Tien-Tsung Lee of the University of Kansas, and Yuki Fujioka of Georgia State University analyzed data from the Taiwan Communication Survey (TCS) from 2013, looking at which news and information sources are connected to civic and political participation. Their sample included 2 000 Taiwanese adults.

Print newspaper reading was positively associated with both online and offline political participation, the results show.

People who participate in politics online, search the web through their phone frequently, but do not necessarily read news on the internet. They do read a larger number of print newspapers and listen to the radio more often than the average respondent, Lee and Fujioka describe.

Interestingly, reading news on the internet was not a significant predictor of online participation, the authors found. For civic participation, print newspaper reading was not a significant factor. For these people, radio was the only relevant information source.

The article “Print newspaper readers more politically active” was published in Newspaper Research Journal and is available online (free abstract).

Picture: 941028-中時工會抗議-25 by Lennon Wong, license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0