Volume 19, No. 2, 2022
Rising Wave Of Social Media: Empowering University Students Through Online And Offline Political Participation
Fakhta Zeib
Abstract
Youngsters’ frequent use of facebook and twitter has facilitated their political expression and transformed the traditional ways of political participation. Combining Dahl’s theory of ‘Democratic Processes’ and Habermas’s theory of ‘Public Sphere’, the current study provides an extension to the theory by examining: (1) the role of social media political expression in fostering the democratic process through online and offline political participation of university students in Pakistan. Further, the study also fills the gap by analyzing the association between their achieved level of online and offline political participation in the context of Pakistan’s struggling democracy. The data is collected from May 15 to July 31, 2020, through survey of 750 students, both male and female, from different universities in four provinces of Pakistan. Study reveals high-level association of social media political expression with online political participation and mediumlevel association with offline political participation. Male students appear more active in online and offline political activities than female students. Certain variations on the bases of performed activities and demographic characteristics prevail. Moreover, the study includes split model analysis on the bases of gender, study disciplines and province. Previous studies have focused on social media political participation but not as a democratic function. The major contribution of the study is that it develops a framework that connects the theory of democratic process with new practices of democratic participation.
Pages: 4540-4558
Keywords: Social Media; Facebook Use; Twitter Use; Political Expression; Online Political Participation; Offline Political Participation.