How citizenship norms and digital media use affect political participation: 
A two-wave panel analysis

Prof. Jennifer Oser

At a moment of growing concern about political inequality and democratic backsliding in contemporary democracies, a centrally important question is whether we can identify any socio-political factors that contribute to equalizing patterns of political participation, which often favor higher-status groups. Research on advanced industrial democracies – such as Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom – have found that socio-political factors of citizenship norms and digital media use can indeed act as “great equalizers” in this regard. 

This intriguing finding raises an important question: Do these socio-political factors of citizenship norms and digital media use have an equalizing effect on political participation patterns also in a deeply divided democracy like Israel? 

The importance of investigating differential effects of participation for distinct subgroups in any polity was described in a compelling way by one of the founding fathers of research on political participation, Sidney Verba (2015), in a fiftieth-anniversary discussion of his classic book on civic culture, co-authored with Gabriel Almond. Reflecting on the legacy of this research on political culture and political participation, Verba discussed how important and how rare it is for researchers to pay attention to distinct subgroups of national polities, noting: “One danger of comparative survey studies of things like political culture is that we focus heavily on comparisons across nations…And we tend to typify groups within nations…The typifications are illuminating, but there is danger of oversimplification” (Verba 2015, p. 239).

The study summarized here, recently published in Media and Communication, heeds Verba’s call to carefully investigate important subgroups within countries by creating an original, high-quality repeated-wave survey in Israel. The data generated by this survey allows for analysis of how patterns of citizenship norms and digital media use at one time point affect political participation patterns at a later time point for both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. This implementation of a repeated-wave survey fills an important gap in research on these topics, which is based mainly on cross-sectional surveys that cannot assess time-ordered causal relations. 

Specifically, the study analyzes a survey conducted in 2018 (Wave 1) and 2019 (Wave 2) among Israeli citizens, with a representative sampling frame of the generally higher-status Jewish majority, and the lower-status Arab minority. In addition to the common focus in this area of research on non-electoral participation, such as protest, the survey also investigates the key electoral-oriented political act of voting. 

The findings show that, controlling for other factors, citizenship norms and digital media use at Wave 1 have a time-ordered, positive effect on nonelectoral participation (such as protest) in Wave 2 for both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. This means that for Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, these findings do not support the optimistic conclusion reached in analysis of advanced industrial democracies that factors like digital media use can give an even stronger boost to lower-status groups (e.g., the Arab minority) compared to higher status groups (e.g., the Jewish majority). Yet, these findings on nonelectoral participation do indicate a normatively encouraging finding that in the context of a deeply divided society, these socio-political factors of citizenship norms and digital media use do not contribute to inequalities between the Jewish majority and Arab minority in Israel. 

For electoral participation, however, the findings show no significant effect of good citizenship norms or digital media use on people’s subsequent voting behavior. Rather, the findings show that for voting, the only relevant socio-political factor is citizens’ ethnic identity as Jews or Arabs. 

At a time when many democracies are facing severe challenges due to democratic erosion and social disintegration, this study contributes a normatively encouraging finding that two key factors identified in the literature on citizenship norms and digital media use do not contribute to participatory inequalities in nonelectoral participation between the Jewish majority and Arab minority in Israel. The findings also show, however, that it is essential to look beyond factors often discussed in the international academic literature to equalize the electoral-oriented playing field between higher-status and lower-status groups—including even between ethnic majority and minority groups in deeply divided societies such as Israel.

Prof. Jennifer Oser is an Associate Professor in the department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. She completed her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and has conducted research as a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the relationships between public opinion, political participation, and policy outcomes.

This research summary is based on the following article, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, grant 1662/16 to Jennifer Oser: 

Oser, Jennifer. (In press). How citizenship norms and digital media use affect political participation: A two-wave panel analysis. Media and Communication. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i3.5482 

The replication files for the article, which include data from an original survey available for public use, are posted on the Open Science Framework: 
Oser, Jennifer. (2022). Replication files for ‘How citizenship norms and digital media use affect political participation: A two-wave panel analysis’. Open Science Framework (OSF). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VAP95