The Social Media and Digitalization of Political Participation in Youths: An Indonesian Perspective

Abstract

Digitalization in the modern era has provided opportunities for the youths to participate in this information and social spheres. The concentrated use of social media has contributed to the astonishing factor among the voters where social media has changed the preferences of youths toward the right to vote. The research aims to investigate the contributions and preferences of youths toward political participation in the contemporary discussion in Indonesia. This research was quantitative research using a purposive random sampling technique to give equal opportunity to each respondent. The mode of data collection was an online survey. The majority of the respondents in this research were the student of the universities. Data were collected in April 2019 to examine the interest of youths in general elections in Indonesia. This research found that social media and Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have provided a unique platform to discuss political matters and ‘take apart’ in political discussions. Existing in-depth researches on this phenomenon show that political awareness among youths in Indonesia is an essential part and social media is the leading indicator. This research suggested some recommendations for to usage of social media for the socialization of youths.

The Digitalization of Kitab Kuning

“…Digitalization is viewed as technology advances and can be an entity that can create a new arena that facilitates countless menus of information that can be a driving force for social change. Digitalization has chopped to various fields of life; social, culture, education, and information [14] [15] [16] [17]. Digitalization seems to have become a basic need that cannot be separated from life.…”

Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?

“…We construct the "predicted normalized rank improvements" of council candidates by regressing normalized rank improvements on all municipality characteristics reported in online Appendix Table A.4. We then use the predicted values as the dependent variable in RDD regressions as specified in equation (2). Since predicted rank improvements do not vary across candidates within a local election (as municipality characteristics do not vary), we have one observation per election.…”

“…One important reason for the electoral gains of female candidates may be that exposure to a female mayor diminishes anti-female biases of voters. 2 To explore this explanation, we analyze this and other mechanisms. First, party leaders may respond to female mayors by changing the initial list ranks of female council candidates.…”

Adolescents in Virtual Forum: Playing, Socializing, or Engaging in Public Issues?

“…Among the most accessed social media are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Line, and these information platforms are among the top 5 most used social media in Indonesia. There are much research that revealed that these various social media are also used for political participation, particularly among the young generation (Saud & Margono, 2021;Aisya et al, 2019;Saud et al, 2020) The support of social media for daily communication with their specific features is indisputable. Each social media has its distinctive affordances in providing advantages to the users.…”