Catie Snow Bailard
School of Media and Public Affairs
George Washington University
The effect of Internet use on citizens’ evaluations and satisfaction regarding their governments’ performance is an important yet still understudied component of the Internet’s potential to motivate political activity and organization. The Internet’s capacity to uniquely affect evaluations is a result of the degree to which the Internet has reshaped contemporary information landscapes – altering the quantity and range of available information as well as the criteria through which individuals evaluate their governments. This is a significant component of the potential for Internet use to prompt political activity and organization; since, it is these evaluations that can and will, at times, encourage men and women to act and organize politically.
By triangulating across methodological strengths and weaknesses, combining statistical analyses of large-N data sets with field experiments offers a robust empirical foundation for understanding the nature of the Internet’s effects on evaluations and democratic attitudes. While laboratory experiments contributed to many of the greatest advances in political communication research since the field’s renaissance began in the 1970s – particularly in tests of agenda-setting, framing, priming, and campaign negativity – field experiments remain a very under-utilized method in this discipline. This is likely for very pragmatic reasons: field experiments are both difficult and costly to execute well. However, by enabling a direct causal test of the Internet’s effects, field experiments address a troubling gap in the present literature, in which actual causal tests remain rare. Additionally, by conducting the experiment in the field – on actual citizens recruited from the community at large, who are using the Internet as they would organically – it is possible to also augment the external validity of this test (at least relative to laboratory experiments).
Within this vein, in an analysis of the effect of Internet use on democratic satisfaction and related political evaluations, I combined large-N quantitative analyses of survey data at both the individual- and country-levels (spanning 45 and 73 countries, respectively) with randomized field experiments in Tanzania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The findings uncovered in each of the analyses of survey data, as well as in the experiments, substantiate the Internet’s clear, consistent, and considerable influence on democratic satisfaction. Whereas the Internet is correlated with enhanced satisfaction in advanced democracies, Internet use depresses satisfaction and evaluations in nations with weak democratic practices (Bailard, 2012a; Bailard, 2012b; Bailard, in press).
The results of the field experiments also substantiate the Internet’s capacity to influence a broader range of meaningful political evaluations, including diminished trust in government and more skeptical evaluations of the integrity of a contested election. However, these results also reveal that one democratic gain, such as more critical evaluations of poor-performing governments, does not automatically set off a chain of entirely pro-democratic gains in citizens’ attitudes and behaviors. In the case of this analysis, for example, the experiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina revealed that individuals who became more skeptical of and dissatisfied with the quality of democratic practices in their country, also became more likely to consider alternative forms of government as preferable for their country. In Tanzania, voters who became more critical of the integrity of their contested presidential election were also less likely to vote. This suggests that the influence of Internet use on evaluations and, subsequently, behavior is a complex, contextually-dependent process that in some instances will prove a double-edged sword for democracy and democratization.
The diffusion of information and communication technologies rapidly throughout the globe – often into regions that were previously nearly devoid of such capabilities – means that opportunities abound to explore how these technologies interact with and influence political attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. Moreover, multiple-method analyses that favor a cross-national approach to testing for these effects will enable researchers to construct a more robust theoretical understanding of the nature of Internet’s effect on political evaluations. This includes seeking out and testing the contextual factors that likely condition the Internet’s effect across a broad range of political evaluations, as well as the factors that predict when the Internet’s influence on political evaluations will tend to be largely pro-democratic in nature and those instances in which the effect of Internet use will prove more of a mixed bag. Finally, identifying and testing the contextual factors that condition the effect of Internet use on satisfaction and political evaluations will also lay the groundwork for generating more reliable predictions of when and where these evaluations will make political activity and organization both more and less likely to occur.
Works Cited
Bailard, C. S. (2012a). A Field Experiment on the Internet’s Effect in an African Election: Savvier Citizens, Disaffected Voters, or Both?. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 330-344.
Bailard, C. S. (2012b). Testing the Internet’s Effect on Democratic Satisfaction: A Multi-Methodological, Cross-National Approach. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(2), 185-204.
Bailard, C.S. (in press). As Seen Online (Satisfaction not Guaranteed): How Internet Use Changes Citizens’ Evaluations of their Government. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.