Feminism! What Is It Good For? The Role of Feminism and Political Self-Efficacy in Women’s Online Political Participation

Abstract

Despite initial hopes for more egalitarian access to democracy, research has shown that political participation on the Internet remains as stratified as its offline counterpart. Gender is among the characteristics affecting an individual’s degree of political engagement on the Internet—even when controlling for socioeconomic status. To explain this gender divide, it is necessary to go beyond purely resource-based perspectives. Social cognitive theory allows for an analysis of how environmental factors shape cognitions, such as political efficacy, which, in turn, foster political participation. Political efficacy has been shown to be lower among women compared to men. This study explores determinants of gendered online political participation (OPP) by analyzing how self-efficacy mediates the effect of newly developed measures of three different waves of feminist attitudes on OPP. Based on a survey of 1,078 Internet users in Germany, 70% of them women, we analyze the effects of feminism on political efficacy and participation. Feminism is associated with higher internal political efficacy. Also, some feminist paradigms are shown to empower women to participate politically online. This effect, however, is not mediated through efficacy. This finding sheds light on opportunities to foster women’s political participation.

Gender differences in civic and political engagement and participation among Italian young people

“…In the past, being a woman has been associated with higher levels of communicative use of the Internet, but only outside of a political scenario (Cotten & Jelenewicz, 2006). More recent studies have found that men are more involved in online political participation, make more attempts to access and have more intense use of digital political content than women (Calenda & Meijer, 2009;Heger & Hoffmann, 2021;Wagner et al, 2021). Men are more politically participative in both social media (Bode, 2017) and in other online activities such as commenting on news sites or political blogs, posting political videos to YouTube, and visiting websites of parties or political organizations (Wen et al, 2013).…”

Gendered Tweets: Computational Text Analysis of Gender Differences in Political Discussion on Twitter

“…Different manners of interaction can imply different psychological motives. For example, the fact that women are more likely to retweet but less likely to reply on Twitter might reflect that women have a lower political efficacy (Heger & Hoffmann, 2021) or higher sensitivity to hostility on Twitter (Nadim & Fladmoe, 2021). Both of these dispositions might hinder women's equal opportunities to express their political opinions in a public space.…”

Digitally Networked Participation and Lifestyle Politics as New Modes of Political Participation

“…Several studies employing the concept and type of activities underlined by DNP—including in the context of mobilization (Lilleker & Koc‐Michalska, 2017), participatory inequality (Bode, 2017), the participatory consequences of selective exposure (Feezell, 2016), feminist (Heger & Hoffmann, 2019) and youth activism (Ekström & Shehata, 2018; Pickard, 2019)—have shown that it has become a popular form of engaging in various areas of politics and civil society. Moreover, manifestations of DNP have been shown to be crucial for shaping political self‐concepts such as political self‐efficacy and interest, strengthening people's political self‐presentation on social media, and their public commitment to their image as politically active (Lane et al, 2019).…”