WhatsApp...ening to political discussion in Europe? Instant messaging services and political engagement in Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany

The use of instant messaging services (IMs) such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger etc. has grown impressively during the last few years, challenging—and in some countries surpassing—social networking websites as preferred digital means for social connection. IMs are thus emerging as crucial digital intermediaries that might have a relevant impact on how citizens (as well as what types of citizens) are informed about and engage with politics online. So far, research on mobile technology and political participation has focused mainly on the general use of such technology and its (positive, according to most studies) association with participation. To the contrary, scholarship addressing the diffusion of specific political uses of mobile-only services and on variables associated to these peculiar behaviors is very limited. Moreover, research has yet to address the relationship between expressive political uses of mobile technologies and engagement in traditional political participation, especially within research designs combining such political expression occurring via IMs with equivalent activities in other communicative milieus. Finally, the comparative perspective is almost missing from the existing literature. The paper is a first attempt to address such limitations by presenting unique data on the political use of IMs in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom from three online surveys on samples representative of internet users (N=1,750 in each country). As regards the diffusion of these specific services in the three countries, according to commercial data from January 2016, in Germany WhatsApp has already overtaken Facebook in term of monthly users and in Italy it is close to the same landmark, while in the UK Facebook is still firmly leading. Our research starts from analyses of the factors that explain political use of IMs in the three countries, where we look at the role played by socio-demographic characteristics, political attitudes, media diets, and online and offline political behaviors as predictors of using IMs for political discussion. We then investigate the correlation between political discussion on IMs and traditional modes of political participation and assess whether this relationship is mediated by political discussion on social networking websites and offline. We find evidence that political conversation on IMs correlates with higher levels of political participation and that this specific effect is stronger for those who discuss politics almost exclusively via messages on their mobile phones than for those who combine it with political discussion on social media or offline. IMs thus can substitute other digital realms and even face-to-face setting as environments where informal, everyday political conversation, far from distracting citizens from action, can motivate them towards more demanding means of participation. By creating a new arena where political expression is more strongly correlated with action for those who are not used to discuss politics elsewhere, IMs could thus contribute to engage a more diverse public in political debates and participation.