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This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison in the field of spiral of silence online. We investigated the effects of user comments on public opinion perception and users' opinions and willingness to speak out in two cultural settings. Previous research has indicated that spiral of silence effects are greater in collectivistic versus individualistic cultures. Our study was conducted in South Korea, which is collectivistic and Germany, which is individualistic. To test the conformity and silencing hypotheses, we conducted online experiments using comments on online news sites that were congruent or incongruent with personal opinion. Our findings supported the conformity hypothesis and the impact of context on public opinion perception and personal opinion, which were shaped by comments in both countries. In Germany, effects were confined to highly collectivistic users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online petitions have become a widespread vehicle for contemporary political participation. While research tends to focus on individual factors for potential petitioners that influence signing, less attention has been paid to the influence of the actual text of petitions. This paper uses data from an original web-based survey experiment in Australia and Germany to test the influence of content factors: narratives (i.e., stories based on individual experiences and emotions) and popularity cues (i.e., high numbers of signatures) across two issues: climate change and welfare policy. We find that narratives within petition texts involve readers through the mechanism of transportation and motivate them to sign petitions, as do popularity cues. The effects of narratives were found across both countries but tended to be stronger in Germany than in Australia. We argue that our novel framework can be used for future research on how the presentation of issues shape contemporary political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to counter hate speech, media platforms have increasingly come to rely on ordinary users to fight abusive content. However, little is known about the predictors of this type of user engagement, which we refer to as online civic intervention (OCI). This article presents an experimental inquiry (N = 337) into whether solidarity citizenship norms promote OCI. The results show that users who support solidarity citizenship norms tend to have a greater propensity to flag hate comments and to engage in counterspeech. Overall, this indicates that "good citizens" are more inclined to stand up against hate speech online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content analyses have shown that German political parties make use of party Web sites in different ways, leading to unequal levels of mobilizing, informing, interacting, and participating features. This article examines whether or not the use of party Web sites has an impact on voting by using individual-level data from a representative survey of Germany in the European parliamentary elections of 2009. Although voting behavior was primarily influenced by well-known factors such as party identification and issue competence, evidence suggests that the use of party Web sites could have positive effects on voting for the Greens and the Social Democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]