It is generally agreed that Internet adoption and diffusion are occurring more rapidly than for almost any other technology in history, and the Internet is becoming indispensable for many sectors of the population. Among Americans online, more than 80% say the Internet plays a vital role in their daily routines (Fallows, 2004). Given these trends, social scientists have begun exploring the political and social implications of Internet use. Of particular interest are comparisons between offline and online modes of political engagement and whether Internet users participate in the political system differently from those offline. Mike Jensen, Jim Danziger and Alladi Venkatesh explore these issues in their paper Civil Society and Cyber Society: The Role of the Internet in Community Associations and Democratic Politics (PDF).

Based on empirical analyses of 1,203 respondents, the research team shows that online participation is not simply an extension of offline participation, but appears to be a distinct, although socially embedded, medium in which political behavior takes place. One of the most important conclusions of their study is that there is a greater democratization of the political process online compared to offline. Broadly phrased, their findings include:

Online practices of community involvement are empirically distinguishable from offline practices. That is, while there is a positive correlation between involvement in any type of community activity, offline or online, and involvement in any other community activity, online community interactions are more strongly associated with similar online community interactions than with their offline counterparts. Those who are engaged with such online associational contexts as hobby, political, and religious web sites tend to come from households that are far more likely to engage in other forms of online engagements than in such modes of offline associational life in the community as attending and planning neighborhood events and holding office in a club.

Political/community-oriented associational practices cluster separately from the social modes of association. That is, public-regarding forms of associational life, such as interacting with an online political group or holding office in an offline organization, are empirically differentiated from private-regarding forms of associational life, such as belonging to an offline club or contacting an online hobby group.

Both offline democratic engagement and online democratic engagement with the political system tend to be associated with political activities within civil and cyber society rather than those with most social groups or even community-oriented groups.

There is a notable difference in the predictors of online and offline political participation. While traditional markers of Socioeconomic Status (SES) such as income, length of time living in the community, and age do matter for offline democratic engagement with the political system, these factors are not significant in predicting variation on their measure of online democratic engagement.

A full copy of the paper (PDF) can be found here.