Global Europe Online' (http://www.webpoleu.net). The authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to this work.