Social Media, Civic Engagement and Political Participation

Abstract

Civic engagement has traditionally been considered a much desired trait of good citizenship. Many researches in the past few decades have treated civic engagement level as one of the variables to measure political participation. Since active and constructive political participation of the citizenry is at the very heart of democracy, inculcating passion towards civic engagement positively helps to augment the political participation level of people. This paper makes a measurement the social media use level of college students in Kerala, categorizing the frequency of use as low, medium and high. The civic engagement level of these same students is then measured to examine the relationship between social media use and civic engagement level of students. The study can contribute insights to social media managers, academicians and policy makers towards effective use of social media for civic engagement enhancement resulting in greater political participation. The study also examines the truth of the argument that online activists are not as much passionate about civic issues when offline. A reality check on this can throw open interesting results on the political behaviour of present day youngsters.