This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats.

Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, this book examines questions of youth citizenship and participation by exploring their meanings in policy, practice and youth experience. It examines young people's participation in non-government and youth-led organisations, and asks what can be done to bridge the democratic disconnect.

The arrival of the participatory web 2.0 has been hailed by many as a media revolution, bringing with it new tools and possibilities for direct political action. Through specialised online platforms, mainstream social media or blogs, citizens in many countries are increasingly seeking to have their voices heard online, whether it is to lobby, to support or to complain about their elected representatives. Politicians, too, are adopting "new media" in specific ways, though they are often criticised for failing to seize the full potential of online tools to enter into dialogue with their electorates. Bringing together perspectives from around the world, this volume examines emerging forms of citizen participation in the face of the evolving logics of political communication, and provides a unique and original focus on the gap which exists between political uses of digital media by the politicians and by the people they represent.

In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse, how do we recognize participation when we see it? Despite the growing interest in new forms of citizen engagement in politics, there is virtually no systematic research investigating what these new and emerging forms of engagement look like, how prevalent they are in various societies, and how they fit within the broader structure of well-known participatory acts conceptually and empirically. The rapid spread of internet-based activities especially underlines the urgency to deal with such challenges. In this book, Yannis Theocharis and Jan W. van Deth put forward a systematic and unified approach to explore political participation and offer new conceptual and empirical tools with which to study it. Political Participation in a Changing World will assist both scholars and students of political behaviour to systematically study new forms of political participation without losing track of more conventional political activities.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of political participation in all its varied forms, investigates a wide range of topics in the field from both a theoretical and methodological perspective, and covers the most recent developments in the area. It brings together research traditions from political science and sociology, bridging the gap in particular between political sociology and social movement studies; contributions also draw on crucial work in psychology, economics, anthropology, and geography. Following a detailed introduction from the editors, the volume is divided into nine parts that explore political participation across disciplines; core theoretical perspectives; methodological approaches; modes of participation; contexts; determinants; processes; outcomes; and current trends and future directions. The book will be a valuable reference work for anyone interested in understanding political participation and related themes.

The Internet and "social media" may initially have been understood as just one more instrument politicians could employ to manage without political parties. However, these media cannot be reduced to being a tool available solely to politicians. The electronic media make reinforcement of the "glocalization" of the public and political sphere, a process already set in motion with the advent of television, and they can develop the trend even further. Political parties are therefore once again becoming indispensable; they are in an unparalleled position to recreate social and political bonds, for only they stand both at the center and on the periphery of the new sphere encompassing public and political life. TABLE OF CONTENTS New Technologies: Helping Political Parties and the Democratic Processes or Threatening Them? (Guy Lachapelle and Philippe J. Maarek) Part I: The Integration of Technological Innovations in the Practices of Parties and Citizens Innovations in Information Technology in American Party Politics Since 1960 (Kenneth Janda) Internet, Social Media Use and Political Participation in the 2013 Parliamentary Election in Germany (Reimar Zeh and Christina Holtz-Bacha) Part II: The Consequences of New Technologies on Activism The Decline of Activism in Political Parties: Adaptation Strategies and New Technologies (Eric Montigny) Party Activists and Partisan Communication in Quebec (Isabelle Gusse) Part III: The New Role Played by Social Networks Changing Communications? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in the 2011 New Zealand General Election (Ashley Murchison) Social Media and American Presidential Campaigns: The Dark Side of the Electoral Process (Karine Premont and Charles-Antoine Millette) Part IV: The Resilience of the Printed Press in the United Kingdom The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the British Press: Integration, Immigration and Integrity (David Deacon and Dominic Wring) Part V: New Technologies and Leadership Evolution Political parties and the Internet: changes in society, changing politics – the case of the Parti Quebecois (Guy Lachapelle) Political communication, electronic media and social networks in France (Philippe J. Maarek) Index of Proper Nouns

By evaluating the Internet's impact on key cultural issues of the day, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the seismic technological and cultural shifts the Internet has created in contemporary society. Books about Internet culture usually focus on the people, places, sites, and memes that constitute the "cutting-edge" at the time the book is written. That approach, alas, renders such volumes quickly obsolete. This provocative work, on the other hand, focuses on overarching themes that will remain relevant for the long term. The insights it shares will highlight the tremendous impact of the Internet on modern civilization—and individual lives—well after specific players and sites have fallen out of favor. Content is presented in two volumes. The first emphasizes the positive impact of Internet culture—for example, 24-hour access to information, music, books, merchandise, employment opportunities, and even romance. The second discusses the Internet's darker consequences, such as a demand for instant news that often pushes journalists to prioritize being first over being right, online scams, and invasions of privacy that can affect anyone who banks, shops, pays bills, or posts online. Readers of the set will clearly understand how the Internet has revolutionized communications and redefined human interaction, coming away with a unique appreciation of the realities of today's digital world—for better and for worse.

This book explores how personalized content and the inherent networked nature of the mobile media could and do lead to positive externalities in social progress in Asian societies. Empirical studies that examine uses of the mobile phone and apps (voice mailing, SMS, mobile social media, mobile Weibo, mobile WeChat, etc.) are featured as a response to calls for theorization of the mobile media's efficacy as a tool for citizen engagement and participation in civic and political affairs, especially in the search for collective solutions to widespread social problems of food safety, pollution, government corruption, and public health risks. Considering the vast cultural diversity of Asian societies that are shaped by different levels of political, social, economic, and religious development, the book offers nuanced studies that provide in-depth analysis of the mobile media and political communication in a variety of communities of leading Asian countries. From the country-specific studies, broad themes and enduring concepts emerge.

In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere. The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation.

The Routledge Handbook of Political Campaigning provides an essential, global, and timely overview of current realities, as well as anticipating the trajectory and evolution of campaigning in the coming years. Offering a comprehensive analysis, the handbook is structured into seven thematic sections, including the campaign environment; rhetoric and persuasion; campaign strategies; campaign tactics and platform affordances; news and journalism; citizens and voters; and civil society. The chapters within each section reflect on the latest societal, technological, and cultural developments and their impact on campaigning, on democratic culture within societies, and on the roles that campaigns might play in both facilitating and impeding political engagement. Key trends and innovations are examined alongside case studies and examples from a range of nations and political contexts. Issues around trust and representation are further reflected in a focus on the wider campaigning environment and the rise in importance of grassroots and pressure groups, social movements, and movements that coalesce within digital environments. The Routledge Handbook of Political Campaigning is an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in political communication, media and communication, elections and voting behavior, digital media, journalism, social movements, strategic communication, social media, and more broadly to democracy, sociology, and public policy.