Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide
A Comparative Study

Explores how digital media use affects political behavior and how this relationship is shaped by political environments across countries.

Eva Anduiza (Edited by), Michael James Jensen (Edited by), Laia Jorba (Edited by)

9781107668492, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 June 2012

304 pages, 17 b/w illus. 1 map 37 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.44 kg

“This book is a major new study that provides one of the most comprehensive answers to date to the question of how digital media is affecting political engagement. Its depth and breadth of coverage is unique and striking in that it brings together highly sophisticated empirical analyses of Internet use and participation across a range of democratic and non-democratic contexts. From single case studies to multi-country analyses, the consistently positive findings that are reported mark an important step forward in the literature in terms of addressing ongoing debates about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. Looking to the future, the book also offers powerful insights into future trends by calling for researchers to consider online participation as a multidimensional phenomenon that is pushing forms of political engagement into a new, more social, horizontal, and expressive space.” — Rachel Gibson, The University of Manchester

This book focuses on the impact of digital media use for political engagement across varied geographic and political contexts, using a diversity of methodological approaches and datasets. The book addresses an important gap in the contemporary literature on digital politics, identifying context dependent and transcendent political consequences of digital media use. While the majority of the empirical work in this field has been based on studies from the United States and United Kingdom, this volume seeks to place those results into comparative relief with other regions of the world. It moves debates in this field of study forward by identifying system-level attributes that shape digital political engagement across a wide variety of contexts. The evidence analyzed across the fifteen cases considered in the book suggests that engagement with digital environments influences users' political orientations and that contextual features play a significant role in shaping digital politics.

1. Introduction Michael J. Jensen, Laia Jorba and Eva Anduiza
2. The impact of digital media on citizenship in a global perspective Laia Jorba and Bruce Bimber
3. Recent shifts in the relationship between the Internet and democratic engagement in Britain and the United States Andrew Chadwick
4. Political engagement and the Internet in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections: a panel survey Allison Hamilton and Caroline J. Tolbert
5. Online political participation in the United States and Spain Michael J. Jensen and Eva Anduiza
6. Internet use and political attitudes in Europe Clelia Colombo, Carol Galais and Aina Gallego
7. Digital media and offline political participation in Spain Marta Cantijoch
8. Online participation in Italy: contextual influences and political opportunities Cristian Vaccari
9. On the causal nature of the relationship between Internet access and political engagement: evidence from German panel data Martin Kroh and Hannes Neiss
10. The uses of digital media for contentious politics in Latin America Yanina Welp and Jonathan Wheatley
11. Opening closed regimes: civil society, information infrastructure, and political Islam Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard
12. Digital media and political attitudes in China Min Tang, Laia Jorba and Michael J. Jensen
13. Conclusions Laia Jorba, Michael J. Jensen and Eva Anduiza.

Subject Areas: Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Comparative politics [JPB], Communication studies [GTC]