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We use original survey data from China to examine gender differences in exposure to, and the exchange of, information critical of their respective governments via the Internet and social media. Existing research suggests that men, generally, tend to be more politically engaged than women. We set out to test whether this extended to dissident political engagement in the Chinese context, and if it translated into variation in support for protest across gender, and across political context. Compared to other Asian nations, China has relatively high gender equality. Yet, due to the social, cultural, and political structures in China, we expect that women will be less active online, less likely to consume critical media, and less likely to engage in political dissidence than their male counterparts. We did find that men were more likely to be critically digitally engaged in China. However, we found that while critical digital engagement was positively related to support for protest, this effect was actually stronger for women in China. We offer some speculation regarding these counterintuitive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passive online media use refers to the act of merely reading and observing political information on a users' feed. Alternatively, active use refers to the conscious decision to share information, comment, challenge, fact check, or engage in related activity. We argue that these types of social media use have fundamentally different relationships to offline political participation. We use original survey data from Malaysia and the Philippines to test two propositions: (1) active political use, such as online protest or resistance, substitutes for offline protest and (2) passive users who encounter critical information and do not engage in active use will participate in offline protest. Our results confirm these expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Presidency. By Michael Foley. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester United Press, 2000, 374 pages. The British Presidency is a theoretical and historical review of the evolution of the British premiership [...]

The ability of authoritarian regimes to maintain power hinges, in part, on how well they are able to manipulate the flow of information to the masses. While authoritarian states have had success controlling traditional media, the growth of social media over the last decade has created new challenges for such regimes. The Russian experience offers an example of how an authoritarian regime responds to this potential threat. Because of the massive demonstrations surrounding the 2011-2012 Duma elections, the ruling Russian government suspected that social media provided a significant impetus for the demonstrations. Social media, through its dissemination of opposition blogs, could have helped drive negative attitudes about the governing party. As such, the government responded by employing strategies to tighten their grip on the digital flow of information. We use survey data to demonstrate that exposure to blogs via social media at the time of the demonstrations led many to believe that the elections were fraudulent. Ultimately, we contend that Russian fears concerning the importance of social media for the fomenting of opposition movements is well grounded. Social media can drive support for opposition in an autocratic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social networking sites are rapidly becoming a central component of the modern political campaign. We build a theoretical framework to explain how and why state party organizations are incorporating social networking sites - Facebook in particular - into their strategy to support their candidates. After offering some descriptive evidence documenting this outreach effort, we estimate a series of models to explain both some factors that contributed to the effectiveness of state parties' efforts to reach the public through Facebook in the 2010 state elections and how well the efforts complemented their larger effort to gain seats in their respective state legislatures. The results indicate, first, that Republicans seemed to do a better job of reaching the public through Facebook, that active use of Facebook by both parties attracted potential voters to their profiles, and that increased party expenditures also attracted people. Second, the results indicate that a growing Facebook following across the course of the election provided a larger electoral benefit for Democrats than Republicans. We offer some theoretical speculation to account for this inherent paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]