Online political participation: the evolution of a concept

ABSTRACT

The advent of online technologies has been triggering a wave of empirical examinations of online political participation (OPP) over the past twenty years. It also stimulated scholarly debate on how to conceptualize political participation in a digital age. Scholars differ on whether to consider passive and expressive online behaviors part of or a mere precursor to political participation. This study argues that due to its rapid evolution as well as its dependence on platform affordances, quantitative empirical studies on OPP may be prone to deviations between established, much-cited definitions and measurements applied in the field. Based on a systematic literature review of 289 international peer-reviewed survey-based and experimental studies, we analyze both definitions and measurements of OPP. We find a series of disconnections: Measures preponderantly address online activities, yet merely a small share of definitions focuses on the online sphere. While only few definitions account for passive activities (e.g., reading news about politics), many operationalizations include measures capturing such passive behaviors. Expressive activities are most popular in measures of OPP, but definitions rarely reflect this focus. Finally, while measures of OPP are prone to be platform-specific, definitions tend to neglect this characteristic. We conclude by reflecting the conceptual implications of common measurement practices for the study of OPP.

KEYWORDS:

• Online political participation
• digital media
• systematic literature review
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Subject area in Scopus: Social Sciences (SOCI) / Categories in Web of Science: Communication OR Political Science OR Sociology OR Social Sciences Interdisciplinary OR Telecommunications OR Social Issues OR Psychology Social / Databases in EBSCOhost: Communications/Media Databases, Law/Political Science Databases, Sociology/Psychology Databases.

2 To guarantee the instrument’s reliability, we conducted a pretest with 40 publications, after which we added several recurring items and changed the wording in some cases.

3 Note that the seemingly decreasing number in 2018 – instead of illustrating a decline in publications – is due to the end date of the literature search mid-2018.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Christina Ruess

Christina Ruess (M. A.) is a research associate and PhD candidate in communication and media studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on political participation and communication in non-public online spaces, online privacy, and social media [email: [email protected]].

Christian Pieter Hoffmann

Prof. Dr. Christian Pieter Hoffmann is professor of communication management at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Leipzig. His research is focused on online participation, trust, self-disclosure, and privacy protection in social media [email: [email protected]].

Shelley Boulianne

Prof. Dr. Shelley Boulianne is an associate professor in sociology at MacEwan University (Canada). She conducts research on media use and public opinion, as well as civic and political engagement, using meta-analysis techniques, experiments, and surveys [email: [email protected]].

Katharina Heger

Katharina Heger (M. A.) is a research associate at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on gender-based inequalities in political participation on the Internet and offline, political and social norms and political attitudes [email: [email protected]].