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This study investigates the role of the Internet in civic participation inequality across 108 countries. Merging individual-level survey data from the 2016 Gallup World Poll with country-level indices, we conduct multilevel analyses to answer three broader sets of questions: (1) Does access to the Internet increase the likelihood of civic participation? (2) Does Internet access amplify or lessen socioeconomic stratification in civic participation? (3) Do press freedom and government intervention as contextual factors shape the role of the Internet in civic participation inequality? The findings suggest that Internet access increases the likelihood of civic participation while it also deepens socioeconomic stratification in participation. Cross-level interactions unveil that the intervening role of the Internet remains unaffected by press freedom, but government intervention through the promotion of ICT use can help control the growing inequality. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for political inequality research and the applied global significance.

A rapidly growing literature has attempted to explain Donald Trump's success in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a result of a wide variety of differences in individual characteristics, attitudes, and social processes. We propose that the economic and psychological processes previously established have in common that they generated or electorally capitalized on unhappiness in the electorate, which emerges as a powerful high-level predictor of the 2016 electoral outcome. Drawing on a large data set covering over 2 million individual surveys, which we aggregated to the county level, we find that low levels of evaluative, experienced, and eudaemonic subjective well-being (SWB) are strongly predictive of Trump's victory, accounting for an exhaustive list of demographic, ideological, and socioeconomic covariates and robustness checks. County-level future life evaluation alone correlates with the Trump vote share over Republican baselines at r = -.78 in the raw data, a magnitude rarely seen in the social sciences. We show similar findings when examining the association between individual-level life satisfaction and Trump voting. Low levels of SWB also predict anti-incumbent voting at the 2012 election, both at the county and individual level. The findings suggest that SWB is a powerful high-level marker of (dis)content and that SWB should be routinely considered alongside economic explanations of electoral choice.