Testing a Digital Inequality Model for Online Political Participation

Abstract

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Original ArticleInternet use can facilitate democratic processes from information seeking to debating political issues and voting. However, various obstacles to "digital democracy" remain (Hindman 2009;Mossberger, Tolbert, and Stansbury 2003;Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2010). There are still sizeable percentages of the population that are excluded from the digital society due to lack of basic physical Internet access (ITU 2016). Nonusers are likely to become marginalized as key resources for societal participation are increasingly or exclusively found online.Even under the assumption that further diffusion of the Internet will close the access divide, questions regarding the uses and consequences of the Internet for social inclusion persist (Willis and Tranter 2006;Witte and Mannon 2010). The web's nearly unlimited information sources and spaces for political discussion brought with them high hopes for a revitalizing and mobilizing effect on democratic participation. The utopic visions were quickly accompanied by cautionary voices proposing that the "political resources available via the Internet will empower those with the resources and motivation to take advantage of them, stranding the disengaged farther behind" (Norris 2001:238). The question thus remains in how far online political participation is socially structured in a way that reflects traditional inequalities. This article tests the relationship between social position and online political participation, including the mediating effect of political interest and Internet skills.The study uses rich primary data from a nationally representative two-wave survey that affords a high level of reliability and validity. Statistical results are based on multivariate modeling (structural equation modeling; SEM) including measurement invariance testing. The literature review identified two existing studies that used SEM to explain online political participation as the key dependent variable. This article extends a model proposed by De Marco, Robles, and Antino (2014) by including political interest, a crucial determinant of political behavior. A model by Min (2010), on the other hand, is advanced by modeling Internet skills and political interest as mediators between social position and digital participation. Finally, we address digital political engagement from the theoretical perspective of sociological digital inequality research (Hargittai and Hsieh 2013;Robinson et al. 2015): full social inclusion in the digital society increasingly requires advanced uses of the Internet such as online political participation.Our results...

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