Facebooking It to the Polls: A Study in Online Social Networking and Political Behavior

ABSTRACT

As Internet use continues to become integrated into the daily lives of average Americans, it becomes necessary to understand the implications of each aspect of that use. As the majority of adults now take advantage of social network sites, understanding how they make use of those sites and what that means for American politics is increasingly important. This study considers one such social network site, Facebook, and how engaging in specific behaviors that provide personalized information, create community engagement, and generate social capital within that realm impacted users' decision to participate politically in the presidential primary of 2008. It concludes that certain Facebook behaviors can be translated into participatory political behaviors, both online and offline. Moreover, it is not whether or how often one uses Facebook, but rather the specific set of activities one engages in during such time that drives the relationship between Facebook use and various types of political participation.

Keywords:

• 2008 election
• Facebook
• political participation
• social media
• social network

Notes

1. It is possible, and even likely, that some of the information obtained in the realm of social media is inaccurate or biased information. However, the perception of being better informed—rather than the value of an increased arsenal of accurate information—is the likely motivator for greater participation, the subject of this study. Future work should consider the extent to which accuracy of information plays a role in the realm of social media and political participation.

2. Data and codebook will be made available via the JITP Dataverse prior to publication. These were introductory classes, and as a result the vast majority of students are not political science majors (only 8.3% reported political science as one of their major areas of study. Thus I would not expect this to bias results in any particular manner).

3. For Institutional Review Board purposes, we were unable to keep track of precise response rates. However, from those classes in which students were offered extra credit, 436 responses were received from a potential 500 students, for a response rate of 87.2%.

4. Measures of what proportion of their friends respondents considered to be acquaintances and strangers were also asked in this section.

5. The four questions were as follows: “How many members of Congress currently serve in the House of Representatives?” “Who is next in line for the presidency after the Vice President?” “How often are senators elected?” and “Which political party has had the most members in the U.S. Senate since the 2006 election?”

6. This measure is composed of a combination of the Interaction Anxiousness Scale and the Revised Shyness Scale (Cheek & Buss, 1981; Leary, 1983). For a complete list of these items, please contact the author.

7. Despite this similarity of mean, the correlation between the two variables is only 0.08, suggesting that more of one does not indicate more of the other.

8. AIC is a measure of goodness of fit that both rewards fit and penalizes the number of estimated parameters, thus discouraging against model overfitting. A smaller AIC reflects a better fit (Burnham & Anderson, 2002). It is thus preferable to other criteria for model comparison that do not account for overfitting.