The Study Of College Students’ Online Political Participation

The invention and the widely use of the internet has brought dramatic changes to our life. With the enhancement of the depth and breadth of the use of internet, all aspects of our social life has been affected. The public and political life has been affected, too. Actually, lots of researchers have been thought concerned about the influence role of the internet to our political life. However, we are still not clear to the possible consequences of the interaction between internet use and the civic political life. At the same time, most of the domestic research are still focus on the discuss from the existing theory.The research object of the study is online political participation. We use the civic voluntarism model(CVM) as our research model because it’s integrated, and quantitative analysis is carried to fully understand the conceptual structure and influence factors of the college students’online political participation. The CVM have three major component, including resources, engagement, and networks. Concretely, money and times, civic skills, political interest, efficacy, and partisan strength, workplaces, churches are all involved. We have built five research hypothesizes after we made several minor adjustments.Factorial analysis demonstrated that the college students’online political participation includes three aspects, namely the political related online behavior, the online acquirement of political information, and the political related online interaction. And the online time, civic skills, political interests, political efficacy, and the social group participation can militate the online political participation in different ways. The results revealed that, the online time has no appreciable impact on the participation behavior. In contrast, the civic skills can explain the level of online political participation well, especially the political related online behavior. Political interests can also explain the participation behavior. The three dimension of political efficacy(including political competence, political influence, and political understanding) interpret the online participation in their ways. Finally, the social group participation can also explain the online political participation slightly.