Digital activism is an emerging phenomenon that has attracted the attention of a great number of researchers. In most cases, analyses have focused on digital activism as an independent variable to attempt to understand other phenomena such as, for instance, changes in political participation. However, it has been less common for specialists to seek to understand the factors that explain digital activism itself, taking it as a dependent variable. This is the approach of this paper, where we attempt to analyse to what extent a politically active citizen can help us explain digital activism in Spain. Through a factorial analysis, we order into dimensions the different types of offline political practices and we use these dimensions as independent variables in order to make a regression where online political participation is the dependent variable. This approach allows us to analyse to what extent offline activism helps predict online activism and which of the two types of activism has more weight in our subject of study. The results of this analysis serve as a basis for discussing the politically innovative nature of digital activism. Our hypothesis is that, to the extent that new innovative practices have a clear and significant influence on the political use of the Internet in Spain, it can be said that the Internet is becoming a space for political innovation in this country.
