The increased availability of the Internet has led to the emergence of new forms of political participation. Opinions differ, however, on whether this has led to a reinforcement of stratification patterns or to the political mobilization of new groups in society. To address this question, the authors conducted a latent class analysis of a U.S. representative sample that indicates that online activism is indeed a distinctive type of political participation. Analysis of the sociodemographic stratification of the identified participation types confirms the mobilization thesis regarding age and gender but finds that traditional socioeconomic status inequalities are reinforced in online political participation.

Various authors have claimed that citizenship norms have changed dramatically in contemporary societies. Recent research has studied the implications of Russell Dalton's argument that dutybased citizenship norms (emphasizing voting and obeying the law) are being replaced by engaged citizenship norms (emphasizing self-expressive and non-institutionalized forms of participation). In this article we use the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Education Survey (ICCS 2009, n=140,650) to ascertain the cross-national empirical validity of engaged and duty-based norms. By means of latent class analysis, we show that both of these citizenship norms are indeed adhered to by different groups of adolescents. We also show however that only half of the research population holds these two norms, while other more traditional norms are also identified. The findings confirm expectations that high-status respondents with low political trust are more likely to adhere to engaged norms, but the country-level findings contradict expectations, showing that engaged norms are less prevalent in highly developed stable democracies, and this casts doubts on the hypothesis that new engaged citizenship norms are predominantly found in stable highly-developed democracies.

Scholars have recognized that a recent increase in the ways citizens participate beyond the electoral arena may be a promising avenue of renewal for citizen participation. In this article we test the theory that different kinds of citizenship norms motivate some citizens to specialize in electoral-oriented activities (e.g. voting), while others specialize in non-institutionalized activities (e.g. protest). The latent class analysis of data from the U.S. Citizen, Involvement and Democracy Survey (2005) in the current study assesses how actors combine a variety of acts in their “political tool kits” of participation, and facilitates a comparison to prior findings that analyze single political behaviors. Results indicate a participatory type that specializes in non-institutionalized acts, but the group’s high probability of voting does not align with the expectations in the literature. An electoral-oriented specialist type is not identified; instead, the findings show that a majority of the population is best characterized as disengaged, while a small group of all-around activists embrace all possible opportunities for political action. The actor-centered theoretical and measurement approach in this study identifies caveats to the theory that changing citizenship norms are leading to civic and political renewal. We discuss the implications of these findings for measuring different aspects of democratic (dis)engagement and participatory (in)equality.

Various authors claim that citizenship norms are changing rapidly in advanced democracies, leading to a stronger emphasis on self-expressive engagement and a decline of notions of civic duty. In this article, we compare results from two comparative surveys of adolescents: the 1999 Civic Education Study and the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Survey (ICCS). By using latent class analysis we identify duty-based and engaged citizenship norms, both in 1999 and in 2009. As expected, the group supporting duty-based citizenship norms is clearly smaller in 2009 than in 1999, while the opposite is true for the group supporting engaged citizenship norms. In contrast to expectations, the empirical evidence also distinguishes additional normative concepts, and shows that the distribution among countries is not according to the dynamics on value change as suggested in the literature, including a decline in engaged norms in Scandinavia and Western Europe.

While in the older literature, low levels of political trust were routinely interpreted as a lack of support for democracy, more recently authors have claimed that the value pattern of critical citizens is a hallmark for a mature and stable democratic system. In this paper we assess the empirical validity of this claim, by relying on the relative deprivation literature highlighting the relation between expectation and frustration. The 2012 wave of the European Social Survey included an extensive battery measuring democratic ideals, and using latent class analysis we identify a group with high ideals on how a democracy should function. Multilevel regression analysis shows that strong democratic ideals are associated with lower levels of political trust, and most strongly so in countries with low quality of government. We close with observations on how rising democratic ideals could be a cause for the occurrence of a new group of 'critical citizens'.

In the recent debate about changing citizenship norms in advanced democracies, Scandinavian countries are often considered the front-runners of developing a new kind of engaged citizenship. The majority of recent empirical scholarship in this field, however, has focused on the United States. In this article we use latent class analysis to ascertain whether the ideal types of engaged citizenship and duty-based citizenship norms are relevant concepts for adolescents in Scandinavia, and whether there are significant changes in these norms between 1999 and 2009. The findings confirm that engaged and duty-based citizens can be clearly identified and that engaged citizenship norms are becoming more prevalent. We also, find, however, that engaged and duty-based norms are not the only norms identified in the analysis, and that important differences are evident in the background characteristics of those ascribing to different citizen norms that contradict expectations in the literature. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for changing citizenship norms in advanced democracies, including the potential implications of these changing norms for political behavior.

Social capital theory as it was developed in the 1990s assumed that face-to-face interaction is a crucial requirement for the development of generalized trust and other pro-social attitudes and behaviors. Television and other electronic media were therefore dismissed as having a potentially negative impact on social capital development. Based on an analysis of high-quality data and a rich variety of social capital indicators in the General Social Survey 2012 we assess the impact of two broad categories of screen timeinternet and televisionon both attitudinal and behavioral components of social capital. The results show that while watching television is either unrelated or negatively related to a range of social capital indicators, there is usually a positive relation between internet use (in various forms) and social capital indicators. This direct comparison of the impact of internet and television usage on social capital indicators in a nationally representative study challenges the expectation that television and other digital technologies would have a similar negative impact on social capital. The findings suggest that internet-based activities clearly play a positive role in the development of social capital despite the lack of inperson interaction, and the concluding discussion reviews avenues for future research to tease out causal mechanisms in the production of social capital in the digital age.

As digital media use has rapidly increased in prevalence and diversified in form, scholars across the globe have focused extensive attention on how the use of digital media relates to political participation. To assess the results of this emerging body of research, we conduct the first meta-analysis of repeated-wave panel data studies on the relationship between digital media use and political participation. The findings, based on 38 survey-based, repeated-wave panel studies (279 coefficients) bring new evidence to bear on two questions central to this literature. First, the findings provide new insight into the classic mobilization versus reinforcement debate: contrary to common assumption, the findings support a reinforcement effect, whereby those who are already politically active are motivated to use digital media. Second, the results indicate that the relationship between digital media use and political participation is durable, as studies with a longer time lag were more likely to yield positive and significant effects. Taken together, this evidence in support of a durable reinforcement effect implies the potential for digital media use to contribute to increased inequality in political participation over time. In the concluding discussion, we outline directions for further theoretical inquiry and empirical research that leverage the value of repeated-wave panel studies to make causal inferences.