Gendered online civic intervention: Old wine in new bottles? Tracing the gender gap in political participation across traditional and emerging types of engagement

The increasing digitalization of society comes with a great number of advantages but it is also characterized by drawbacks: Online political participation is robustly gendered, with women being less willing and less likely to raise their political voices on the internet compared to men. This inequality exacerbates against the backdrop of online incivility and misinformation. The architecture of the online ecosphere allows for novel forms of citizen engagement, including the spread of uncivil speech, hate comments and misinformation in political debates. Yet, while some citizens engage in the dispersion of such content as a means to attack or influence politics, other citizens are also involved in defending democracy against it. The concept of online civic intervention (OCI) conceptualizes behavioural responses to disruptive behaviours as a new type of political participation that includes counter speech, reporting misbehaviours to platforms, verifying falsehoods and warning others about them. Yet, seeing as a disrupted political discourse is one of the defining political topics of our time and urges citizen engagement on behalf of democratic values, the question suggests itself: How does gender come into play here? In response to this, this study expands existing definitions and typologies of political participation. By means of confirmatory factor analysis on the basis of German survey data from 2022 (N = 2,022), it demonstrates how OCI as an emerging type of political participation is related to traditional ones. Moreover, employing MIMIC (multiple indicators, multiple causes) modelling, the study demonstrates how the closing of some gender gaps in political participation relates to the opening of new inequalities: While most gender gaps in political participation shrink in size, OCI presents itself as strongly gendered to women’s detriment. As a result, women are not only targeted by disruptive online behaviours but they are also less likely to counter them. As this renders the internet a civic square that is deeply unequal, the study discusses theoretical and methodological toeholds to analyse and understand the seemingly vicious circle that unfolds between gender, digitalization and political participation.