Political Participation

This then warrants a look at the mobile phone, which has already been identified above as having the ability to combine online and offline friend networks. An obvious argument can be extended here, in that the source of the information would be the mobile phone owner, as opposed to the profile owner on Facebook (Lenhart, 2010). Credibility in such a source would be necessarily higher as there is an increased likelihood that the mobile phone owner is known to the audience in most cases, except for example through text message advertising. Again, this platform can also extend into both mediums identified above, which increases the likelihood that this platform is perceived as a credible source.

R: Political Participation

The last section of the O-S-O-R model deals with the response of the audience, and thus the effects of the mediums and the potential mediators. Political participation is defined as a more specific form of civic capital (Putnam, 1995), and are those actions deemed to be democratically necessary to hold the government accountable for their actions. Fukuyama (1995) identifies participation as the building blocks of a democracy an essential to hold the government accountable.

Traditionally offline participation is the one with the most impact on a democracy, however politics is increasingly online, like with the Howard Dean campaign (Wolf, 2004), the 2008 Obama election campaign (Metzgar & Maruggi, 2009; Wattal et al., 2010) and again the 2010 US elections (Smith, 2011a). The online participation dimension becomes as essential to persuade people to choose a political candidate, inspire, and interest people to debate issues of public concern.

According to Verba and Nie (1987) political participation refers to activities that directly influence the process of politics. Hardy and Scheufele (2005) offers such a list:

written a letter to a newspaper editor; calling into a public affairs radio talk show; circulating a petition for a candidate or an issue; voting for an elected official; working for a political

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campaign; contacting a public official; calling other people to raise funds for a political organisation; and contributing money to a political organisation or candidate. From this list, Fukuyama (1995) argues that voting is potentially the strongest indicator in a democracy, having the potential to enforce accountability of those in power.

Gibson, Lusoli, and Ward (2005) argue that online political participation is a

continuation of the above definition on the online arena. While their definition includes also actions of political information seeking and discussion, this research will focus on the online continuation of the above definition (Hardy & Scheufele, 2005; Verba & Nie, 1987). Their definition includes: signing up for an e-news bulletin; sending an e-postcard from a political organisations' website; downloading software from a political organisation's website; signing an online petition; sending an email to a politician, a political organisation, or government;

donating funds online to a political cause; volunteering online to help with a political cause;

joining a political organisation online; and participating in an online question and answer session with a political official.

Then based on the above elaborations, this paper takes the approach of posing a single genera research question to explore the relationship in the proposed model. Thus, research question one will attempt to explore the direct and indirect relationship of the different variables in this model.

Research Question 1: What are the indirect associations of ideology and online

political information use, through the paths of wider view exposure and credibility, and their direct effects on online political participation?

Following this, research question two is interested in determining the differences between online and offline political participation, as defined above.

Research question 2: What differences are distinguishable between online and offline political participation?

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Lastly, this paper uses three different mediums able to spread information online.

This paper wishes to determine the differences between these in order to clarify which has the strongest direct and indirect association within the context of the O-S-O-R model.

Research question 3: What differences are visible between online political

information use, Facebook political information use, and mobile phone political information use for direct and indirect association on political participation?

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This research will run a total of six models to contend with the mediums and two variants of political participation, using path analyses. Associations are tested for using path analyses.

Sampling and Data Collection

This research makes use of a dataset collected by Pew Internet & American life project (November 2010 Post-Election Tracking Survey, 2010), conducted by the Princeton Survey Associates International, and collected between November 3, 2010 and November 24, 2010 via a telephone and mobile phones nationwide survey. The survey was based on a sample of 2, 257 of ages 18 and older, which includes 755 mobile phones interviews, with the total margin of error within plus or minus 2.4% percentage points.

The sample was drawn via a combination of telephone and cellular phone random digital dialling (RDD) to represent the American population (Smith, 2011b). Samples were obtained from Survey Sampling International, LLC (SSI) according to PSRAI specifications and phone numbers were selected calculating for the probabilities of their share of active blocks. The cellular sample was drawn through a systematic sampling of dedicated and shared wireless blocks (Smith, 2011b). All samples were made available daily and kept active for 5 days. Each number was called at least 7 times during different times of the day and week. Half the time interviewers asked to speak to the youngest adult male, if not available then to the youngest adult female. For the other half of the time the opposite strategy was followed. In the case of the cellular phone sample, the person who answered was the respondent. Landline numbers had a 13.7% response rate and cellular phone numbers has a 15% response rate (Smith, 2011b).

Due to the intent of this research to specifically focus on online mediums, the above sample is filtered using the question from the dataset that asks “Do you use the internet, at