Presented at the American Political Science Association Conference

Current research on the effects of internet use on political participation indicates that internet access and exposure may increase political knowledge and; as a result, increase participation among voters regardless of political affiliation or socioeconomic status. Despite the internet’s potential cost effectiveness for reaching diverse groups of voters, the challenge of reaching young and historically apathetic voters remains. While disengagement of the youth has been attributed to several factors, the most prevalent is a lack of knowledge regarding candidates and the political process. Further, believing that candidates fail to consider or understand issues affecting their generation directly, research indicates that young voters are plagued by a sense of mistrust. Following survey data from the 2004 election which indicated that young adults between the ages of 18-29 are most likely to gather political information from the internet, candidates in the 2006 mid-term elections increasingly sought to employ influential social networking websites as a medium for reaching young adults. By integrating their individual websites with these virtual social networks, candidates are seeking to generate opportunities for interactivity between themselves and untapped youth constituencies. In effect, websites such as MySpace and Facebook, with their 58 million users, give young adults the opportunity to create virtual relationships with their preferred candidate. For example, users can post support advertisements for candidates on their personal profiles, or even create intricate communication links that personally address other potential voters through movie clips and photos. Candidates can also direct users on where to find additional information, including voter registration websites. Utilizing survey data and focus groups, we address whether these efforts on behalf of candidates is useful in translating potential youth voters into active political participants. Our initial study examines social networking websites and the ability to motivate youth voters not only in terms of voting, but also individual promotion of candidates or working for political campaigns. Here we use a model whose dependent variable consists of an index of several political activities including candidate site visitation and personal profile endorsement to determine types and levels of participation. To determine influence, we systematically revisit our survey participants during the course of the 2008 campaign to verify whether social networking sites influenced youth based political activity and voter turnout.