Participation, Online and Otherwise: What's the Difference for Policy Preferences?

Abstract

Objective. One explanation for why voters' preferences are privileged by policymakers is that voters are likely to communicate their preferences through additional avenues as well. We examine this "communication hypothesis" by comparing the policy preferences of different types of political participators. Methods. We analyze the National Annenberg Election Survey (2008) using latent class analysis to identify different types of political participators and multinomial logistic regression to compare the policy preferences of these participator types. Results. Voters who also engage in additional online and/or offline political acts have policy preferences that differ in a number of meaningful ways from those who "only" vote. Conclusion. The findings indicate that prior research has overlooked important evidence on the connection between citizen participation and political outcomes due to a primary focus on the act of voting. This study suggests how future research can assess the impact of citizens' broader patterns of political participation.As voting rates have remained stable or declined in advanced democracies, scholars of political participation have viewed the increased prevalence of political participation beyond the vote-both offline and online-as an important potential avenue for alternative civic and political engagement. Focusing on the United States, Dalton concluded that even though electoral turnout declined somewhat in the United States over the past several decades, "the repertoire of political action has actually expanded, and people are now engaged in other ways . . . adding to the tools of political activism" (Dalton, 2008:90-94). In addition to the increased prevalence of familiar "old" political activities like petitioning and protesting, various new forms of online * Direct correspondence to Jennifer Oser, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3131 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 oser@post.harvard.edu . Jennifer Oser will share all data and coding for replication purposes. We would like to thank

Channels of participation: Political participant types and personality

“…The participant types were constructed employing LCA [ 20 – 24 ] using the poLCA package in R [ 65 ]. We estimated a latent class regression model, which simultaneously permitted us to include independent variables into the model, predicting the probability of affiliating with a specific type of participant [ 65 ].…”

“…Reviving the person-centred idea of political participant types [ 3 , 8 ], scholars have started employing empirical solutions to structure how citizens combine their available channels of participation. This approach is arguably useful to study the facets of political activism, especially given that an increasing number of individual modes is available in citizens’ tool kits [ 8 , 19 – 24 ]. Combining different modes from a tool kit of political activities might be more promising for citizens to successfully influence politics than to be politically active in only one way [ 18 – 22 ].…”

“…Any additional types of political participants mentioned in previous literature typically cluster around a level of specialisation [ 13 , 17 , 20 , 21 , 23 , 24 ]. Some scholars only report engaged and disengaged participators [ 23 , 24 ], others all-round activists, high-voting engaged, mainstream and disengaged participants [ 22 , 41 ], or agitators, outsiders, activists, and conventionals [ 16 ]. A study on youth online participation identifies engagers and non-engagers [ 42 ].…”

Political Consumerism as a Neoliberal Response to Youth Political Disengagement

“…As voting turnout demonstrates declining trends, scholars of political participation have started to examine the increased prevalence of political participation beyond the vote as a significant potential avenue for alternative civic and political engagement [108]. The present article draws from the assertion of the existence of a neoliberal ideological hegemony of the marketopoly, so as to associate the declining levels of electoral engagement among younger generations in post-crisis Europe with the rise of political consumerism.…”

Power users in online democracy: their origins and impact

“…Two key debates can be found in this area. The first concerns whether the interests of power users diverge in important ways from the interests of normal users in such a way that, through their heavy engagement activities, they distort the focus of the community, leading it to focus on issues which are not of general interest (Oser, Leighley, & Winneg, 2014), something which may exacerbate participation inequality. A range of literature provides theoretical support for this idea.…”