Research on the question of whether use of digital media contributes to political participation may be reaching a cross-road. It is clear what when people act politically or civically, they often turn to digital media, and this connection appears to grow stronger over the years. At the same time, the causal relationship from use of digital media to political and civic practice is quite small at best, and appears to be contingent and difficult to interpret. Whether these modest relationships between digital media use and individual-level participation rates are growing stronger or weaker over time has not been well explored, but is clearly important to understanding digital media in politics. We consider theoretical reasons to expect that such relationships vary across behaviors and across time in the short run in ways that are idiosyncratic. We use ANES data from the US to look for trends across five elections from 1996 to 2008. We find no over-time trend, either upward or downward, in the relationship of digital media use to six political behaviors as well as an aggregate index. We find a great deal of idiosyncratic variation, and we find that the presence of relationships is weaker for younger people than the population at large. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings, including the possibility that use of digital media is more a contextual factor influencing the environment for politics within a country than it is a factor whose individual-level variation can be shown to be meaningfully related to other behaviors using variable-analytic methods.
