Development and Validation of the Digital Political Participation Inventory: Surveys and Big Data

The emerging role of political uses of the Internet was made evident in various processes of collective action such as Occupy Wall Street, 15-M and the ‘Arab Spring’. In addition, the Internet plays an increasingly relevant role in electoral processes across the world. This has led to a growing academic interest in the study of this phenomenon in a more structured way (Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; Saglie & Vabo, 2009). In order to achieve this goal, we deem it necessary to build standardised measurement tools, metrically structured and apt for use with the general population. Ideally, these tools should be based on the classical concepts of the social sciences in order to take advantage of the knowledge accumulated by these disciplines during decades of study of political participation. We also deem that we should aspire to developing measurement tools that are sufficiently specialised so as to cover the rage of specificities of this type of phenomena. In this proposal, we focus exclusively on citizens’ participative use of the Internet: digital political participation (DPP). Thus, we differentiate our analytic approach from other approaches that focus on issues such as the use of the Internet made by political parties during election campaigns, e-government or the incorporation of the use of the Internet in the action of social movements. We aim to develop and test a DPP measurement tool that may be used in general population surveys. This also allows us to advance in the study of the relationship between politics and the Internet, making it possible to relate digital political participation with relevant sociological aspects, such as determining factors for a citizen to make political use of the Internet (Gibson, Lusoli & Ward, 2005; Best & Krueger, 2005), the democratic digital divide (Hargittai & Walejko, 2008; Min, 2010), the balanced development of the Information Society and the effect of the Internet on the political agenda (Parmelee, 2014). The DPP measurement tool that we have developed and tested has served as the basis for a study with Big Data about various political campaigns in Spain. Thus, we show that our tool is useful for application on surveys and also for studies with Big Data.