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Chapter Five:
Discussion
5.1 Implications of results Political activities on Facebook
The study has contributed to assess the role of Facebook in fostering offline political participation among young adults aged 18 to 35. While some of the results replicated existing findings, this thesis contributes to the study of the impact of Facebook on participation by differentiating among several dimensions of Facebook use. Overall, the survey findings indicated that political activities on Facebook play important roles in the life of Taiwanese youth. It seems that Facebook has become a main source of news to retrieve information related to political issues among the youth in the age group of 18 to 35 years. Also, this platform is now the new form of political expression and the new connection hub between political actors and followers. While TV news use is also associated with offline political participation among Taiwanese citizens aged 18 to 35, Facebook use for expression and connecting with public political actors for predicting offline political participation is more significant.
The present research empirically tested the influence of the use of political information, political expression, and the connection with political actors. The results showed that the use of Facebook for political information has no significant association with offline political participation. The null finding for the information use on Facebook explanation deserves further examination. Following news and political information on Facebook is not a significant predictor of political participation. The results in this thesis is in line with previous findings by Valenzuela (2013). He suggested that due to the redundancy of hard news content in social media,
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the content related to political issues and public affairs were still supplied by mainstream media organizations. Thus, by controlling for news use in traditional media platforms, the variance of political participation explained by Facebook for political information became insignificant. However, although Facebook use for information cannot be predicted for offline political participation. According to the survey, 66.1% of respondents regularly receive information about political issues and current events from Facebook friends' post of news, articles, or the videos. Also, 38.7% of respondents regularly search for information about political issues and current events from Facebook friends. Facebook is a platform that keeps Taiwanese youth informed about political affairs.
In addition, as the hypotheses proposed in this study, the political expression and connection with political actors on Facebook exert significant and positive impacts on individuals’ offline political actions. Thus, results indicated that achieving a better understanding of how citizens use Facebook for participating in political activities may help clarify the new paths that spur political action in the real world. In regards to the connection with public political actors on Facebook, the study showed that the influence of this variable on offline political participation is remarkable.
Similar to the findings from Tang & Lee (2013)'s study on Hong Kong college students, Facebook can influence people politically through facilitating people to build connection with public figures within the political arena. Connection with these public political actors seems to have tremendous influence of young people's political behaviors. In fact, in the survey, there are 53.1% of respondents who think over half of social movement activists they connected with on Facebook are political opinion leaders, followed by media commentators (52.6 %), government officials (44.7%) and legislators (40%). These percentages are substantial. One of the possible interpretations is that these social movement activists might play important roles in
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leading the public opinion among young people after the student-led 318 Sunflower movement. These findings are particularly important for the existing literature related to politics because the connection with political actors is a variable seldom examined in the existing literature.
Political efficacy
In regard to political efficacy, similar to other research’s findings (Gil de Zúñiga
et al., 2012; Lee, 2006), which showed that people who have a higher sense of internal efficacy are more likely to engage in offline political participation. Taiwanese youth have a high level of internal and collective efficacy, while having a low sense of external efficacy. This result further reinforced the findings of previous studies based on the data from Election Studies Center that college students tend to have lower sense of external efficacy but higher internal efficacy (Chen & Huang, 2007; Chen &
Chen, 2013). Young adults have personal political effectiveness but hold negative attitudes toward the responsiveness of the government and political system. They are more critical and retrospective toward the current government and political system.
Also, Lee (2006) suggested how the collective culture would play an important role in collective societies is similar to internal efficacy in individual societies. Both Taiwanese youth and Hong Kong citizens have high level of collective efficacy.
However, the results showed that there is no relationship between collective efficacy and political participation. The findings suggested a different story than Lee (2006), in which research found that Hong Kong citizens who have a higher level of collective efficacy are more likely involved in offline political participation. Although these aged 18 to 35 Taiwanese youth have a remarkable high level of collective efficacy, they didn’t put these beliefs into action in the offline world. The relevance of
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collective efficacy to other collectivist cultures needs to be further examined.
Media use
The relationship between media use and political participation is also worth discussing. The findings showed that people who watch TV news less are more likely to be involved in political action. The finding also supported the claim by Putman (1995) regarding time replacement, which meant TV deprived time that could be spent on civic activities. Putnam suggested that television viewing was negatively linked to social cohesion and it provides us with a pseudo-personal connection to others, in which viewers feel engaged with the community without the effect of actually being engaged. Television as a medium creates a false sense of companionship. Also, because television news favored ‘‘debate’’ formats over investigative reporting, it contains less contextual information. Broadcast media lacked space to provide significant context or mobilizing information; even cable news often favored ‘‘debate’’ formats over investigative reporting (Boyle &
Schmierbach, 2009). The relationship between time spent with Facebook is also worth discussing. In this thesis, time spent on Facebook is not related to offline political participation. This finding is consistent with past studies (Tang &Lee, 2013; Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2012).
Partisanship
In terms of offline political participation, from the total population, 66.1% of respondents possessed no political affiliation and 4.7% respondents supported the parties other than pan-blue and pan-green camps. Compared to the data from Election Study Center in 2015 which found that 43.4 % of the total Taiwanese population were independent voters, the finding showed that the number of independent voters among
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young adults tends to go far beyond that national sample. Over half of Taiwanese aged 18 to 35 don’t have any party attachment. It can be interpreted from Taiwan’s social context: For years politics in Taiwan have been long a fight between the KMT alliance of the pan-blue camp against the DPP and its respective pan-green alliance.
That changed in 2014 when the independent candidate Ko Wen-je took the position of Taipei mayor, attracting unprecedented attention with a real chance to truly introduce a third political force in Taiwan. This was the case of the New Power Party (NPP), which emerged from the Sunflower Student Movement. Social Democratic Party (SDP), which is mainly composed by a group of rookie politicians, came after the launch of the NPP. In the sample of this thesis, among the parties other than the Pan-Green and Pan-Blue alliance, SDP (n=6) and NPP (n=5) are also the top three parties followed by Green party (n=12).
Political Participation
So far, the results have showed that the majority of respondents were not actively engaging in offline political participation. Although the findings indicated that 31.7% of the respondents regularly discussed politics with their family members or friends, there was only a small portion of respondents reporting that they had engaged in political participation in the real word. These findings echoed previous research (Shih, 2014) that Taiwanese college students were not actively involved in political participation offline. It suggested that while quite an amount of young adults were involved in political activities on Facebook, the degree of political participation was quite low. The findings indicated that some young citizens were becoming
“slacktivists,” meaning that they do not translate their political activities on Facebook into other more valued forms political participation. The kind of low-risk, low cost
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activities via social media grant satisfaction to the person engaged in the activities.
Another explanation is that politically active users are only accessing Facebook to supplement their offline political participation (Vitak et al. 2011). Among several forms of political participation, the most common political activities are participating in demonstrations, protests, or marches. According to the data from the research center for humanities and social sciences of Academia Sinica in 2012, only 5.3% of the total population reported they have joined a demonstration during that year.
Compare to the total population, this sample indicated that almost half of young adults aged 18 to 35 had participated in a protest over the past year. It seems that young adults who are more anti-authoritarian usually join protests or demonstrations. The result could also be interpreted from Taiwan’s social context as mentioned below. In March, 2014, huge student-led rallies were organized around the Legislative Yuan for 23 days over the government’s handling of the cross-strait service trade agreement, attracting tens of thousands of supporters. Also, a petition launched by Appendectomy Project6 (割闌尾行動), in late 2014, recalled Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元), which collected over 30,000 signatures, as it is the first recall petition in history to make it to polling stations.
5.2 Limitations and suggestions for future research
Overall, these findings helped to shed some light on the effects of Facebook use in the demographic process. Nevertheless, there were a number of limitations to this study that also merit attention. First of all, the sample only targeted those young adults aged 18 to 35, which does not represent all samples. In fact, the majority of participants in this study were university students who probably had a higher
6 The Appendectomy Project’s name was chosen becausein Chinese, the term for blue-camp legislators, lan wei (藍委), is pronounced the same as the word for “appendix” (闌尾).
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education level and frequency of Facebook use than other participants. There is also the fact that most participants are highly educated people who might have a higher income level and higher frequency of general social media use than other participants.
The influence of students and highly educated participants perhaps impact the whole result of the study. Therefore, the result of this thesis may not be applicable to the entire population.
Secondly, this thesis was conceptualized in a manner that combined conventional and pretest participation. Although the individual items comprising the scale performed well in terms of reliability, future research should consider whether political activities on Facebook predict various modes of participation differentially.
All in all, Facebook is part of life for most Taiwanese youth today. This study attempted to register the effect of a medium that not only grows in popularity and penetration among Taiwanese youth, but also has a prominent position in explaining and influencing the democratic process. Future research can also elaborate on the findings reported in this thesis by replicating the current analysis in other countries and political contexts, testing additional mediating mechanisms, and employing more fine-grained measures of political behaviors.
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5.3 Contribution
Despite these limitations, this thesis made several contributions to political communication research in Taiwan. The study illustrated the independent impact of various aspects of Facebook use and found that some aspects of Facebook political activities could increase Facebook users’ offline political participation. For most politically active Facebook users, social networking sites are not a separate realm of political activity, as they are often frequently active in offline civic life. The
contributions of this emerging venue, Facebook, which facilitates political expression and connects with public political actors, are established. An implication of this is the possibility to utilize Facebook as a bridge between Taiwanese youth and public political actors through communicating with each other. Politicians and political parties may prompt themselves to draw young adults’ attention through the interaction on Facebook.
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