The Internet and Citizen Communication With Government: Does the Medium Matter?

Abstract

The Internet offers a new means by which citizens may contact government to express their views or concerns, and it raises interesting empirical and theoretical questions about whether citizen contacts are affected by communication media. This article uses survey data to explore hypotheses about whether means of communication shape contacting activity. It compares Internet-based contacts with traditional contacts, showing statistically significant but for the most part substantively small differences. Effects of technology are of two kinds, those affecting only the likelihood of citizens being active in communicating with government and those affecting the frequency or intensity of communication among those who are active. The article discusses these findings in terms of transitional effects of technology, which arise from uneven distribution of the technology in society, and in terms of inherent effects, which attend to the technology itself. The most important inherent effects involve gender and political connectedness: The gender gap in contacting is larger on the Internet than in traditional forms of communication, and political connectedness has a weaker association with communication through the Internet.