The Impact Of Media Use On Female Political Participation

Mass media is an important way of individual political modernization.With the development of the country and social progress,mass media has gradually become an important tool for people to master policy information,learn political thoughts and acquire political knowledge in their work and life.It not only changed people’s way of life,but also influenced people’s attitude and emotion towards politics imperceptibly,and then shaped people’s political behavior.Is women’s political participation related to media use? Will traditional media use and new media use have different effects on women’s political participation? If so,what is the mechanism by which this effect is produced? This is the central issue of this study.To solve the above problems,this study uses the survey data of the seventh Wave of World Values survey in Chinese mainland,and uses SPSS26.0 to conduct a descriptive analysis of women and media use and participation.On this basis,a binary Logistic regression model is established to analyze the impact of media use on women’s political participation.The results show that:(1)In terms of the frequency of media use,the frequency of new media use by Chinese women is higher than that of traditional media,among which the frequency of mobile phone use is the highest,followed by TV,social media(wechat,Weibo),computer Internet,radio and newspaper rank the last.(2)From the overall situation of female political participation,among the six indicators selected,the highest participation rate is "contacting government officials",with 43.1% of women participating;"Encouraging others to vote" and "signing an online petition" were followed by 40 percent and 31 percent,respectively."Organizing political activities and protests" had the lowest rate of female political participation,at 11.12 percent.(3)From the analysis results of group differences,female political participation is significantly affected by age,religious belief,marital status and subjective social class,while education level and income level have no significant impact on female political participation.(4)Both traditional media and new media have a significant positive impact on female political participation.Based on the above empirical analysis results,this paper further discusses the following two aspects: First,the overall level of female political participation is not high,the main reason may be that women do not understand the ways of political participation and related policies.Since both traditional media and new media are significantly positively correlated with female political participation,we can explore ways to enhance female political participation from the perspective of media use.Second,compared with traditional media,new media has advantages such as fast transmission speed and rich content.However,the users of new media are mainly young people,while the middle-aged and the elderly mainly use traditional media.Therefore,it is necessary to take effective measures to narrow the digital gap between different female groups and promote the digital integration of middle-aged and elderly female groups in the context of the deepening of the aging degree.