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After the UK government announced cuts to higher education and an increase in the tuition fee cap, thousands of students across the country used new media tools to organise peaceful protests at over 35 universities. Although extensive theoretical frameworks about online mobilisation and political action are available, we know very little about how these new informational tools are used in practice. This article provides an overview of the increasingly influential role of the internet in youth politics. Using the case study of the student occupations, it assesses the role of a variety of online tools and methods that were used to coordinate and mobilise young people. The study reveals the extensive use of old and new online platforms and hardware, and the constant blending of offline and online repertoires of participation, which have facilitated a novel way of organising political action. It argues that the student protests were important in demonstrating the potential of new media for political mobilisation, stresses the need to better understand the role of digital tools in political activism and suggests avenues for further research. Adapted from the source document.

According to Inglehart's postmaterialist theory, young people brought up in periods of high economic and physical security, surrounded by better opportunities for education, are more likely to prioritise postmaterialist values. Postmaterialists are strongly inclined to support new forms of collective action and extra-institutional activity. Internet researchers have reported that internet users are mainly young, well educated and affluent, thus denoting a similarity to the demographic characteristics of postmaterialists. This article presents some evidence regarding the existence of postmaterialist values in the online realm of Greece, attempting to demonstrate how postmaterialism influences online and offline political activity. The findings indicate a trend on the part of young people to display a postmaterialist orientation, accompanied by a disinterest in traditional forms of political participation. Postmaterialism is positively associated with internet use and is a weak contributing factor to online and offline extra-institutional participation.

Abstract 
Most studies of online incivility report negative effects on attitudes and behaviors of both the victims and the audiences who are exposed to it. But while we have extensive insights about the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of incivility, less emphasis has been paid on its emotional effects. We conduct a series of survey experiments using statements posted on Twitter by elite actors along with the comments they receive and measure the emotional reactions of the public in relation to the content of the original post. We find that when the raw information is accompanied by uncivil commentary (compared to civil or no commentary), respondents express higher levels of positive and lower levels of negative emotions. Further analysis of heterogeneous effects focusing on partisanship shows that the effects are primarily driven by those who are generally expected to agree with the expert's claim. The broader consequences of incivility as entertainment on social media platforms are discussed.

Over the past decade, Internet and politics scholarship has been concerned with the effects of the Internet on forms of civic and political participation. Recent research has moved on to examine the effects of social networking sites like Facebook. Although past studies have generally found positive – albeit weak or moderate – relationships between social networking sites use and civic and political participation, reliance on cross-sectional surveys has not produced conclusive evidence of the direction of causality. We use a two-wave panel survey of 15- and 16-year-olds to examine how Facebook use affects various forms of political and non-political entertainment-oriented participation (both online and offline). We find that Facebook use is positively related to civic and entertainment-oriented, but not to online or offline political, participation. Further analysis using structural equation modelling shows that prior levels of civic participation have a stronger effect on Facebook use than Facebook use has on civic participation. Facebook use only leads clearly to entertainment-oriented participation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

AbstractPolitical participation (PP) has been found to be associated with socioeconomic status (SES) indicators, most strongly with educational attainment. At the same time, previous research has been inconclusive regarding potentially biasing effects of personality and cognitive characteristics on this association. In the present study, we investigated the association between different forms of youth PP and attained SES, taking youth's and parents' individual characteristics into account. We used data from 983 German twin families with same‐sex twin pairs of emerging adults (aged 21–25) that provided information on electoral, nonelectoral individual and collective political participation as well as on youth's and their parents relevant personality and cognitive characteristics. After adjusting for youth's and parents' individual characteristics, regression analyses showed educational attainment and household income to be solely significantly associated with emerging adults' electoral political participation. Genetically informative analyses revealed confoundedness due to shared environmental factors for electoral PP and due to genetic factors for individual and collective PP. Depending on the form of PP, the covariance between attained SES indicators and youth's PP mostly or fully overlapped with variance in political interest, general cognitive ability, and/or openness to experience. Findings are discussed against the backdrop of genotype‐environment interplay.

The repertoire of political participation in democratic societies is expanding rapidly and covers such different activities as voting, demonstrating, volunteering, boycotting, blogging, and flash mobs. Relying on a new method for conceptualizing forms and modes of participation we show that a large variety of creative, expressive, individualized, and digitally enabled forms of participation can be classified as parts of the repertoire of political participation. Results from an innovative survey with a representative sample of the German population demonstrate that old and new forms are systematically integrated into a multi-dimensional taxonomy covering (1) voting, (2) digitally networked participation, (3) institutionalized participation, (4) protest, (5) civic participation, and (6) consumerist participation. Furthermore, the antecedents of consumerist, civic, and digitally networked participation, are very similar to those of older modes of participation such as protest and institutionalized participation. Whereas creative, expressive, and individualized modes appear to be expansions of protest activities, digitally networked forms clearly establish a new and distinct mode of political participation that fits in the general repertoire of political participation.