Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study

9. Online Political Information in Seven Countries

D emocracy requires that citizens possess adequate knowledge of public affairs to cast an informed vote and keep government accountable (Norris 2000). However, most voters do not acquire and constantly update as much political information as would be ideally desirable (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Hibbing and Thesis-Morse 2002); instead, they behave as “cognitive misers” (Fiske and Taylor 1984), retrieving, processing, and storing only limited amounts of information. This strategy can be seen as rational because one’s vote has almost no probability to affect the final outcome of an election and, thus, being fully informed has no practical consequences (Downs 1957). As a result, rather than constantly scrutinizing the whole political landscape, voters rely on “information shortcuts” that can help them make political decisions with minimal cognitive efforts (Popkin 1994; Lupia and McCubbins 1998), and they increase their attention only when they become aware of critical events or situations (Schudson 1998). Because it is the media that alert citizens of troubling issues, the structure and functioning of media systems can go a long way toward explaining their political knowledge (Curran et al. 2009; Shehata and Strömbäck 2011). Individual-level CHAPTER NINE Online Political Information in Seven Countries 132 Citizens and Digital Politics factors such as education and political interest, however, are the strongest predictors of citizens’ political information (Zaller 1992). As highlighted in chapter 4, these factors may be particularly relevant on the internet, because its “pull” affordances allow—and, to some extent, compel—users to constantly choose which contents to access and which ones to avoid. If most citizens rationally ignore public affairs offline, they may do so even more online (Prior 2007; Hindman 2008). Not only are these issues relevant for the overall quality of democracy, understood as government by public opinion, but they also involve political representation and equality among citizens. To the extent that some voters are better informed than others, they will be able to more clearly identify political decisions and actors that can affect their interests and, thus, to voice their preferences in these domains and toward these targets more strongly than those who are less knowledgeable (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Because using digital media for political information can increase political knowledge (Dimitrova et al. 2011), assessing the extent to which and the reasons why citizens take advantage of the internet to acquire political news can shed light on important issues for representation, equality, and democracy. This chapter sets the comparative framework on which the remaining chapters in part III will build. Toward this end, I compare the percentages of citizens who used the internet to get political information during the last national general election campaign in the seven countries included in this research between 2006 and 2010. In chronological order, the data refer to the French presidential elections in 2007, Italian and Spanish parliamentary elections and US presidential elections in 2008, German parliamentary elections in 2009, and UK and Australian parliamentary elections in 2010. National election surveys in all these countries included at least one question that measured use of the internet for campaign-related news.1 Data on parliamentary elections in Italy (2006) and Australia (2007) are also used for longitudinal comparisons in these two countries, the only ones where general elections were held twice in the time frame of this research. As can be seen in figure 9.1, percentages of citizens who paid attention to the campaign online vary widely across the seven political systems included in this study. For instance, in 2008 three times more Americans got electionrelated information on the internet than Italians did. As a percentage of both the population and internet users, American citizens show a much greater inclination than voters in any other country to engage with the campaign Online Political Information in Seven Countries 133 online. Almost half of citizens and almost two-thirds of internet users in the United States got some information on the web about the 2008 elections, a significantly larger proportion that in the countries that took second and third place—Australia and the United Kingdom (with about one-third of the population and a little less than half of internet users relying on the web for campaign news). The American prominence is even more remarkable in light of the fact that the US measurements were taken two years earlier than those in Australia and the United Kingdom. Considering how consequential...