Opportunities and Constraints for Civic Participation in the Context of Digital 'Public-Private' Political Spaces

This proposal has two objectives. On the one hand, I focus on the study of the opportunities and challenges brought about by the role of the Internet as a tool to facilitate civic participation. In this regard, I study new forms of participation associated with online social networks and Apps. Specifically, I analyze the factors explaining the use of the Internet. Some of the most important factors to explain the digital political participation are off-line participatory experience, the consumption of political information, digital skills of citizens, the level of study and, especially, their beliefs about the extent to which the Internet can be a tool to influence the power. In my presentation I will review the main results of our empirical studies on this topic and reflect on how far the Internet has an inclusive potential. However, on the other hand, in this presentation also will analyse another dimension of the digitization of political participation: the transformation of spaces for political participation. Increasingly, citizens use social networks like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter to participate politically or share political contents. However, it is important to note that these spaces are "public-private" spaces. Public because everyone can access to share content and ideas. However, they are also private because they are governed by the decisions of the companies on how the digital spaces should be designed and how manage the users data. What is the impact of this transformation on citizen participation? These questions are even more relevant when we observe the emergence of private tools and applications specifically designed for the digital political participation. In short, this presentation aims to point out two dimensions of the same phenomenon: the participatory potential of the Internet and the risks associated with a lack of public regulation of digital spaces for political participation.