Why Does the Press Still Matter? Explaining the Conditional Effects of Online Mobilization of Protest on Newspaper Market Structures in Asia

Abstract

In this study, it is argued that Internet-enabled opportunities for mobilization of elite-challenging politics are constrained by media systems in East and Southeast Asia. Particularly, Asian media systems are assumed to produce institutional constraints on digitally-mediated contexts of protest in that the wide reach of traditional news outlets increases the cost of access to alternative information sources. Multi-level modeling is thus used to test whether the impact of Internet use on unconventional political participation at the individual level is moderated by the presence of a mass-circulation print media at the countrywide level. The data came from the World Press Trends for media-system variables and the Asian Barometer Survey for the individual-level variables. It was found that, because Asian countries have a larger circulation of newspapers, unconventional political participation is predicted by Internet use to a lesser extent, but the impact of political interest was shown to increase. The findings suggest that, when media systems are structured by the development of a mass-circulation press, the mobilization capacity of digital networks is constrained by high information costs imposed by institutions on civil-society voices. Even if Internet use reduces the costs of grassroots organizing, its capacity to generate such organizing is contingent on users’ political interest to overcome the barriers to alternative information sources. Discussion is undertaken to address the political implications of Asian media systems.