Doctoral Dissertation Research: Issue publics and Web use

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The landscape of available political information in America has changed dramatically in the past three decades. Of central importance, many scholars argue, has been the rapid development and adoption of the Internet. Observers have painted this change in variously optimistic and pessimistic terms, but there is some consensus that this new medium appears to have the potential to bring significant changes to the American democratic system. Given that information is essential to citizens for making adequate political decisions and that democracy is best sustained when citizens effectively give voice to their needs, wants, and values, it is imperative to examine how individual citizens interact with recent changes in the political information environment. Despite its importance, we know little about how and why individual citizens use the Internet in their political judgments. This dissertation project narrows this gap. The academy's failure to fully assess how and why citizens use online political information stems largely from three chronic problems in previous research: a) much of the existing research has tended to be descriptive rather than theoretical; b) prior studies have had limitations in the adequacy and precision of their measurement of how citizens process information on the Internet; and c) most importantly, prior research has applied a mass society paradigm, one in which researchers have somewhat naively thought of citizens as a single aggregation of individuals (i.e., the mass). This dissertation project examines how citizens use the Internet in their political judgments. Conceptually, the dissertation project adopts a pluralist perspective, emphasizing issue publics--groups of people particularly interested in a given political issue--and their motivated information seeking. Whereas previous studies have focused on a causal link from content in the national news media agenda to the public's knowledge and agenda, we direct more attention to the impact of individuals' personal agendas on online information seeking. This dissertation project also has a sharper focus on information processing than has been the case in previous research. Explicating the political judgment process, the dissertation project studies how citizens gather, assemble, and use information in attitude formation. Methodologically, the dissertation project will directly measure naturally occurring Web site viewing at the page level in order to adequately and precisely measure online information acquisition and use. This dissertation project will use an innovative Web tracking program developed by the research team. This dissertation project involves a set of two studies that look at how people acquire and use online political information. The first study features measurement of the political attitudes of a set of Internet users and observation of their online information searching behavior. Observing the nature and extent of information searching that varies by a level of personal issue salience will inform how issue public members search for information differently than do non-issue public members. The first study will also examine the effects of personal issue salience, information search, and the interaction between these two factors on domain-specific and general political knowledge gain, attitudes toward issue policies, and candidate evaluations in a hypothetical campaign context. This will reveal how the differences between issue publics members and non-issue public members' information searching may produce different consequences in terms of political knowledge acquisition and decision-making. The second study is designed to assess the impact of basic information search motivations on the acquisition and use of political information. The second study will focus on possible moderating effects of motivations in issue publics' information search behavior. This dissertation project draws upon core areas of theory and research in diverse fields of social inquiry and integrates them in novel ways. Thus, it is well grounded in established theory, yet it suggests news approaches to addressing pressing questions about the changing nature of citizens and contemporary political environments. As a result of these features, the proposed dissertation project is expected to produce broad impacts. The dissertation project will enhance current research tools in measuring Internet use and its antecedents. The results of the dissertation project should inform basic theory across disciplines including communication, public opinion, and political psychology. The proposed dissertation project is also relevant for policy discussions among governments, interest groups, or other political organizations about the social role and future of the Internet in modern democracies.