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Recent empirical research on voter turnout has revealed a variety of regularities. Citizens who expect to be asked about their turnout decisions after the elections are more likely to vote. Parents whose children enter the electorate are more likely to vote when their children live home than when they left home. Citizens without social networks acquire less information about politics. We develop a model that can explain these and other empirical findings. In our model, citizens receive disutility from being perceived not to have voted. This motivates a citizen to vote. Moreover, a citizen feels worse being perceived not to have voted when he is thought to have a strong opinion as this raises expectations about his voting behavior among peers. When a citizen anticipates that he will likely vote, the latter concern motivates him to acquire information, to participate in political discussions, and to vote. However, when a citizen anticipates that he will likely abstain from voting, he shies away from politics to lower his peers' expectations.

Das von der VolkswagenStiftung geförderte Forschungsprojekt untersucht die Konsequenzen der Online-Medienpräsenz für politische Präferenzen und Verhaltensweisen. Die Studie wurde von YouGov USA durchgeführt. Im Erhebungszeitraum 23. April 2018 bis 15. Oktober 2019 wurden amerikanische Staatsbürger ab 18 Jahren mit Internetzugang in Onlineinterviews (CAWI) zu folgenden Themen befragt: Politische Präferenzen und politisches Verhalten, Nutzung sozialer Medien, Mediennutzung, Einstellungen zu bestimmten Themen, politisches Wissen, Meinungen zur Regulierung von Online-Belästigung. Die Auswahl der Befragten erfolgte durch eine Quotenstichprobe aus einem Online-Access-Panel.

Das von der VolkswagenStiftung geförderte Forschungsprojekt untersucht die Konsequenzen der Online-Medienpräsenz für politische Präferenzen und Verhaltensweisen. Die Studie wurde von YouGov Deutschland durchgeführt. Im Erhebungszeitraum 13. Juli 2017 bis 14. Oktober 2019 wurden deutsche Staatsbürger ab 18 Jahren mit Internetzugang in Onlineinterviews (CAWI) zu folgenden Themen befragt: Politische Präferenzen und politisches Verhalten, Nutzung sozialer Medien, Mediennutzung, Einstellungen zu bestimmten Themen, politisches Wissen, Meinungen zur Regulierung von Online-Belästigung. Die Auswahl der Befragten erfolgte durch eine Quotenstichprobe aus einem Online-Access-Panel.

This study explores the complex relationship between digital news consumption and public opinion formation in Pakistan. Employing a quantitative approach, the research focused on adult digital news consumers across Pakistan, utilizing stratified sampling for a diverse demographic representation. The study formulated and tested several hypotheses related to the frequency of digital news consumption, source credibility, social media engagement, content diversity, and the mediating role of digital literacy. Findings from a structured questionnaire survey indicate that all these factors significantly influence the formation of public opinion. The study also highlights the pivotal role of digital literacy as a mediator in this process. These insights extend the application of theories such as agenda-setting and uses and gratifications in the context of digital media. The study contributes to the academic discourse on media influence in the digital era and offers practical implications for policymakers and media practitioners. It underscores the need for strategies promoting media literacy and responsible news consumption. The study acknowledges its limitations, including reliance on self-reported data and its focus on Pakistan, which may affect the generalizability of the findings. Future research avenues include comparative studies across countries and longitudinal analyses to understand evolving digital news consumption patterns.

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the 'passivation' of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage's heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the 'passivation' of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage's heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

Die Studie Media Exposure and Opinion Formation (MEOF) ist eine Mehrländer- und -wellen-Panelbefragung, die zwischen Juli 2017 und Oktober 2019 in Deutschland und April 2018 und Oktober 2019 in den USA durchgeführt wurde. Die Befragung ermöglicht es, politische Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen, Wissen, Online-Medienkonsum und Einstellungen zu verschiedenen Themen zu untersuchen. Zusätzlich zu den Umfragedaten wurde eine passive Messtechnologie (Tracking-Software) auf den Desktop- und Mobilgeräten der Befragten eingesetzt, um mit Einverständnis der Befragten Echtzeitdaten über Webbesuche und die Nutzung mobiler Apps zu sammeln.