AR; political discussion frequency, network size, and heterogeneity of discussions

_

Not one of the snappiest titles ever, but the original – from William P. Eveland, Jr. and Myiah Hutchens Hively, is even longer. In their paper they have reviewed considerable amounts of previous research material on political discussion, and on this basis arrived at more accurate and hence more useful conceptualization of notions such as “discussion frequency”, “safe” and “dangerous” discussion, and “heterogeneity” of political discussion.

Finally, they examined how these affect political knowledge (also reconceptualized here), and political participation, through a new survey.

_

AR; on blogs and political participation

 

It has been established that traditional informational media consumption correlates with political participation: in general, the more someone uses the media for informational purposes, the higher the chances that they will also be politically active (I’ll add a brief note on the causality behind this). Homero Gil De Zúñiga and his two colleagues looked at whether this applies in relation to blog consumption too; in an article recently published in New Media & Society.

 

Sparing the detailed description of methodology (quantitative analysis of surveys), here are the results.

 

Finns uninterested in politics

photo by flickr user "jpaudit"

A short piece of news from Finnish public service broadcaster YLE reported about a survey measuring the political knowledge of Finns across the society. The survey, conducted by the University of Turku, found that a large part of the general population had quite poor knowledge about domestic politics. Three out of four respondents were unable to name the currently governing parties.

Most of the more than 1000 respondents could name prime minister Matti Vanhanen. In contrast, only one in four considered it important to vote in the European parliamentary elections. Political knowledge showed correlation with the income level and profession of the respondents.

AR: Whose voice is heard in online deliberation?

Some quick notes on Steffen Albrecht’s paper “Whose voice is heard in online deliberation? – A study of participation and representation in political debates on the Internet.” (Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 9. No 1., February 2006)

Albrecht discusses topics such as political activism online (does the net actually spread activism?; not really, though it provides new forms for it), the situational advantage of the digerati, and hypotheses about the lack of social cues (unreliability vs the levelling out effect). The paper then approaches the main problem through a case study carried out in Hamburg in November 2002.

But what’s most important is not really the answer to the question in the title – the point is that the answer is quite vague, and it is most useful if we look at it as an incentive to ask further questions. As the main concluding point, Albrecht proposes a new theoretical model to conduct research into online deliberation; in the model, four sets of factors are considered to determine who participates (participation) and what is communicated (representation) in instances of online deliberation.