The impact of intolerance on young people’s online political participation
| Author | Martín Portos,Lorenzo Bosi,Anna Lavizzari |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211014453 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211014453
Politics
2022, Vol. 42(1) 95 –127
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211014453
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
The impact of intolerance
on young people’s online
political participation
Lorenzo Bosi
Anna Lavizzari
Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
Martín Portos
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Abstract
This article investigates the impact of intolerance on online political participation among young
Europeans. Based on the theoretical insights of (in)tolerance, political participation, youth, and
media studies, we explore whether and to what extent intolerant attitudes drive young people’s
online political participation. In doing this, we draw on original survey data with booster samples
for young people, covering nine European countries. Our results show that intolerance leads to
more online political activities among young people. However, these individuals are not socially
isolated and marginalised; in fact, the effect of intolerant attitudes on online political engagement is
reinforced by participation in offline unconventional forms of participation and social capital. Our
findings bear important consequences for the understanding of intolerant attitudes, youth politics,
and (online) political participation.
Keywords
intolerance, online political participation, social capital, youth
Received: 5th June 2020; Revised version received: 31st March 2021; Accepted: 8th April 2021
As danah boyd (2014) forcefully argued in her work, young people today do not differ
so much from those of past generations, but they have different avenues for expressing
themselves and make their voices heard. We can read the decline in conventional forms
of participation (e.g. electoral turnout, contacting a politician) among young people as
coinciding with an increased engagement in politics through alternative avenues (Dalton,
2009; Sloam, 2014). Public space has often structural constraints that make it exclusion-
ary for young people, through surveillance and policing practices implemented by adults.
Also, arenas for political engagement, particularly through traditional and institutional
settings, are perceived as increasingly inaccessible for young people and riddled by
Corresponding author:
Lorenzo Bosi, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, 50123 Firenze, Italy.
Email: lorenzo.bosi@sns.it
1014453POL0010.1177/02633957211014453PoliticsBosi et al.
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
96 Politics 42(1)
adult-dominated dynamics. On the reverse, the digital sphere, which refers to Internet
and related technologies, has opened up new opportunities to facilitate political engage-
ment and expression in our societies and in particular for young people, who are known
to be more intensive and active Internet users (Kwak et al., 2006; Theben et al., 2018).
Notably, the digital sphere presents different opportunities for young people relative to
physical – both private and public – spaces where youth are generally subject to adult
and institutional control (boyd, 2014). Young people in the digital sphere claim agency
on themselves that may not be afforded to them in traditional public space. They have
been, in fact, consistently found to be more involved than adults in online activism or
‘connective action’, as digitally personalised communication that crosses boundaries
between private and public spaces (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Earl et al., 2017).
The relatively anonymous contexts provided by the digital sphere may be free, in the
views of young people, from concerns for positive evaluation of their behaviour and
opinions, and therefore ‘facilitate online activism without fear of social repercussions’
(Greijdanus et al., 2020: 50).1 Even if this may also be true for older individuals, the
increased demands for policing and surveillance, and more broadly exclusionary pat-
terns of control and removal generated in public spaces, affect the perceptions of risk
and control for young people, and particularly their use for political purposes (Tani,
2015; Van Aalst and Brands, 2020). These dynamics prevent young people from the
enjoyment of public space with the same rights, confidence, and intensity as older
groups of citizens while making the digital sphere more appealing.
Given the digital sphere has quickly become of paramount importance in our con-
temporary societies, it has opened a vast debate over the impact it may have on people’s
political opinions, attitudes, values, and knowledge (Robinson et al., 2002). On a sys-
temic level, it refers to questions over the impact of the digital sphere on democratic
processes, particularly on public debate, deliberation, and pluralism, that is, how
changes in media environments influence the quality of democracies. Studies along
these lines of research are still divided, pointing to either pessimistic views, where
intolerant discourses and attitudes find a home in the digital sphere (Jamieson and
Cappella, 2008), or more optimistic views, insofar as it provides autonomous access,
fast and direct communication, interaction, and dissemination, as well as broadly
unregulated creation of information and sharing of opinions and worldviews (Himelboim
et al., 2017). These works, despite their different results, investigate whether the digital
sphere is a context affecting attitudes. In other words, the digital sphere is the independ-
ent variable, given that ‘social structures and patterns change because of the use of
technologies’ (Calenda and Meijer, 2009: 882). Against this background, and building
on the idea that the digital sphere ‘mirrors, magnifies, and makes more visible the good,
bad and ugly of everyday life’ (boyd, 2014: 24), we argue in this article that per se the
digital sphere does not create from scratch young people’s attitudes, even if it makes
them more visible to the broad public. We reverse the direction of the investigation and
‘focus on one specific individual attitude as a trigger factor for’ participation in the
digital sphere (Rapp and Ackermann, 2016: 568). From this approach, ‘members of
social systems choose how to use technologies to fit their specific situation’ (Calenda
and Meijer, 2009: 882); in this article, the digital sphere is interpreted to create among
young people the perception of an instrument for those who want to express themselves
and make their voices heard, behind the perceived adult-dominated physical– private
and public – space. Online political participation includes a range of activities reflect-
ing the frequency through which young people use the digital sphere to access political
Bosi et al. 97
information, acquire political knowledge, express and share political opinions, and
mobilise. This way, we shed light on the determinants of online political participation,
which have been less explored than those of offline political participation.
Based on these insights, the article investigates two crucial questions. First, do intoler-
ant attitudes make young people more active in online political participation? Second,
and partially qualifying the first question, we ask whether this association holds in par-
ticular for young people who report high values of intolerance and are also engaged in
offline unconventional forms of participation (e.g. street protesting, striking, occupying),
have higher levels of social capital, or are dissatisfied with democracy, that is, do offline
unconventional activities, democratic satisfaction, and social capital reinforce the effect
of intolerant attitudes on online political activities among young people? In doing so, this
article advances a key argument: while we find intolerant attitudes increase youth’s online
political participation, offline political engagement, democratic dissatisfaction, and social
capital reinforce such association. This argument is substantiated theoretically, tested
empirically, and found to hold in the form of a strong and significant interaction effect
between intolerant attitudes and variables measuring offline unconventional participa-
tion, democratic satisfaction, and social capital. By investigating the role of intolerant
attitudes on young people’s online political participation, we do not only shed light on a
largely unexplored topic (see Feezell, 2016; Lobera and Portos, 2020), but also address a
major challenge for contemporary democracies and their prospects. In fact, the relation-
ship between young people and the digital sphere is tightly linked to the ways it affects
collective action and mainstream modes of democratic expression. The normative impli-
cations of our argument and findings are important to better grasp the extent to which the
digital sphere can be considered, on the one hand, as a democratising force helping young
people becoming ‘digital citizens’ (and not only ‘digital natives’), adhering to models of
moral respect and democratic pluralism. On the other hand, our study also cautions us
about the use of the digital sphere as an instrument for intolerant discourses, threatening
a pluralist democracy while fuelling polarisation.
The article breaks down into five main sections. In the first section, we specify the
concept of (in)tolerance. Drawing on (in)tolerance, political participation, youth, and
media studies, in the second section, we present the argument on intolerant attitudes
triggering online political activities among young people, as well as the moderating
role of offline unconventional forms of participation and social capital, and develop our
main research hypotheses. The third section introduces the data and presents the meth-
odological design. Our empirical analyses draw on original survey data with booster
samples for young people conducted in the framework of the ‘Reinventing Democracy
in Europe: Youth Doing Politics in Times of Increasing Inequalities’ (EURYKA) pro-
ject,2 covering nine European countries. In the fourth section, we discuss our results
and empirical findings, showing how intolerance affects online political activities and
how this effect is further strengthened when young people participate in offline uncon-
ventional activities, and report high democratic satisfaction and social capital. A con-
cluding section summarises the main arguments and findings, and reflects on the main
implications of this piece of work.
A note on terminology: Intolerant attitudes
Tolerance and intolerance are at the two ends of a spectrum – meaning they are the oppo-
site of one another (Gibson, 2005). However, what does it mean to be (in)tolerant? No one
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