The Impacts of Digital Literacy on Citizen Civic Engagement—Evidence from China

Abstract

The use of information and communication technologies and the internet is becoming more and more important in people's lives. The ability to make use of these technologies turns out to be a new kind of literacy–digital literacy. Besides, engaging in civic life is a basic citizen right. As a form of civic engagement, political participation is largely shaped by the use of internet and online communities. We expect that digital literacy offers people capabilities to speak out their viewpoints in online spaces. Using data from China collected in 2017, we investigate empirically the relationship between digital literacy and individual online political participation. We measure online political participation as online rights protection for oneself and for others. Estimation results show a positive and significant effect of digital literacy on online political participation. For those who care about news and those who believe that the government workers pay attention to the public's thoughts online, the impact of digital literacy is larger than that for the general population. We propose that lack of digital literacy is a barrier for people to participate in online political activities in China. We also suggest policies for promoting digital literacy.

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