Election Media and Youth Political Engagement (original) (raw)
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Young People, Politics and Social Media
2011
As voter turnout has fallen especially among young people, many have expressed high hopes that Internet and social media may stimulate political participation and deliberation. Obama’s success in engaging young voters in his 2008-campaign has been associated with effective use of social media like Facebook and MySpace. This has generated optimistic visions about how social media could not only make young people vote, but also become more active participants in political deliberation. Digital technologies, like social media, open several possibilities for people to access information, express political views and discuss issues with other people in their network. To what degree and how these opportunities may be used is another question. The Obama campaign may of course be the beginning of a new era with more participation, but it may also be a specific case, a case where one campaign managed to spread enthusiasm around its candidate for a number of reasons, and where social media was...
Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics.pdf
New media have come to play a prominent role in civic and political life. Social network sites, web sites and text increasingly serve as both a conduit for political information and a major public arena where citizens express and exchange their political ideas; raise funds; and mobilize others to vote, protest, and work on public issues. This chapter considers how the ascendency of today's new media may be introducing fundamental changes in political expectations and practices. Specifically, we see evidence that new media are facilitating participatory politics--interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern. While these kinds of acts have always existed, evidence suggests that new media are providing new opportunities for political voice and discussion, thus increasing the role of participatory politics in public life. In this chapter, we provide a conceptual overview of the implications of this shift for how political life is organized, emerging political practices, and pathways to political engagement. We focus our analysis on youth, who are early adopters of new media, and provide some empirical evidence to demonstrate the importance of participatory politics to their political life as well as to highlight some benefits as well as risks associated with this form of political engagement.
New Media and Youth Political Engagement
Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 2020
This article critically examines the role new media can play in the political engagement of young people in Australia. Moving away from "deficit" descriptions, which assert low levels of political engagement among young people, it argues two major points. First, that there is a well-established model of contemporary political mobilisation that employs both new media and large data analysis that can and have been effectively applied to young people in electoral and non-electoral contexts. Second, that new media, and particularly social media, are not democratic by nature. Their general use and adoption by young and older people do not necessarily cultivate democratic values. This is primarily due to the type of participation afforded in the emerging "surveillance economy". The article argues that a focus on scale as drivers of influence, the underlying foundation of their affordances based on algorithms, and the centralised editorial control of these platforms make them highly participative, but unequal sites for political socialisation and practice. Thus, recent examples of youth mobilisation, such as seen in recent climate justice movements, should be seen through the lens of cycles of contestation, rather than as technologically determined.
Journal of Youth Studies
During election times, societal actors frequently employ specific getout-the-vote campaigns to mobilize young voters' turnout and engagement with the election. Although such campaigns receive praise in society, little is known about how effective they are and if they shape longer lasting types of political engagement. This study presents novel evidence about the differential effects of a multi-platform get-out-the-vote campaign in Denmark, and investigates how such campaigns can help to address the important democratic problem of youth disengagement. Based on a two-wave panel study among high school-and university students in Denmark (n = 275), the effects of classroom interventions, political event participation, and social media use on political interest, knowledge, and political efficacy are explored. The results suggests that get-out-the-vote campaigns are able to strengthen youths' political engagement, but that civic education and political events may be more important than communication via social media.
The networked young citizen: social media, political participation and civic engagement
Information, Communication & Society, 2014
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Rocking the Vote and More: An Experimental Study of the Impact of Youth Political Portals
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2008
This study provides a controlled lest of the effects of youth-oriented political portals. Based on existing theories of the individual effects of Interne! u.sc, we hypothesize that these sites may facilitate political engagement among memhers of their target audience in a variety of ways, but we also consider the possibilily thai such effects may ho moderated hy prior levels of political interest. Observations are drawn from a Wcb-hascd experiment administered lo undergraduates at a major midwestern university at the height of the 2006 election season. Findings indicate weak to nonsignificant main effects for exposure to youth-oriented political portals on self-reported cognitive engagement with election information, and a pattern of differential effects of exposure on opinion formation and domain-specific political efficacy, based on users' prior levels of interest in politics. KEYWORDS. Internet, online politics, political efficacy, youth The events surrounditig the 2004 presidential e-mail, and other relatively new forms of election sparked a lively debate over the youth comtmuiication technology, vote. Prior to the election, commentators and After Election Day, early postmortems on academics cited the dramatic growth in efforts campaigns such as Rock the Vote were split. At to mobilize new, and in particular young, first, these efforts were colorfully declared voters. Notably, MTV's familiar "Rock the fruitless, often on the grounds that the fraction Vote" campaign was joined by a number of of all ballots that were cast by young people other high-profile efforts, virtually all of which remaitied under 20%, displaying no major featured a significant onlitie presence atid chatige sitice the last presidential election, and conducted large portions of their communica-that the youth vote failed to swing the outcome tion and mobilization efforts through the Web, in favor of John Kerry. Consider, for example.
The Impact of New Media Use on Youth Political Engagement
International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding, 2020
During increasing studies and debates on the impact of the use of social media, especially among young people in the context of civil life and political action, some researchers suggest that the category of findings on these two categories is optimistic or pessimistic. Focusing on young Chinese ethnic groups in Singkawang City, this study aims to view the extent to which social media is a driving force for young people’s online political engagement. By conducting a multiple correlation regression analysis of 100 respondents data collected using a questionnaire, this study found that the use of social media was not the main driver (contributing on 25.6%) for increased online political engagement by young Chinese Singkawang, but social media provided opportunities for Singkawang Chinese young people to access information and transfer political knowledge.