Michael A. Xenos

The great equalizer? Patterns of social media use and youth political engagement in three advanced democracies

Recent developments suggest a strong relationship between social media use and political engagement and raise questions about the potential for social media to help stem or even reverse patterns of political inequality that have troubled scholars for years. In this paper, we articulate a model of social media and political engagement among young people, and test it using data from representative samples of young people in Australia, the USA, and the UK. Our results suggest a strong, positive relationship between social media use and political engagement among young people across all three countries, and provide additional insights regarding the role played by social media use in the processes by which young people become politically engaged. Notably, our results also provide reasons to be optimistic concerning the overall influence of this popular new form of digital media on longstanding patterns of political inequality.

Media Framing and Effective Public Deliberation

Thanks to recent advances in public opinion research, we now know that the origins of public opinion—the sacred icon of democracy—lay in elite discourse. We also know that the public relies on the mass media for its political information. However, the pathways of elite discourse, as it winds its way through the media, remain shrouded in mystery. The purpose of this article is to probe the discussion of political issues that drives public opinion. Some critics direct our focus away from these pathways altogether, focusing on the ability of certain audience members to become their own producers of meaning independent of elite discourse. In contrast, other scholars argue that elite discourse represents a powerful hegemonic force for indoctrinating the masses with the ideas of the ruling class. In this vein, they claim that the discussion of issues and events in the media largely responds to, but does not cause, conditions in the material world, for example serving to “index” the level of conflict in government. Finally, to our mind, the most optimistic as well as accurate view holds that the media can be the locus for genuine public deliberation. We argue that the give and take of ideas that political argumentation in the mass media entails both follows the dictates of communicative rationality as it unwinds over time and, more important, leads to deliberative outcomes that have substantial consequences in the real world. This article, then, documents these points with respect to media coverage of labor strikes. Public discourse about strikes provides an exceptionally fertile ground for testing hypotheses about effective deliberation. These events provide an occasion for conflict between broad economic groups in society. Thus, strikes provide a reasonable arena for assessing the competing predictions of the discourse theories with which we are concerned. Also, the interactions between elites—such as union leaders, company management, and public officials—can be clearly characterized in the terms used in these theories. For these reasons, we can develop and test clear predictions about the direction of causality between patterns of discourse and real-world outcomes. Specifically, in this, our first effort, we employ a variant of framing analysis to examine the public discourse associated with a U.S. national labor strike—the 1997

The networked young citizen: social media, political participation and civic engagement

The accusations that young people are politically apathetic and somehow failing in their duty to participate in many democratic societies worldwide have been refuted by a growing number of academic...

Moments of Zen: Effects of The Daily Show on Information Seeking and Political Learning

A growing number of scholars continue to investigate relationships between exposure and attention to political comedy programs like The Daily Show and political knowledge. One prominent explanation for these relationships suggests that exposure to such programs facilitates the acquisition of political information from hard news sources, particularly among less politically sophisticated comedy viewers, thus serving as a gateway to political attention and knowledge. Previous studies have provided support for this explanation largely through cross-sectional survey data focused on learning from traditional hard news outlets such as television news. This research draws on data from two experimental studies conducted with undergraduates at a major midwestern university to provide a more direct causal investigation of these processes and also expands the scope of hard news media considered to include online sources. Our findings provide general support for the gateway hypothesis but raise important questions concerning the causal structure of gateway effects.

Analyzing Linking Practices: Candidate Sites in the 2002 US Electoral Web Sphere

This article offers preliminary insights and a possible empirical model for managing the conceptual, methodological, and technological challenges entailed in developmental analysis of link-mediated relations. We offer a “mid-range” approach to making sense of linking practices, midway between close rhetorical/ethnographic analysis of links and large-scale link mapping. We suggest that systematic human coding and interpretation of linked-to producer types affords a more concrete and specific basis for hypothesizing about linking strategies than machine mapping, while providing a more robust attempt to generalize across the universe of candidate Web sites than ethnographic analysis. To illustrate this two-pronged approach to link analysis, we examine the linking practices exhibited on Web sites produced by U.S. Congressional candidates during the 2002 campaign season, focusing on the extent and development of links from candidate Web sites to other types of political Web sites during the three months prior to the November, 2002 election.

Young people, social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk

Social media is pervasive in the lives of young people, and this paper critically analyses how politically engaged young people integrate social media use into their existing organisations and political communications. This qualitative research project studied how young people from a broad range of existing political and civic groups use social media for sharing information, mobilisation and, increasingly, as a means to redefine political action and political spaces. Twelve in-person focus groups were conducted in Australia, the USA and the UK with matched affinity groups based on university campuses. The groups were of four types: party political group, issue-based group, identity-based group and social group. Our focus group findings suggest that this in-depth approach to understanding young peoples political engagement reveals important group-based differences emerging in young peoples citizenship norms: between the dutiful allegiance to formal politics and a more personalised, self-actualising preference for online, discursive forms of political engagement and organising. The ways in which political information is broadcast, shared and talked about on social media by engaged young people demonstrate the importance of communicative forms of action for the future of political engagement and connective action.

New Mediated Deliberation: Blog and Press Coverage of the Alito Nomination

This study explores the implications of political weblogs for theories of mediated public deliberation. Guided by contemporary questions surrounding the internet and the public sphere, we examine blog and newspaper coverage of the nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court of Samuel Alito with an eye toward further development of theories of mass deliberation. Specifically, we pursue questions concerning volume of coverage, ideological polarization, and interactive features in the blogosphere, using newspaper coverage as a point of reference. Data come from content analyses of newspaper stories mentioning Alito in the headline or lead paragraphs from the initial nomination announcement through final confirmation, as well as archival impressions of blog posts featuring hyperlinks to the newspaper stories. Our analysis suggests that blogs may enhance as well as complicate processes of mediated deliberation. We conclude by discussing empirical and conceptual implications of these findings for future research on the role of blogs in the contemporary public sphere.

Coverage of emerging technologies: A comparison between print and online media

This study explores differences in volume of coverage and thematic content between US print news and online media coverage for an emerging technology – nanotechnology. We found that while American print news media and Google News coverage of this emerging technology has peaked and started to decline, Google Blog Search coverage of nanotechnology is still growing. Additionally, our data show discrepancies in thematic content of online and print news coverage. Specifically, online users are more likely to encounter environmentally themed content relating to nanotechnology than are users of American print newspapers. Differences in the amount of coverage of nanotechnology in print news and online media as well as thematic content suggest that public discourse on related issues will be shaped, in part, by media consumers’ preferred information platform.

Building Buzz: (Scientists) Communicating Science in New Media Environments

Public communication about science faces novel challenges, including the increasing complexity of research areas and the erosion of traditional journalistic infrastructures. Although scientists have traditionally been reluctant to engage in public communication at the expense of focusing on academic productivity, our survey of highly cited U.S. nano-scientists, paired with data on their social media use, shows that public communication, such as interactions with reporters and being mentioned on Twitter, can contribute to a scholar’s scientific impact. Most importantly, being mentioned on Twitter amplifies the effect of interactions with journalists and other non-scientists on the scholar’s scientific impact.

The Disconnection In Online Politics: the youth political web sphere and US election sites, 2002–2004

In recent years, candidates and other political actors have dramatically increased their presence and activities online. Although the notion of these activities reaching beyond a limited set of early-adopters is relatively new, younger citizens have long been at the forefront of new developments on the web and continue to make up a substantial proportion of those seeking political information online. Given longstanding concern over levels of civic and political engagement among young people, questions concerning what young people seeking information and opportunities for political involvement online might find there are particularly relevant. In particular, we explore political websites that are directly targeted at younger voters (e.g. Rock the Vote and similar sites), websites produced by candidates and political parties, and possible linkages between these two web spheres. Based on content and hyperlink analyses spanning the 2002 and 2004 US election cycles, we find a complex evolution of the online political information environment offered to youth. Although the youth engagement web sphere experienced dramatic growth during this time period, our data also identify a reluctance of many mainstream political actors to speak directly to young people through the web, and a surprising underdevelopment of linkages between youth politics websites and the wider web of political information online. We conclude by considering the implications of these patterns for future research on the role of new media in processes of political communication and engagement.