This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats.

This book explores alternative approaches for engaging and understanding young people’s political activity and looks at the adoption of information and ICTs as a means to facilitate the active engagement of young people in democratic societies.

The Internet and "social media" may initially have been understood as just one more instrument politicians could employ to manage without political parties. However, these media cannot be reduced to being a tool available solely to politicians. The electronic media make reinforcement of the "glocalization" of the public and political sphere, a process already set in motion with the advent of television, and they can develop the trend even further. Political parties are therefore once again becoming indispensable; they are in an unparalleled position to recreate social and political bonds, for only they stand both at the center and on the periphery of the new sphere encompassing public and political life. TABLE OF CONTENTS New Technologies: Helping Political Parties and the Democratic Processes or Threatening Them? (Guy Lachapelle and Philippe J. Maarek) Part I: The Integration of Technological Innovations in the Practices of Parties and Citizens Innovations in Information Technology in American Party Politics Since 1960 (Kenneth Janda) Internet, Social Media Use and Political Participation in the 2013 Parliamentary Election in Germany (Reimar Zeh and Christina Holtz-Bacha) Part II: The Consequences of New Technologies on Activism The Decline of Activism in Political Parties: Adaptation Strategies and New Technologies (Eric Montigny) Party Activists and Partisan Communication in Quebec (Isabelle Gusse) Part III: The New Role Played by Social Networks Changing Communications? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in the 2011 New Zealand General Election (Ashley Murchison) Social Media and American Presidential Campaigns: The Dark Side of the Electoral Process (Karine Premont and Charles-Antoine Millette) Part IV: The Resilience of the Printed Press in the United Kingdom The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the British Press: Integration, Immigration and Integrity (David Deacon and Dominic Wring) Part V: New Technologies and Leadership Evolution Political parties and the Internet: changes in society, changing politics – the case of the Parti Quebecois (Guy Lachapelle) Political communication, electronic media and social networks in France (Philippe J. Maarek) Index of Proper Nouns

The arrival of the participatory web 2.0 has been hailed by many as a media revolution, bringing with it new tools and possibilities for direct political action. Through specialised online platforms, mainstream social media or blogs, citizens in many countries are increasingly seeking to have their voices heard online, whether it is to lobby, to support or to complain about their elected representatives. Politicians, too, are adopting "new media" in specific ways, though they are often criticised for failing to seize the full potential of online tools to enter into dialogue with their electorates. Bringing together perspectives from around the world, this volume examines emerging forms of citizen participation in the face of the evolving logics of political communication, and provides a unique and original focus on the gap which exists between political uses of digital media by the politicians and by the people they represent.

This book explores the changes in political communication in light of the development of a public opinion mediated by web 2.0 technologies. One of the most important changes in political communication is related to the process of disintermediation, i.e. the process by which digital technologies allow citizens to compete in the public space with those agents who, traditionally, co-opted public opinion. However, while disintermediation has undeniably generated a number of advances, having linked citizens to the public debate, the authors highlight some aspects where disintermediation is moving away from a rational and inclusive public space. They argue that these aspects, related to the immediacy, polarization and incivility of the communication, obscure the possibilities for democratization of digital political communication.

In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere. The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation.

This book discusses the implications of recent innovations in information and communication technology for civic and political engagement. The international mix of contributions offers insights across a broad spectrum of studies into the form of engagement: explaining the reasons, incentives and motivations for engaging, and the different forms and levels of engagement; contrasting traditional and non-traditional forms of engagement and how they interlink; and asking why people utilize or avoid certain forms of engagement. It is a must-read for any scholar interested in the impact of social media on citizens’ propensity to get involved in political actions. It depicts the role that parties, organizations and peers play in mobilizing or demobilizing others and how online behaviour can act as a springboard into what might be called real-world politics. The book gathers together prominent scholars, who offer their understanding of social and political phenomena and give theoretical and empirical insights into the highly complex questions around political participation in the digital age. ​ This book was originally published as a special issue of Political Communication.