Unconventional Online Participation and Voting: Results from an Online Panel Survey

The proposed paper addresses the question which new forms of online-engagement, especially social web-engagement, are important for electoral participation, and thus electoral campaigns. The main hypothesis hereby is that new practices, developed in electronic social spaces in combination with the rising importance of unconventional forms of participation such as political consumerism and issue-related signature campaigning is fostering electoral participation. While prior research has often lamented the crowding out from electoral participation due to the rising importance of unconventional participation such as street protests, newer insights suggest that especially electronic participation and political consumerism should be understood as positive correlates of electoral participation. This means that seemingly non-political activities such as sharing, liking, commenting, socializing with friends or talking about purchases within social media do not foster political alienation but rather lead to the development of new forms of more lifestyle-oriented, issue-specific and cooperative forms of everyday life-politics which at the same time are of rising importance for electoral participation. In this regard, the paper presents first results from an online-panel-survey conducted in 2014. Overall 1.300 respondents were selected by means of randomized quota-sample from a German online-panel. While the data is not fully representative for the German population, the use of an online survey allowed for development of new and more differentiated items. This way, the paper more in detail investigates whether newer political practices reinforce or innovate the diverse realm of political participation forms. E.g. the data entails questions about the participation in online-signature-campaigns, interactive or just informative use of the net, online practice related to issues of sustainibility, or proactive online publishing of text or pictures by using different online-applications (e-mail, facebook, twitter etc.).