Examining the Roles of Political Social Network and Internal Efficacy on Social Media News Engagement: A Comparative Study of Six Asian Countries

Abstract

The use of social media has risen exponentially in Asia in the past decade, but there have been few comparative studies examining social media news engagement in the region. We use online survey data to examine the relationships among political social networks, internal political efficacy, and social media news engagement in six countries (Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore). Findings across the samples showed that individuals in political social networks comprising cross-cutting and like-minded political views engage in social media news more, and internal political efficacy accentuated the relationships between cross-cutting/like-minded political social networks and engagement. Implications for the findings are discussed in relation to current debates on the potential for social media news engagement to engender a more deliberative democracy; or lead to greater ideological segregation and echo chambers in social media spaces.

Does political efficacy equally predict news engagement across countries? A multilevel analysis of the relationship among internal political efficacy, media environment and news engagement

“…In line with previous research (Chan et al, 2018;Park and Kaye, 2018), we reveal the positive association between internal political efficacy and news engagement. It is noteworthy that previous studies only focused on one country or conducted separate analyses across countries.…”

“…To our best knowledge, few studies have directly examined the relationship between media environment and news engagement. The cross-national studies to date either adopt a small-N approach to studying news engagement in a limited number of countries or treat the country unit as the fixed effect, without including country-level characteristics, in explaining news engagement (Chan et al, 2018;Fletcher and Park, 2017;Kalogeropoulos et al, 2017). To fill the gap, this study pays close attention to how political and technological media environment may impact news engagement and how the effect of internal political efficacy on news engagement varies across different media environments.…”

“…Scholars either look at one particular news engagement activity, such as curational news use, and news sharing (Lee and Ma, 2012;Park and Kaye, 2018), or use a broad measurement that includes both active and passive news consumption behavior (Ha et al, 2018). For the other, recent research mainly focuses on individual-level predictors of news engagement, including internal political efficacy, news interest, and civic and information-seeking gratifications (Chan et al, 2018;Lee, 2015;Lee and Ma, 2012). As the digital media environment has greatly expanded opportunities for action due to the lower costs of communication and information (Bimber, 2017), the context for news engagement, referring to the media environment and access to media content (Strömbäck et al, 2013), is an important dimension that has rarely been touched upon.…”

“…Specifically, we proposed a refined conceptualization of news engagement with three dimensions, including overall, user-user, and user-content news engagement to address the wide variety and the very nature of news engagement behavior. By expanding prior findings of a positive relationship between internal political efficacy and news engagement (Chan et al, 2018;Park and Kaye, 2018), we further sought to reveal how the contextual factors-press freedom and Internet penetration-account for news engagement through hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Our study provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between individual agency and media environment in shaping news engagement behavior.…”

Determinants of cross-cutting discussion on Facebook: Political interest, news consumption, and strong-tie heterogeneity

“…Although many of a person’s strong ties are politically similar to him or her (McPherson et al, 2001; Putnam, 2001), not all in one’s core network have similar political views with him or her (Chan et al, 2019; Oliphant, 2018). If a politically attentive person’s strong ties consist of many individuals holding different opinions, it is conceivable that they will have a higher chance of engaging in cross-cutting discussion in the course of news-related activities on Facebook.…”