The DOI matches its Crossref record; 42 of the 42 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom
Open accessAbstract
We assess whether and how accidental exposure to political information on social media contributes to citizens’ online political participation in comparative perspective. Based on three online surveys of samples representative of German, Italian, and British Internet users in the aftermath of the 2014 European Parliament elections, we find that accidental exposure to political information on social media is positively and significantly correlated with online participation in all three countries, particularly so in Germany where overall levels of participation were lower. We also find that interest in politics moderates this relationship so that the correlation is stronger among the less interested than among the highly interested. These findings suggest that inadvertent encounters with political content on social media are likely to reduce the gap in online engagement between citizens with high and low interest in politics, potentially broadening the range of voices that make themselves heard.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
An Economic Theory of Democracy.
Banfield, E. C., & Downs, A. (1958) · Midwest Journal of Political Science · doi:10.2307/2109186 · Cited by 18,594
Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2006) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511790942 · Cited by 13,597
Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics
VERBA, S., SCHLOZMAN, K. L., & BRADY, H. E. (1995) · Harvard University Press eBooks · doi:10.2307/j.ctv1pnc1k7 · Cited by 6,626
Voice and equality: civic voluntarism in American politics
(1996) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.33-3597 · Cited by 5,186
An Economic Theory of Democracy
Marvick, D., & Downs, A. (1960) · The Western Political Quarterly · doi:10.2307/444355 · Cited by 4,109
A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization
Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11421 · Cited by 2,575
Prior, M. (2007) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139878425 · Cited by 1,582
Information and Expression in a Digital Age: Modeling Internet Effects on Civic Participation
Shah, D. V., Cho, J., Eveland, W. P., & Kwak, N. (2005) · Communication Research · doi:10.1177/0093650205279209 · Cited by 960
Does Internet Use Affect Engagement? A Meta-Analysis of Research
Boulianne, S. (2009) · Political Communication · doi:10.1080/10584600902854363 · Cited by 924
Messing, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2014) · Communication Research · doi:10.1177/0093650212466406 · Cited by 902
Cited by
Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis
Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2018) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/1461444817724170 · Cited by 738
Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Matassi, M. (2018) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/1461444817750396 · Cited by 435
The continuous expansion of citizen participation: a new taxonomy
Theocharis, Y., & van Deth, J. W. (2018) · European Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s1755773916000230 · Cited by 386
Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization
Barberá, P. (2020) · Social Media and Democracy · doi:10.1017/9781108890960.004 · Cited by 373
Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda
Guess, A. M., & Lyons, B. A. (2020) · Social Media and Democracy · doi:10.1017/9781108890960.003 · Cited by 284
Metadata
- Authors
- Valeriani, A., & Vaccari, C.
- Venue
- New Media & Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2016-07-09
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1857-1874
- ISSN
- 1461-4448 (ISSN-L)
- 1461-7315
- OpenAlex
- W2278427776
- Cited by
- 371
- References
- 42
- FWCI
- 57.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/1461444815616223
- The paper
- Valeriani, A., & Vaccari, C. (2016). Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815616223
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.