Thursday, May 12, 2011

Does the Internet make citizens love democracy?

Catie Bailard, of George Washington University, has been blogging at The Monkey Cage on the extent to which Internet access changes citizens' awareness of political events and their willingness to engage in voting and other political activities. You can follow the above link for information about her experiments and her findings.

2 comments:

  1. I don't know about the whole internet causes people to go for revolutions things. I mean, it’s just correlation not causation, and in any case throughout history when people grew dissatisfied with their government they did not calmly decide to change it from the inside. Why should it be any different here?

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  2. It seems from what I read of her post, that the internet increases democracy for peoples which either do not have it, or have a poor democracy. As she writes:
    "Window-opening means that the global nature of the Internet opens a window for individuals to better view how democracy functions in other countries, particularly the high-functioning democracies that are most visible on the Internet. " Or, basically, the internet allows people to see how the high-functioning democracies treat their citizens and can compare that to the treatment they get by their government (usually worse). But the internet probably does not have an effect in countries like the US where democracy is already fully entrenched

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