Esta investigación explora los procesos de mediación que intervienen en el efecto producido por el uso político de redes sociales sobre la participación política offline. A partir de una muestra de ...1520 participantes pertenecientes al Distrito Metropolitano de Quito (Ecuador) se evalúo el rol mediador de factores actitudinales, emocionales y de reclutamiento. Los resultados de análisis de ecuaciones estructurales efectuado sugieren una relación parcialmente mediada. Los efectos indirectos se transmiten mediante variables como interés en la política, la eficacia política interna y la pertenencia a grupos políticos. Por el contrario, las emociones y el conocimiento político no operan como mediadores significativos. Se discuten las contribuciones de los hallazgos efectuados, las limitaciones del estudio y se esbozan sugerencias para futuras investigaciones.
Does talking about civic issues encourage civic participation? In his innovative book,Civic Talk, Casey Klofstad shows that our discussions about politics and current events with our friends, ...colleagues, and relatives-"civic talk"-has the ability to turn thought into action-from voting to volunteering in civic organizations.
Klofstad's path breaking research is the first to find evidence of a causal relationship between the casual chatting and civic participation. He employs survey information and focus groups consisting of randomly assigned college freshman roommates to show this behavior in action. Klofstad also illustrates how civic talk varies under different circumstances and how the effects can last years into the future. Based on these findings, Klofstad contends that social context plays a central role in maintaining the strength of democracy. This conclusion cuts against the grain of previous research, which primarily focuses on individual-level determinants of civic participation, and negates social-level explanations.
How and why does protest shape participants’ attitudes? We study this issue using panel data gathered both before and after Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests. We argue that frames play a key role in this ...process. We find that protest participation increased alignment of protesters’ policy preferences with the main protest frames by stabilizing existing attitudes that were in alignment and changing attitudes that conflicted with the dominant frame. Attitudes on core protest issues also became more coherent. We find no comparable effects for issues less central to the protests, and all effects vary as the framing and protest environment changed. In addition, we examine the mechanisms of attitude change, showing that while protesters also experience significant increases in efficacy, interest, and participation, these changes only partly explain attitudinal changes. These findings speak to both the short- and long-term mechanisms by which protest participation can shape public opinion.
We have witnessed a drastic increase in partisanship in the United States in the past decades. This increase has sparked concern that the effects may not be as benign as the positive political ...engagement and activism behaviors sometimes associated with increased partisanship. This paper explicitly targets the risk that increased partisan identities may lead to stronger intentions to engage in violent political behaviors from an individual difference perspective. This paper integrates insights from the literature on political violence and personality psychology. It understands partisanship as social identity and focuses on the influence of the dark triad. In three original, population representative cross-sectional and experimental studies of adult Americans (total n = 3797), the paper shows that stronger partisan identities drive stronger intentions to engage in political violence, but that this effect holds for partisans with the callous, manipulative personality indicated by high dark triad scores only.
Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand ...expert involvement in political decision‐making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non‐transparent nature of expert‐based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.
There is no doubt that partisanship is a powerful influence on democratic political behavior. But there is also a lively debate on its nature and origins: Is it largely instrumental in nature and ...shaped by party performance and issues stances? Or is it basically a long-standing expressive identity reinforced by motivated reasoning and strong emotions? We assess the nature of partisanship in the European context, examining the measurement properties and predictive validity of a multiitem partisan identity scale included in national surveys conducted in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K. Using a latent variable model, we show that an eightitem partisan identity scale provides greater information about partisan intensity than a standard single-item and has the same measurement properties across the three countries. In addition, the identity scale better predicts in-party voting and political participation than a measure of ideological intensity (based on both left–right self-placement and agreement with the party on key issues), providing support for an expressive approach to partisanship in several European democracies.
Governments are increasingly establishing innovation labs to enhance public problem solving. Despite the speed at which these new units are being established, they have only recently begun to receive ...attention from public management scholars. This study assesses the extent to which labs are enhancing strategic policy capacity through pursuing more collaborative and citizen-centred approaches to policy design. Drawing on original case study research of five labs in Australia and New Zealand, it examines the structure of lab's relationships to government partners, and the extent and nature of their activities in promoting citizen-participation in public problem solving.
While the study of e-participation has gained increasing attention within political science, our understanding of its underlying structure and relationship to offline participation is limited. This ...article addresses these gaps by focusing on three interrelated questions: (1) Is e-participation a multidimensional phenomenon (differentiation hypothesis)? (2) If submodes exist, do they mirror existing modes of participation (replication hypothesis)? (3) If offline forms are replicated online, do they mix together (integration hypothesis) or operate in separate spheres (independence hypothesis)? We test our hypotheses through confirmatory factor analysis of original survey data from the U.K. General Election of 2010. The results show that distinct submodes of e-participation, comparable to those occurring offline, can be identified. Support for integration and independence varies according to the type of participation undertaken. Finally our results suggest that the online environment may be fostering a new social-media-based type of expressive political behavior.
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