Abstract
The Digital Divide has been considered key to understanding the relation between Internet and politics. However, today the use of the Internet is following a normalization trend and new country contextual factors must be taken into consideration in explaining the unequal use of the Internet in politics. This study focuses on the unequal presence of political parties online across political systems. By combining multiple sources, this study explores the relation between the unequal online presence of political parties in 190 countries, and country-contextual factors, including level of Digital Divide, and economic and democratic indicators. Here, the empirical findings resize the relation of causality between the Digital Divide and the use of the Internet for politics. They highlight that democratic status, among various other country-contextual specificities, is the strongest contextual factor in determining the unequal use of the Internet in politics for political parties.
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Notes
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Norris defines democratic and autocratic regimes according to the level of democratization measured by the Freedom House Rate (1999).
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unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49.htm.
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Ibidem.
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hdr.undp.org.
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These are: Switzerland, United States, Canada, Japan, Denmark, Norway, Slovenja, Hungary, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Maldives, Malta, Saudi Arabia, Barbados, Equador, Colombia.
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These are: Azerbaijan, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Central Africa, Comoros, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Korea North, Laos, Niger, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Solomon Island, Swaziland, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates.
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I tested for multilinearity correlation among the independent variables. None of them is correlated beyond the 0.5.
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Acknowledgment
Special thanks go to the World Information Access Project for the data on online political parties here explored.
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Calderaro, A. (2014). Internet Politics Beyond the Digital Divide. In: Pătruţ, B., Pătruţ, M. (eds) Social Media in Politics. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04666-2_1
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