ABSTRACT: This paper examines the extent social media is enabling e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The study conducts an interpretative case study approach interviewing active social media users, political actors, civil servants, civilians, civil society actors and tertiary students. The study also conducts a content analysis of popular “political social media” Facebook pages i...

The relationship between social media use and youth’s political participation has been extensively studied. However, explanations for youth’s online collective political activism have been less explored. Previous studies have used the concept of internal political efficacy to examine the relationship between social media and political participation. However, this concept only explains individua...

I use the quality and quantity of energy flows to interpret economic, social, and political changes in the US and Former Soviet Union. The economic successes of both the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the US reflect an abundant supply of high quality energy. This abundance ended in the 1970s in the US and the 1980s in the Former Soviet Union. In the US, the end of cheap oil caused labor producti...

Existing research on the effect of social media use on political behavior has yielded mixed results to date, demonstrating the importance of research examining the effects of varying types of social media communication on political behavior. The experiment reported in this study provides valuable insights into the role of social media in elections. A longitudinal experiment was conducted to ass...

We argue that the political effects of negativity bias are narrower than Hibbing et al. suggest. Negativity bias reliably predicts social, but not economic, conservatism, and its political effects often vary across levels of political engagement. Thus the role of negativity bias in broad ideological conflict depends on the strategic packaging of economic and social attitudes by political elites.

Since the late 1990s political leaders in several African countries have pursued legislation to expand criminal penalties for same-sex sex. Yet, much of the research on efforts to expand criminalization of same-sex sexualities in Africa has focused on individual country cases, neglecting the role of national and transnational sociopolitical contexts and economic flows. Focusing on discourses pr...

Social movements rely in large measure on networked communication technologies to organize and disseminate information relating to the movements' objectives. In this work we seek to understand how the goals and needs of a protest movement are reflected in the geographic patterns of its communication network, and how these patterns differ from those of stable political communication. To this end...

The article deals with the issue of political participation in the network society. It examines how new forms of public communication enabled by ICT mediated communication (especially new media), as well as virtual socialization and the resulting new social structures (especially social networks), affect political participation, particularly citizens’ influence on the government and the politic...