Does incidental exposure on Social Media equalize or reinforce participatory gaps?

Autor(en)

Jörg Matthes, Raffael Heiss

Abstrakt

Existing research indicates that incidental exposure to political information on social media may function as an equalizer, stimulating political engagement among the politically detached. In this article, we challenge this notion and propose that there are good reasons to assume that incidental exposure may reinforce existing gaps. We test the equalizing against the reinforcing hypothesis using data from a two-wave panel study (N = 559). We find a positive main effect of incidental exposure on low-effort digital participation. However, this effect was not conditional on political interest, as the equalizing assumption would have suggested. More interestingly, we found that the effect of incidental exposure on high-effort digital participation was conditional on political interest. However, against the assumption of equalization, individuals with low levels of political interest were negatively affected by incidental exposure, thus lending support for the reinforcement hypothesis. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

MCI Management Center Innsbruck

Journal

New Media & Society

Band

21

Seiten

2463-2482

Anzahl der Seiten

20

ISSN

1461-4448

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819850755

Publikationsdatum

11-2019

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

508007 Kommunikationswissenschaft, 508014 Publizistik

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Communication, Sociology and Political Science

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/07f309ca-afef-4bda-9acc-fbddb40ca1ff