Nojin Kwak’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

This special issue showcases innovative scholarly works examining the role of social and mobile media in the formation and/or transformation of democratic citizenship in some of the most populous and economically powerful countries in Asia—China, India, Japan and South Korea.

Scholars have long been interested in the overlap between electronic communication systems and international affairs. New communication systems have brought an expectation for greater information flow and connection across geographical boundaries when compared to the systems that came before them. This study continued this longstanding scholarly interest by examining how the Internet facilitates a sense of connection to the international community at the individual level. Findings demonstrate that the Internet matters for international engagement. According to the results, the Internet connects individuals to the international community by helping them increase their knowledge of the world, facilitating their sense of belonging to the greater world, and motivating them to participate in international events and foreign volunteer opportunities. Further, findings suggest that younger users of the Internet tended to benefit more than older users from reading international news on the Internet with respect to international political knowledge and international participation.

This article examines the role of the Internet as a source of political information and a sphere for public expression. Informational media use, whether traditional news sources or online public affairs content, is expected to foster interpersonal political discussion and online civic messaging, contributing to increased civic participation. Using two-wave national panel survey data, three types of synchronous structural equation models are tested: cross sectional (relating individual differences), fixed effects (relating intraindividual change), and auto regressive (relating aggregate change). All models reveal that online media complement traditional media to foster political discussion and civic messaging. These two forms of political expression, in turn, influence civic participation. Other variable orderings are tested to compare the theorized model to alternative causal specifications. Results reveal that the model produces the best fit, empirically and theoretically, with the influence of the Internet, rivaling the mobilizing power of traditional modes of information and expression.

The purpose of this study was to examine more closely the assumptions of causality in research on communication and political knowledge. Although most communica-tion theory suggests that communication causes learning, some have argued for the reverse causal direction or reciprocal causality. Others have confounded these con-cepts—in conjunction with political interest—in measures of political "sophistica-tion" or "expertise." We collected panel data (N = 1,109) on a national sample in June and November 2000. We employed a model comparison approach to identify the best fitting model among alternatives that included models of unidirectional and reciprocal causality in both lagged and synchronous models, controlling for prior political interest and various demographic factors. The data are most consistent with a model of causality that is unidirectional running from Time 2 measures of news use and political discussion to Time 2 political knowledge.

This study takes a process-oriented approach to understand the current status of political discussion research and identifies discussion engagement—discussion attention and integrative discussion—as an unexplored but important facet of political discussion. As a block, these two variables of discussion engagement independently accounted for significant variance in two criterion variables of political engagement, political knowledge and political participation, after controlling for not only a host of demographic, attitudinal, and media use variables but also three most researched structural features of political discussion—network size, discussion frequency, and network heterogeneity. In addition, the study analyzes the interplay between various attributes of political discussion in an attempt to untangle the dynamic relationships among features of political discussion in politics. Findings suggest that whether network size and heterogeneity mobilize or demobilize citizens may depend on whether they are attentively and frequently discussing political issues with others.

In recent years, research has come to recognize that nonpolitical associations have unintended but important consequences for citizens’ participation in public affairs. Scholars theorize that these associational activities—embedded within social networks and sustained by confidence in the motives of others—encourage and facilitate participation in civic life. This study tests and broadens these theses by (1) assessing the relative impact of different types of associational activities (i.e., informal socializing, public attendance, and religious participation) and (2) examining interactive relationships between these activities and generalized interpersonal trust. Findings show that all of these associational activities significantly contribute to civic engagement. Furthermore, all three interactions between the social associations and social trust are significant, indicating that those involved in associational activities are even more likely to become civic participants when they hold trusting attitudes toward others.

This study tests 2 competing theoretical models that attempt to understand the roles that broadband Internet plays in society. The linear model posits that the gains or harms introduced by the Internet via narrowband will further increase with the adoption of broadband. On the contrary, the differential gains model proposes that changes stemming from advances to different stages of Internet connection technology should be unique to each technological advance. Findings show that support for these models was contingent upon the domain that each criterion variable represents. For hard engagement, such as political discussion, hard knowledge, and civic participation, there was support for the differential gains model, but for soft engagement, such as informal socializing and soft knowledge, the linear model was supported.

We focus on the relationships among three types of television viewing (news, police reality, and crime drama) and attitudes toward capital punishment and handguns, as well as the likelihood of actually owning a handgun. A host of exogenous variables are treated as predictors of television use, support for police authority, fear of crime, and our criterion variables. A series of direct and indirect relationships are assessed. Analysis suggests that viewing police reality shows is both directly and indirectly related to the endorsement of capital punishment and handgun ownership, while also directly predicting a greater likelihood of actual handgun ownership. In addition, TV news viewing predicts fear of crime in audience members, and this fear contributes to the endorsement of capital punishment and handgun ownership. Crime drama viewing is positively related to support for the death penalty.