Pub Date : 2022-08-18DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2112796
Ryan Shandler, M. A. Gomez
ABSTRACT This paper argues that the primary threat posed by cyber-attacks is not cataclysmic physical destruction - but rather more insidious societal risks such as reduced trust in government. To test this claim, we collect and analyze survey data in the immediate aftermath of a ransomware attack against a Düsseldorf hospital (n = 707). We find that exposure to cyber-attacks significantly diminishes public confidence among segments of the population who are exposed to the attack. Cyber-attacks exploit particular qualities of cyberspace that are directly tied to matters of public confidence, causing a precipitous drop in public trust. Second, we identify the psychological mechanism underpinning this effect, with anger and dread intervening in countervailing directions. Feelings of anger triggered by exposure to cyber-attacks amplify public confidence, while the more potent feeling of dread reduces confidence. Our findings verify that governments cannot rely on a unifying social-cohesion effect following cyber-attacks since the public is liable to perceive the authorities as incapable of defending against future threats. We conclude by discussing why escalating cyber-threats can cause severe social upheaval and reduce trust in democratic institutions, and discuss what constitutes exposure to the new generation of attacks in cyberspace.
{"title":"The hidden threat of cyber-attacks – undermining public confidence in government","authors":"Ryan Shandler, M. A. Gomez","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2112796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2112796","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper argues that the primary threat posed by cyber-attacks is not cataclysmic physical destruction - but rather more insidious societal risks such as reduced trust in government. To test this claim, we collect and analyze survey data in the immediate aftermath of a ransomware attack against a Düsseldorf hospital (n = 707). We find that exposure to cyber-attacks significantly diminishes public confidence among segments of the population who are exposed to the attack. Cyber-attacks exploit particular qualities of cyberspace that are directly tied to matters of public confidence, causing a precipitous drop in public trust. Second, we identify the psychological mechanism underpinning this effect, with anger and dread intervening in countervailing directions. Feelings of anger triggered by exposure to cyber-attacks amplify public confidence, while the more potent feeling of dread reduces confidence. Our findings verify that governments cannot rely on a unifying social-cohesion effect following cyber-attacks since the public is liable to perceive the authorities as incapable of defending against future threats. We conclude by discussing why escalating cyber-threats can cause severe social upheaval and reduce trust in democratic institutions, and discuss what constitutes exposure to the new generation of attacks in cyberspace.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"359 - 374"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47366708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-02DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2105465
A. Agadjanian, Jacob Cruger, Sydney House, Annie Huang, Noah Kanter, C. Kearney, Junghye Kim, Isabelle Leonaitis, Sarah Petroni, Leonardo Placeres, Morgan Quental, Henry Sanford, Cameron Skaff, Jennifer Wu, Lillian Zhao, B. Nyhan
ABSTRACT Growing concern about dubious information online threatens the credibility of legitimate news. We examine two possible mechanisms for this effect on social media. First, people might view all news on social media as less credible. Second, questionable information elsewhere in a news feed might discredit legitimate news coverage. Findings from a preregistered experiment confirm that people see information on Facebook as less credible than identical information on news websites, though the effect is small, suggesting that observational data overstates this platform penalty. Prior exposure to low (versus high) credibility information on Facebook also reduces engagement with a target article, but not its perceived credibility. However, exploratory analyses show that the effects of prior exposure to low credibility information vary depending on the plausibility of the target article, decreasing the credibility of a less plausible article (a spillover effect) but increasing the credibility of a more plausible one (a contrast effect).
{"title":"A platform penalty for news? How social media context can alter information credibility online","authors":"A. Agadjanian, Jacob Cruger, Sydney House, Annie Huang, Noah Kanter, C. Kearney, Junghye Kim, Isabelle Leonaitis, Sarah Petroni, Leonardo Placeres, Morgan Quental, Henry Sanford, Cameron Skaff, Jennifer Wu, Lillian Zhao, B. Nyhan","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2105465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2105465","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Growing concern about dubious information online threatens the credibility of legitimate news. We examine two possible mechanisms for this effect on social media. First, people might view all news on social media as less credible. Second, questionable information elsewhere in a news feed might discredit legitimate news coverage. Findings from a preregistered experiment confirm that people see information on Facebook as less credible than identical information on news websites, though the effect is small, suggesting that observational data overstates this platform penalty. Prior exposure to low (versus high) credibility information on Facebook also reduces engagement with a target article, but not its perceived credibility. However, exploratory analyses show that the effects of prior exposure to low credibility information vary depending on the plausibility of the target article, decreasing the credibility of a less plausible article (a spillover effect) but increasing the credibility of a more plausible one (a contrast effect).","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"338 - 348"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45826747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-26DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2106005
Talia Goren, I. Beeri, D. Vashdi
ABSTRACT Popularity metrics, such as “likes” are key features in social media (SM). In the political sphere, politicians use popularity metrics as indicators of the extent to which opinions and agendas are widely held by the public. However, popularity metrics have an inherent potential to increase rapidly, making today’s not-so-popular content tomorrow’s potential hit. Hence the lack of popularity indices or their low values may not indicate the full popularity potential of any specific SM content. This is crucial for politicians as they aim to identify and respond to popular public opinions in their constant effort to boost and maintain public support. Considering SM’s ever-growing role in politics, and the significant portion of SM content with no popularity metrics, exploring politicians’ responsiveness to public opinion in SM with and without popularity metrics may shed light on contemporary democratic process and their impact on representation and policy making. Based on Prospect Theory of choice under uncertainty, and the lack of an anchor to base their perception of popularity on, we claim that politicians will be more responsive to public opinion content without “likes” than with “likes.” Findings of a survey-experiment of 100 Israeli politicians support this claim. Possible implications are discussed.
{"title":"The phantom effect of social media: the impact of no “likes” on politicians’ responsiveness to public opinion","authors":"Talia Goren, I. Beeri, D. Vashdi","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2106005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2106005","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Popularity metrics, such as “likes” are key features in social media (SM). In the political sphere, politicians use popularity metrics as indicators of the extent to which opinions and agendas are widely held by the public. However, popularity metrics have an inherent potential to increase rapidly, making today’s not-so-popular content tomorrow’s potential hit. Hence the lack of popularity indices or their low values may not indicate the full popularity potential of any specific SM content. This is crucial for politicians as they aim to identify and respond to popular public opinions in their constant effort to boost and maintain public support. Considering SM’s ever-growing role in politics, and the significant portion of SM content with no popularity metrics, exploring politicians’ responsiveness to public opinion in SM with and without popularity metrics may shed light on contemporary democratic process and their impact on representation and policy making. Based on Prospect Theory of choice under uncertainty, and the lack of an anchor to base their perception of popularity on, we claim that politicians will be more responsive to public opinion content without “likes” than with “likes.” Findings of a survey-experiment of 100 Israeli politicians support this claim. Possible implications are discussed.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"349 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44938220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-22DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2103766
Christiane Eilders, Pablo Porten-Cheé
ABSTRACT This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison in the field of spiral of silence online. We investigated the effects of user comments on public opinion perception and users’ opinions and willingness to speak out in two cultural settings. Previous research has indicated that spiral of silence effects are greater in collectivistic versus individualistic cultures. Our study was conducted in South Korea, which is collectivistic and Germany, which is individualistic. To test the conformity and silencing hypotheses, we conducted online experiments using comments on online news sites that were congruent or incongruent with personal opinion. Our findings supported the conformity hypothesis and the impact of context on public opinion perception and personal opinion, which were shaped by comments in both countries. In Germany, effects were confined to highly collectivistic users.
{"title":"Effects of online user comments on public opinion perception, personal opinion, and willingness to speak out: A cross-cultural comparison between Germany and South Korea","authors":"Christiane Eilders, Pablo Porten-Cheé","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2103766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2103766","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison in the field of spiral of silence online. We investigated the effects of user comments on public opinion perception and users’ opinions and willingness to speak out in two cultural settings. Previous research has indicated that spiral of silence effects are greater in collectivistic versus individualistic cultures. Our study was conducted in South Korea, which is collectivistic and Germany, which is individualistic. To test the conformity and silencing hypotheses, we conducted online experiments using comments on online news sites that were congruent or incongruent with personal opinion. Our findings supported the conformity hypothesis and the impact of context on public opinion perception and personal opinion, which were shaped by comments in both countries. In Germany, effects were confined to highly collectivistic users.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"323 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49078800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-20DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2097974
S. M. Alavi A., O. Ebadati E., S. Masoud Alavi A., Towhid Firoozan Sarnaghi
ABSTRACT Poverty, known as a widespread economic and political challenge (specifically at the times of crisis, like COVID-19), is a very complicated problem, which many countries have been trying for a long time to eradicate. Cash-subsidy allocation procedure using traditional statistical vision is the famous approach, which articles have targeted. Inefficiency of these solutions besides the fact that a pair of households with exact same situation will not be existing leads us to inadequacy and inaccuracy of these methods. This study, by putting data mining and machine learning (as well-known majors in IT and computer Science) visions together, draws a path to overcome this challenge. For this aim, the social, income and expenditure dimensions of a dataset are surveyed from 18885 households considered to measure the population poverty ratio (a fuzzy look at on their eligibility). In respect to the different experimental mode, the effective features are being filtered to use in FCM algorithm in order to determine to what extend the households in the poor or wealthy. Moreover, Genetic Algorithm displays its efficiency in the role of optimizer. Finally, the evaluation results show more accurate outcomes from the feature selection technique (on normalized data) and get the optimized clusters.
{"title":"Determination of households benefits from subsidies by using data mining approaches","authors":"S. M. Alavi A., O. Ebadati E., S. Masoud Alavi A., Towhid Firoozan Sarnaghi","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2097974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2097974","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Poverty, known as a widespread economic and political challenge (specifically at the times of crisis, like COVID-19), is a very complicated problem, which many countries have been trying for a long time to eradicate. Cash-subsidy allocation procedure using traditional statistical vision is the famous approach, which articles have targeted. Inefficiency of these solutions besides the fact that a pair of households with exact same situation will not be existing leads us to inadequacy and inaccuracy of these methods. This study, by putting data mining and machine learning (as well-known majors in IT and computer Science) visions together, draws a path to overcome this challenge. For this aim, the social, income and expenditure dimensions of a dataset are surveyed from 18885 households considered to measure the population poverty ratio (a fuzzy look at on their eligibility). In respect to the different experimental mode, the effective features are being filtered to use in FCM algorithm in order to determine to what extend the households in the poor or wealthy. Moreover, Genetic Algorithm displays its efficiency in the role of optimizer. Finally, the evaluation results show more accurate outcomes from the feature selection technique (on normalized data) and get the optimized clusters.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"303 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48050336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-19DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2097358
Larissa Doroshenko, Fangjing Tu
ABSTRACT Investigating the role of emotions in online political engagement, we show that far-right parties receive more amplification online than centrist parties because their messages produce stronger emotional reactions. Using a 2 × 3 mixed design survey experiment (N = 303), which compared far-right and centrist messages about three campaign issues in Ukraine, we demonstrate that nationalist appeals evoked hope and enthusiasm, which resulted in more likes and shares. However, far-rights were only successful when addressing their traditional issues, such as national language policy. We conclude with advice on how other parties can harness emotional appeals to encourage political participation when facing competition from far-right parties.
{"title":"Like, Share, Comment, and Repeat: Far-right Messages, Emotions, and Amplification in Social Media","authors":"Larissa Doroshenko, Fangjing Tu","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2097358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2097358","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Investigating the role of emotions in online political engagement, we show that far-right parties receive more amplification online than centrist parties because their messages produce stronger emotional reactions. Using a 2 × 3 mixed design survey experiment (N = 303), which compared far-right and centrist messages about three campaign issues in Ukraine, we demonstrate that nationalist appeals evoked hope and enthusiasm, which resulted in more likes and shares. However, far-rights were only successful when addressing their traditional issues, such as national language policy. We conclude with advice on how other parties can harness emotional appeals to encourage political participation when facing competition from far-right parties.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"286 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42459726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-14DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2096742
Rui Wang, W. Xu
ABSTRACT Social media platforms such as Twitter provide opportunities for governments to connect to foreign publics and influence global public opinion. In the current study, we used social and semantic network analysis to investigate China’s digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19. Our results show that Chinese state-affiliated media and diplomatic accounts created hashtag frames and targeted stakeholders to challenge the United States or to cooperate with other countries and international organizations, especially the World Health Organization. Telling China’s stories was the central theme of the digital campaign. From the perspective of social media platform affordance, we addressed the lack of attention paid to hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting in the public diplomacy literature.
{"title":"Hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting: An affordance perspective on China’s digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19","authors":"Rui Wang, W. Xu","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2096742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2096742","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Social media platforms such as Twitter provide opportunities for governments to connect to foreign publics and influence global public opinion. In the current study, we used social and semantic network analysis to investigate China’s digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19. Our results show that Chinese state-affiliated media and diplomatic accounts created hashtag frames and targeted stakeholders to challenge the United States or to cooperate with other countries and international organizations, especially the World Health Organization. Telling China’s stories was the central theme of the digital campaign. From the perspective of social media platform affordance, we addressed the lack of attention paid to hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting in the public diplomacy literature.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"250 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48624284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-07DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2096743
Saifuddin Ahmed, Dani Madrid-Morales, M. Tully
ABSTRACT This study explores the role of political information seeking on social media and perceived exposure to misinformation in influencing online political engagement. A survey investigation of three Sub-Saharan African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa) suggests that both information seeking and perceived exposure to misinformation are positively associated with online political engagement. We find that younger citizens are more actively engaged in online political activities. However, we also find that perceived exposure to misinformation has varying effects on political engagement across age groups. More frequent perceived exposure to misinformation is found to be a mobilizer for online political engagement for the older population. We conclude with a discussion of how social media may facilitate greater engagement for the older population. Still, the mobilizing role of misinformation exposure raises concerns about the consequences of such political engagement. Theoretical implications for political engagement research, in general and in the countries under study, are discussed.
{"title":"Social media, misinformation, and age inequality in online political engagement","authors":"Saifuddin Ahmed, Dani Madrid-Morales, M. Tully","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2096743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2096743","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study explores the role of political information seeking on social media and perceived exposure to misinformation in influencing online political engagement. A survey investigation of three Sub-Saharan African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa) suggests that both information seeking and perceived exposure to misinformation are positively associated with online political engagement. We find that younger citizens are more actively engaged in online political activities. However, we also find that perceived exposure to misinformation has varying effects on political engagement across age groups. More frequent perceived exposure to misinformation is found to be a mobilizer for online political engagement for the older population. We conclude with a discussion of how social media may facilitate greater engagement for the older population. Still, the mobilizing role of misinformation exposure raises concerns about the consequences of such political engagement. Theoretical implications for political engagement research, in general and in the countries under study, are discussed.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"269 - 285"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45594193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-09DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2082622
A. Cavalieri, P. Ducange, S. Fabi, F. Russo, N. Tonellotto
ABSTRACT In this work, we present an intelligent system for the automatic categorization of political documents, specifically the documents containing the parliamentary questions collected during the weekly Question Times at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic. The proposed intelligent system leverages text classification models to perform the document categorization. The system is aimed at supporting and facilitating the research activities of political science scholars, who deal with comparative and longitudinal analysis of thousands of documents. To select the best classification models for our specific task, several classical machine learning and deep learning-based text classification models have been experimentally compared.
{"title":"An Intelligent system for the categorization of question time official documents of the Italian Chamber of Deputies","authors":"A. Cavalieri, P. Ducange, S. Fabi, F. Russo, N. Tonellotto","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2082622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2082622","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this work, we present an intelligent system for the automatic categorization of political documents, specifically the documents containing the parliamentary questions collected during the weekly Question Times at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic. The proposed intelligent system leverages text classification models to perform the document categorization. The system is aimed at supporting and facilitating the research activities of political science scholars, who deal with comparative and longitudinal analysis of thousands of documents. To select the best classification models for our specific task, several classical machine learning and deep learning-based text classification models have been experimentally compared.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"213 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47124132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-06DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2022.2084483
Jing Guo
ABSTRACT Using a representative Taiwan sample from the 2019 Asia Barometer Survey, this study investigated the effect of political interest on two types of political participation (i.e., participation in electoral campaigns and political advocacy) based on the communication mediation model. Findings showed that three communication channels (i.e., news involvement, on-line political expression, and off-line political discussion) mediate the positive relationship between political interest and participation through different paths. When people are more interested in politics, they will be more likely to read political news, leading to more on-line political expression, which then motivates higher level of political participation. In parallel, political interest could also increase political participation first through news involvement and then through off-line political discussion. More importantly, compared with the total indirect effects on participation in electoral campaigns, political interest could exert stronger indirect effect on participation in political advocacy through the three communication channels under study. In addition, the mediating effect of on-line political expression is more powerful than off-line political discussion in mobilizing participation in political advocacy. However, in terms of participation in electoral campaigns, indirect effect through on-line and off-line communication showed no significant difference. Implications of the findings are discussed.
{"title":"Is computer-mediated communication more powerful than face-to-face discussion in mobilizing political participation? A study examines participation in electoral campaigns and political advocacy in Taiwan","authors":"Jing Guo","doi":"10.1080/19331681.2022.2084483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2084483","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using a representative Taiwan sample from the 2019 Asia Barometer Survey, this study investigated the effect of political interest on two types of political participation (i.e., participation in electoral campaigns and political advocacy) based on the communication mediation model. Findings showed that three communication channels (i.e., news involvement, on-line political expression, and off-line political discussion) mediate the positive relationship between political interest and participation through different paths. When people are more interested in politics, they will be more likely to read political news, leading to more on-line political expression, which then motivates higher level of political participation. In parallel, political interest could also increase political participation first through news involvement and then through off-line political discussion. More importantly, compared with the total indirect effects on participation in electoral campaigns, political interest could exert stronger indirect effect on participation in political advocacy through the three communication channels under study. In addition, the mediating effect of on-line political expression is more powerful than off-line political discussion in mobilizing participation in political advocacy. However, in terms of participation in electoral campaigns, indirect effect through on-line and off-line communication showed no significant difference. Implications of the findings are discussed.","PeriodicalId":47047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Technology & Politics","volume":"20 1","pages":"235 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43996223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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