Antecedents of intentional and incidental exposure modes on social media and consequences for political participation: a
- PDF / 692,689 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 2 Downloads / 202 Views
Antecedents of intentional and incidental exposure modes on social media and consequences for political participation: a panel study Andreas Nanz1 · Raffael Heiss2 · Jörg Matthes1 Accepted: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This study investigates antecedents and consequences of incidental and intentional exposure behavior to political information on social media. Based on the Social Media Political Participation Model (SMPPM), we investigated how political and non-political motivations predict intentional and incidental exposure modes while accounting for moderators (i.e., personal curation skills and the frequency of social media political exposure). We also examined how intentional and incidental exposure modes affect low- and high-effort political participation. We rely on data from a two-wave panel survey based on representative quotas for the Austrian population (N = 559) to run autoregressive models. Political information motivation predicted the intentional mode, and this relationship was stronger with rising levels of curation skills. By contrast, entertainment and social interaction motivations increased individuals’ incidental exposure mode. The intentional mode led to low-effort political participation but not to high-effort participation. However, the incidental mode was unrelated to both low- and high-effort participation. Keywords Social media · Intentional mode · Incidental mode · Political participation · User motivations
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s4126 9-020-00182-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Andreas Nanz [email protected] Raffael Heiss [email protected] Jörg Matthes [email protected] 1
University of Vienna, Währinger Straße 29, 1090 Vienna, Austria
2
MCI Innsbruck, Universitätsstraße 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Nanz et al.
Introduction In contrast to the politics section of a newspaper, social media (SM) expose people to various topical domains and content types—ranging from entertainment videos to statements by the president—right next to each other. Although political information has become a substantial part of most SM platforms, most users might turn to these platforms for other than informational purposes (Knoll et al. 2020). Researchers have frequently highlighted the possibility of SM to bring political information to politically uninterested citizens (e.g., Matthes et al. 2020; Valeriani and Vaccari 2016). Besides the affordances that allow citizens to seek and consume political information on SM actively, these platforms can thus facilitate incidental exposure. Despite the relevance of this topic for political communication scholarship, there is hardly any research on the predictors of both, incidental and intentional exposure on social media. Moreover, research in this area hardly formulates a clear-cut distinction between intentional and incidental exposure (Matthes et al. 2020). Although so
Data Loading...
