Political Participation and Engagement via Different Online and Offline Channels

Introduction

Political participation is commonly defined as those legal acts by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing and/or supporting the selection of governmental personnel and/or the actions that they take (Verba, Nie, & Kim, 1978, p.1). Political participation is not restricted to electoral processes, but it involves much more than voting. For example, attending public hearings, putting up signs or using banners to advocate opinions, attending rallies, writing letters to public officials, volunteering and campaigning, as well as online activities such as emailing politicians, participating in political discussion forums and communicating with members of a political party through websites, among others. In this paper, we take a micro-perspective and focus on political participation, taking into account new media formats.

Technological advances in today’s world, in combination with an era of political unrest during the recent financial crisis have also resulted in the increasing popularity of non-conventional political participation activities via social media, which may or may not have a direct effect on the selection of governmental personnel and/or the actions that they take. These may include, but are not restricted to, the use of social media for political-related communications and discussions among potential and actual voters, searching for information related to politics by using, for example, hash-tags on Twitter, voicing opinions to other voters/users and politicians/political parties via liking a politician’s Facebook page, tagging photos and posting messages on social media related to a politician. Therefore, the term political participation encompasses all the aforementioned activities, which may be at an individual or collective level (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many), and can describe actual and potential two-way communications/interactions among external actors (voters and potential voters) and internal actors (politicians/political parties). This implies that not only can politicians engage with voters/users (the term ‘users’ here is used to refer to social media and online users) (Papagiannidis, Stamati, & Behr, 2013), but also that voters/users can engage with politicians.

Given these relatively new political activities that exist among social media users, in this paper we use the term “political participation and engagement” (PPE) to describe all these aforementioned political activities, both offline and online, which are not restricted to actual voters, but also extend to potential voters and users of social media. They do not necessarily have to be engaged politically, but could potentially become engaged with political activities and relevant content online. For online engagement we adopt the definition by Hutchins et al. (1985), which considers engagement as taking place when a user experiences direct interaction with the objects in a domain, leading to a feeling of involvement directly with a world of objects. Given the interactive nature of social media, which is ideal for political engagement, we differentiate these from any other technologies that could potentially be used by users.