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Political expression and action on social media: Exploring the relationship between lower- and higher-threshold political activities among Twitter users in Italy

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-25, 14:04 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Augusto Valeriani, Pablo Barbera, Rich Bonneau, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker
Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher-threshold modes of political participation or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves politically on these platforms, the more they are likely to contact politicians via e-mail, campaign for parties and candidates using social media, and attend offline events to which they were invited online. These results suggest that lower-threshold forms of political engagement on social media do not distract from higher-threshold activities, but are strongly associated with them.

Funding

We acknowledge the support of the Italian Ministry of Education “Future in Research 2012” initiative (project code RBFR12BKZH), Dean Thomas Carew and the NYU Faculty of Arts and Science Research Investment Fund, and the United States National Science Foundation (Award #1248077). This article is the product of a collaboration between the research projects “Building Inclusive Societies and a Global Europe Online” (http://www.webpoleu.net) at the University of Bologna and “Social Media and Political Participation” (http://smapp.nyu.edu/) at New York University.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Volume

20

Issue

2

Pages

221 - 239

Citation

VACCARI, C. ... et al, 2015. Political expression and action on social media: Exploring the relationship between lower- and higher-threshold political activities among Twitter users in Italy. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20 (2), pp. 221-239.

Publisher

Oxford University Press © International Communication Association

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication following peer review. The version of record VACCARI, C. ... et al, 2015. Political expression and action on social media: Exploring the relationship between lower- and higher-threshold political activities among Twitter users in Italy. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20 (2), pp. 221-239 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12108. This journal is now published by Wiley and this paper is also available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12108/abstract.

eISSN

1083-6101

Language

  • en