Casual Social Media Use among the Youth: Effects on Online and Offline Political Participation
This research addresses the mixed debate on how social media influences youth political engagement, providing causal evidence that is incremental to existing correlational studies.
This study tackled the problem of understanding the causal effects of casual social media use on youth political participation, finding that it has a large effect on online participation but negligible impact on offline activities, with a 1% increase in online participation leading to a 0.12% increase in offline activity.
Background: Previous studies suggest that social media use among the youth is correlated with online and offline political participation. There is also a mixed and inconclusive debate on whether more online political participation in the youth increases their offline political participation. Methods: This study uses three models of OLS, two-way fixed effects, and an instrumental variable approach to make causal inferences about social media use, online, and offline political participation of the youth. Findings: The analyses provide evidence of a large effect of casual social media use on online political participation, and no effect or negligible effect on offline political participation and voting behavior. The results from fixed effects and instrumental variable models provide strong evidence of elasticity between online and offline political participation in young individuals. On average, a one percent increase in online political participation increases the offline political activity index by 0.12 percent.