The Internet provides new opportunities for cost effective participation. Online, political information is only a mouse click away, raising few opportunity or transaction costs for those participating. Periodically, advocates of electronic democracy assume behavioral consequences such as increasing rates of political participation resulting from these new technological opportunities. With equal regularity, critics emphasize well-established and researched factors explaining political participation to contradict these assumptions. While the former claim that the Internet might increase the quantity of political participation in established democracies, the latter perceive the Internet as a weapon of the strong, further contributing to inequalities among social groups when it comes to political participation. This paper tests both theories on the basis of the German National Voter Study 2009 which includes numerous indicators measuring the quantity and forms of electoral political participation online and which also allows to gauge the relationship between electoral participation on the Internet and other forms of participation. The data set includes about 3,000 respondents and allows for an empirical exploration of highly relevant and pressing issues on the basis of new, high-quality data.
