Killing the Bill Online? Pathways to Young People's Protest Engagement via Social Media

Introduction

We know that young people use social media for political purposes. Indeed, 42 percent of all adults who use these sites for political purposes are under the age of 30. ¹ As young individuals' political engagement on social media evolves, it is important to examine its relationship with young people's political participation offline, including political protests. To do so, the current study uses the recent protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in response to the legislation passed by Governor Scott Walker as a test case. In early 2011, newly elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker supervised a bill (commonly known as the Budget Repair Bill) that would diminish the strength of some state employee unions, ending their collective bargaining abilities to close a $3.6 billion shortfall in the state's budget.^2,3 Large protests, both in favor of and against the bill, broke out in Madison, Wisconsin, the state capitol and home of the largest state university. Because the bill would affect university employees, including teaching assistants, a large proportion of the protestors were graduate and undergraduate student sympathizers.

Individuals can engage in a variety of information-seeking and expressive behavior on social media; therefore, the current study moves research forward by distinguishing conceptually between informational and expressive protest engagement. In addition, previous literature acknowledges multiple dimensions of protest participation; thus, we argue that informational and expressive uses of social media may play unique roles for offline protest participation.

Social Media, Information, and Expression

A uses and gratifications framework has been employed to examine the Internet,^4–7 and scholars have found that individuals use digital media in different ways, some of which may be unique compared to traditional media. On one hand, motivations for watching television include seeking information, passing time, and entertainment, ⁸ and people read magazines as a diversion from daily life and to get news. ⁹ However, interactivity and interpersonal communication may be paramount in the Internet age. ¹⁰ Individuals' interactions with blogs, wikis, and video-sharing Websites entail consuming, participating, and producing, whereas traditional media tend to involve consumption only. ¹¹ Thus, although individuals use social media and traditional media for some similar reasons, they are also motivated to use social media because of its participatory nature and the ability to produce user-generated content.^12,13

Social media afford individuals the ability to exchange information in unprecedented ways. This may be important especially for young people in college, as they can use websites like Facebook to learn about people they meet^14,15 and become informed about campus events, products, and services. ¹⁶ Therefore, unlike information seeking via traditional media, individuals can use social media to exchange information among those in their social networks that is both applicable and timely. Because social media allow individuals to largely self-select the information, opinions, and updates they wish to share with others, people can self-present and self-express themselves in new ways. Self-presentation may be a process of editing and packaging the self to create an impression on others, ¹⁷ and individuals may take advantage of self-presentation online to come across as authentic and enhance their persona. ¹⁸ Because social media users can represent themselves in different ways, such as controlling the information they share with others and including certain personality attributes, ¹⁹ scholars have discovered that self-expression is a main motivation for using these media.^20–22

Overall, informational and expressive uses are central to social media users' experiences. It makes sense that these interactions may include political information seeking and expression. Individuals, especially young ones, may seek or come across content involving political issues and events, convey their political views, and distribute political information. Understanding the relationship between these social media behaviors and participating politically underscores how it may play out in specific contexts, including the political protests in Madison, Wisconsin.

Social Media and Political Participation

Although people have been going online to engage with politics for some time, the engagement was primarily with top-down institutions. ²³ Social media allow for bottom-up or grassroots the level of political participation not beholden to institutional control. Consequently, social media now represent a shift from organizational-based communication to individual and interpersonal communication. ²⁴ However, although some social media may play a role in informational and organizational aspects of protest participation, their impact is not universal, ²⁵ as for example, visiting Facebook is related to civic engagement, but visiting MySpace is not. ²⁶ Nevertheless, some social media such as Blogs and Facebook may reduce transaction costs and social distance and create resiliency toward the “the powers that be.” ²⁷

Social media's role may depend on specific uses, including informational and expressive. Expressive behavior, such as writing blog posts, posting political videos, and sharing political opinions, influences attention to elections. ²⁸ For Facebook, expressive uses such as posting politically oriented status updates relate to traditional political engagement, including volunteering for an organization and signing paper petitions. ²⁹ In addition, active participation with political Facebook groups results in engaging with the group's purpose offline. ³⁰ Information-seeking behavior, such as attention to political blog posts, also coincides with offline participation, ³¹ and friending candidates on Facebook as a surveillance mechanism relates to volunteering and signing paper petitions. ²⁹

In general, informational and expressive uses may spur mobilizing actions, both offline and online, which subsequently lead to offline participation. ³² However, it is useful to distinguish informational and expressive social media uses conceptually to understand their roles in offline political participation robustly. Such behavior may be more prevalent on some social media and may affect offline political engagement differently. Therefore, because social media afford individuals a variety of ways to engage politically, parsing the relations between different uses and protest behavior uncovers a more complete picture.

Research Questions

Social media afford users unique opportunities to exchange information and unprecedented ways to express themselves to others. In addition, we know that political engagement with social media leads to participation politically offline, but scholars have yet to uncover whether the diverse uses among varying social media may influence participation differently. Our study combines informational and expressive protest engagement via four social media to examine their impact on offline protest participation. Because this study is exploratory in nature, we pose two research questions:

RQ1: What is the relationship between informational social media use and offline protest participation?

Methods

Results

We employ two Poisson regression analyses due to the count-dependent variable with one block of independent variables, including demographics, information and news seeking, political orientations, and informational and expressive social media use related to the Budget Repair Bill. Both models fit the data well, indicated by nonsignificant goodness-of-fit Chi squared tests.

For group participation, ideology (β=−0.199; p<0.001) and expressive use (β=0.240; p<0.001) are related. The results suggest that self-described liberal students who used social media to share opinions and updates about the protests were those who participated offline with them in group settings. Interestingly, however, seeking updates or other information about the protests via social media did not relate to offline group participation. In addition, attention to traditional news outlets (i.e., print, television, and general internet sources) as well as being interest in politics and feeling politically efficacious were not related.

Considering individual participation, ideology (β=−0.397; p<0.001) and expressive use (β=0.495; p<0.001) are related. As with group participation, students who consider themselves liberal who used social media to express themselves as engaged with the protests were those who also performed individualized activities. Again, attention to traditional news sources, political predispositions, and informational social media uses did not matter. Notably, interest in politics approaches significance in this model (β=0.271; p<0.062). Table 3 presents the regression analyses.

Discussion

The advent of social media allows new avenues for political engagement, especially for young people. This current study compliments the research exploring the relationship between political social media use and offline forms of political participation,^28–31 including protest participation.^25,27 In addition, this study expands this research by examining the relationship between informational and expressive social media behavior and different forms of protest participation, using the 2011 Budget Repair Bill protests in Madison, Wisconsin, as a case study. The results suggest that informational and expressive social media behavior may both be important, but expressive use may trump informational use when considering their impact together.

Two political orientations stand out as having an impact on protest participation. First, unsurprisingly, self-described liberals were those who engaged politically with the protests regardless if it was with a group or individual. The bill sponsored by the Republican governor, who had narrowly defeated his Democrat opponent,^a was controversial even for some of his supporters. Therefore, self-described liberal young people may have chosen to engage with the protests, because they truly disagreed with the governor's legislation, or because they were the ones who felt more comfortable doing so in Madison, a politically progressive, liberal city. Second, being interested in politics approaches statistical significance for individual participation, but not for group participation. Perhaps this type of offline engagement required a certain kind of personal initiative not needed for group engagement. Therefore, engaging with the protests in individualized ways was reserved for only those who keep themselves abreast of political matters in general. It makes sense that participating with the protests individually was a means to facilitate politically interested college students' general political engagement.

Social media offer a participatory and user-generated content environment, which likely drives users' motivations to engage with them.^12,13 Consequently, there is little doubt that individuals use social media primarily for informational and expressive purposes.^14,16,20,21 Some political social media use facilitates information exchange and mobilization, which can spur political engagement.^23,24,32,36 Overall, the current study support previous research, suggesting expressive uses facilitate political participation. However, we find that although college students used social media in informational ways related to the protests, doing so did not spur offline behavior. This supports previous literature cautioning against concluding that all types of social media engagement lead to other forms of political participation. ²⁶ In addition, to understand the role of informational and expressive social media on protest engagement better, it is useful to acknowledge that this type of political behavior is multifaceted. Therefore, we attempt to distinguish between individual and group protest participation, following previous scholars who have done so.^35,36

The lack of a significant relationship for informational social media use is intriguing. For example, social media allows for rapid and concise information sharing. College students may have received up-to-the-minute, short updates about protest happenings, including opportunities to participate in activities at the Capitol. In addition, political information on social media may be more in-depth. Furthermore, attention to news on social media may supplement or even take the place of some traditional ways of receiving updates on current events (e.g., newspapers and television). However, these efficient, purposeful, and unique information-seeking behaviors did not carry over to actual offline protest participation. Perhaps students who used social media for informational reasons did so for surveillance purposes only. Overall, although social media may afford young people a unique news-gathering experience, ³⁷ it may not act as a mobilizing force for participation in all situations.

By nature, social media are expressive spaces. Using these media in expressive ways may require more interest, initiative, and time; thus, those who share or express themselves politically on social media may be facilitating their general political engagement. Consequently, these individuals may be more likely to participate offline as well. Young people can use social media as a personal soapbox to share opinions and news about political events and issues, and an individual's social media profile can contain as much political content as he or she desires. Political expression on social media may also take the form of attempting to organize and mobilize individuals for offline political engagement. This may have been true for protest participation in Madison, Wisconsin, as students attempted to demonstrate support for the protests by disseminating information and calling on their social media networks to be engaged. In addition, expressive use was related for both individual and group protest participation, further suggesting that those who engaged with social media in these ways were those who wanted to participate in protest behavior individually and with others.

Because the current study is exploratory in nature, it is important to address several limitations. First, the sample used is one of convenience; thus, it is not representative of young people or even young people in Madison, Wisconsin, who engaged with the protests through social media and offline. Second, we do not capture all the ways in which young people could have used the different social media to engage with the protests, nor do we capture all the ways in which young people could have participated with the protests offline. Lastly, our study is one of a case in a tumultuous time in one city; therefore, in other contexts, the influence of social media protest engagement may differ. Conducting similar studies in different contexts is important to understand social media's impact on protest participation more completely.

Despite these limitations, our study is a positive step in the beginning to understand the role of informational and expressive uses of different social media in times of protest. For young people especially, social media may represent ways to access information quickly and in both a concise or thorough manner, as well as in place of traditional news outlets. In addition, because the motivations for using social media also revolve around self-expression and presentation, young people may use these media to express themselves politically as well as share political information they find valuable with others. These informational and expressive behaviors may influence their social media contacts to act politically; however, specific behavior may be more important for certain political engagement than may others. This could be due in large part because of the various functions social media serve. Scholars should continue to examine these claims as social media use evolves. Political actors should continue to take heed of evolving social media to communicate effectively and efficiently with citizens.

Endnotes

a. See www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/87173062.html for election information.