Political campaigns in Internet

This summer I had an honour to participate in research work about political campaigns in Internet, based on the case of the 2006 Latvian Parliamentary elections.

My responsibility was to analyse and to expound research foundings. Look, there is one of the results I wondered and I want to share :

In order to examine the relationship between the Internet use and political participation patterns respondents were asked about their political engagement before the elections, such as attending meetings with politicians, canvassing, donating funds.

Despite of one could not observe a statistically significant correlation between the use of the Internet and different forms of political participation to establish causality between the variables.

We established, as seen in table, that regular Internet users, and those who used the Internet for acquiring political information showed slightly higher levels of political participation than non-users.

		Regular Internet users		Internet non-users		Used the Internet to acquire political information
		Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
	Participated in elections	71.2%	28.5%	64.7%	35.3%	82.8%	16.8%
	Attended a meeting with politicians	21.9%	86.7%	5.9%	94.1%	19.5%	79.4%
	Donated funds to a political party	0.9%	97.9%	5.9%	94.1%	1.9%	95.7%
	Called others to go voting	2.6%	96.1%	0%	100%	5.1%	93%
	Canvassed at people’s homes	1.5%	97.2%	0%	100%	1.9%	96.1%