A Communicative Approach to Social Capital

Abstract

This article advances a communicative approach to social capital that views communication as the fundamental source of societal integration. We contend that integration occurring at the system level via news consumption and at the individual level via interpersonal discussion is amplified through ties at the community level. This cross-level interaction is theorized to encourage civic engagement, writ large, above and beyond the influences of news, talk, or social ties. This perspective distinguishes between the extent of news use and political talk and the orientation toward news consumption and political conversation. We offer evidence that communication variables, specifically news attention and exposure along with conversational frequency and orientation toward conversational understanding, interact with associational membership and network size to foster engagement.

Online political participation, civic talk, and media multiplexity: how Taiwanese citizens express political opinions on the Web

“…For example, citizens may discuss politics with their friends in private settings although they do not participate in the campaign of their favorite candidate. Research in this area consistently shows that citizens' social networks serve an important role for their political information and opinion exchange, and subsequently, have positive implications for their political participation (Gil de Zúñiga, & Valenzuela, 2011;Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1987;Ikeda & Boase, 2011;Lake & Huckfeldt, 1998;Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1968;McLeod et al, 1999;Mutz, 2002;Rojas, Shah, & Friedland, 2011;Scheufele, Hardy, Brossard, Waismel-Manor, & Nisbet, 2006). However, having personal networks with diverse information or opinions only presents the potential for information exchange or deliberation.…”

“…Given that the original questionnaire primarily asked respondents to report the overall estimates of online political activities and ICT usage, we could only construct proxy measures capturing the general patterns of online civic talk and online media multiplexity. Without a more refined observation with the necessary details about these behaviors, we are not able to account for these important variables and further examine the interaction effects among these constructs noted by some recent studies (Gil de Zúñiga & Valenzuela, 2011;Kim, Hsu, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2013;Rojas, et al, 2011;Tian, 2011). We are also not able to explore the implications of social Web use for political participation in both online and offline contexts.…”

Political Network Size and Its Antecedents and Consequences

“…Name generator methods are incapable of identifying network hubs-individuals who have been hypothesized to play a central role in the spread of information and influence at the macro level. Unfortunately, even most studies that have the data to identify these network hubs (i.e., studies using summary network measures) have not addressed their presence or taken the non-normal distribution of this variable into account (e.g., Eveland & Hively, 2009;Kwak et al, 2005;Rojas, 2008;Rojas et al, 2011). Had they done so, the evidence reported in this study suggests that the literature would likely reveal demonstrably stronger empirical relationships between network size and its antecedents and consequences than it currently does.…”

“…First, in Table 4 we used the 2004 battleground data-since this study had most of the outcome variables of interest-and constructed two measures of network size as predictor variables. The first measure was the raw summary network measure, ranging from 0 to 100, representing the typical approach to analyzing summary network size measures (e.g., Eveland & Hively, 2009;Kwak et al, 2005;Rojas, 2008;Rojas, Shah, & Friedland, 2011). The second measure repeats our analysis from Table 3 by taking the log of the summary network size measure to account for its highly non-normal distribution (see also Gil de Zúñiga & Valenzuela, 2011).…”

Applying the communication theory of Diffusion of Innovations to economic sciences: a response to the ‘Using gossips to spread information’ experiments conducted by the 2019 Nobel Laureates

“…Communication network research has shown that both weak and strong ties (Rojas et al, 2011) have different effects on information diffusion. For example, health prevention innovations, such as family planning and HIV prevention vaccines such as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), may carry with them familial implications and/or social stigmas (where strong ties are important for social support), and thus operate differently from information about contests and the need to immunize children (where weak ties are appropriate).…”