Hai’s new article on political forums to appear in IJPOR

Hai’s new article on political forums to appear in IJPOR

Hai Liang’s new article, entitled “Cultural difference, social values, or political systems? Predicting willingness to engage in online political discussion in 75 societies” and coauthored with Fei Shen, will appear in International Journal of Public Opinion Research this year. This is the third article he has published in SSCI-indexed journals. Combining discussion forum data from 75 countries with country-level indices, we examine the relationships between culture traditions, value orientation, democracy and the likelihood of opinion expression in political forums. We find that political institution and civic culture are the most robust predictors of willingness to express one’s ideas online – they explain more than 28 percent of the variance in our model. In democracies and countries with higher self-expression value orientation, internet users were more likely to leave comments after reading a post. Our findings suggest that willingness to engage in political conversation in online forums is not only influenced by micro-individualistic factors such as trust, efficacy, and motivations to express one’s viewpoints, but also determined by macro-societal variables. (JZ)