Cross-Cutting Exposure and Political Mobilisation in the Internet Era

How do Internet-based media impact citizens’ mobilization? Political communication scholars who focus on these technologies are heavily concerned about their effect on online and offline political participation. Most studies have investigated the impact of Internet-based media access on political involvement with dichotomic measures of use (“yes/no”), thus leaving aside the differentiated effects of specific uses of these media. The goal of this paper is to get a better understanding of some Internet-based media impact on citizens’ online and offline participation. Literature on political participation has shown that citizens who deal with political cross-pressures through real-world social networks are more likely to have ambivalent opinions and, as a consequence, less likely to participate, than others who live in social environment where political beliefs are more homogeneous (Mutz 2002). Furthermore, cross-cutting exposure tends to be lower where media-party parallelism is strong, as selective exposure is easier in such media environments (Goldman and Mutz 2011). We assume that media-party parallelism can not be stronger than in cyberspace. On the basis of this theoretical framework, we hypothesize that selective exposure to some candidates’ or parties’ websites and respective social networking sites is more likely to increase online and offline mobilization than cross-cutting exposure. To test this hypothesis, we rely on data collected with two online surveys conducted among citizens who made political uses of Internet during the 2012 French presidential and Quebec election campaigns. These datasets allow us to create measures of selective/cross-cutting exposure to candidates’ and parties’ websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts during these campaigns. We use these measures to assess the impact of Internet-based media on a wide range of online and offline forms of political participation, with standard controls for sociodemographics and other well-known predictors of mobilization.