{"id":2671,"date":"2016-10-25T08:20:53","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T13:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ssn\/?p=2671"},"modified":"2016-10-25T08:35:55","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T13:35:55","slug":"digital-dualism-in-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ssn\/2016\/10\/25\/digital-dualism-in-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Online Activism Is Unlikely To Reduce Political Inequalities in the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"If<\/a>
If you can “vote with your feet,” can you vote with your key strokes? Sebastien Wiertz, Flickr CC.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Originally posted on Jan. 19, 2016<\/em><\/p>\n

In every election cycle, news stories tout the potential of online activism to engage people who have historically been less engaged in offline politics \u2013 particularly young people, women, and people with less education and income. Could this be true? If so, there would be new possibilities for enlarging American democracy \u2013 in an age when one in three eligible U.S. adults skips voting in presidential elections and two thirds of potential voters fail to show up in midterm elections.<\/p>\n

But what if online activism mainly offers ways for citizens who are regularly politically active offline to amplify their already loud voices? In that case, online political opportunities would largely reinforce existing political inequalities.<\/p>\n

Using national data on Americans who engage in various types of online and offline political participation, our research examines the evidence about these competing \u201cnew mobilization\u201d and \u201creinforcement\u201d perspectives on the impact of online activism.<\/p>\n

Who Participates Online?<\/h3>\n

We start by noting the percentage of the U.S. population engaged in various kinds of online and offline political activities, using data from a 2008 Pew Survey that asked a national sample of Americans whether they had performed each act at any point in the previous twelve months.
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Probing further, we used a novel statistical technique called latent analysis to see whether some people are especially active online but not very politically active offline. Then we compared the characteristics of online activists to those of other kinds of participants.<\/p>\n

Four Types of Political Participants<\/h3>\n

In our data, we find four distinctive types of participants.<\/p>\n