Authors

Yerkebulan Sairambay¹;  ¹ The University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

Many scholars have studied the contributions of new media to political participation; however, fewer scholars have investigated how civic engagement mediates these contributions. One common issue that many scholars’ works face is the lack of clear differentiation between political participation and civic engagement. In this paper, I distinguish civic engagement from political participation and analyse how it mediates the contributions of new media to political participation among young people in Russia and Kazakhstan. I demonstrate that the civic engagement might foster the contributions of new media to political participation through enhancing young people’s political interest, political knowledge, political standpoint, and political efficacy as well as providing them with an experience of civic participation. This article is based on the analysis of data I collected during fieldwork in 54 places across Russia and Kazakhstan in 2019-2020 that include online surveys (n≤2,400), interviews (n≤90), and focus groups (n≤40). My study’s contribution is twofold: (1) I show a new approach in dealing with the debate about ‘clicktivism’/ ‘slacktivism’ versus ‘political mobilisation’ theories by analysing civic engagement as a separate concept, but at the same time as the one that mediates new-media-led political participation; (2) my cross-national comparative research adds in-depth findings from a non-Western post-communist perspective to the research area.