Internet users’ political practices and content in Spain

Abstract

People, through their values and their expression in certain practices, set social forms in communicational exchanges in their daily lives, including forms for political expression. Internet is playing an increasingly important role in these exchanges and it is worthwhile studying whether this use is having an effect on society, and if so, what type of effect. This paper looks at the differences seen in the attitudes, values, ideologies and political practices of people who use the internet in relation to those who do not, based on data from the “Citizenship, participation and democracy” survey carried out by the CIS (Sociological Research Centre) in 2002. Likewise, it assesses certain types of political expression from latent factors that indicate them, analysing to what extent the variable frequency of internet use is more symptomatic of political activity than other structural variables.