The final presentation in this final session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhieh Lor, Jihyang Choi, and Jaehyun Lee, who introduce the idea of a virtuous circle between nerds, political efficacy, and political participation. However, such active citizenship has continued to evolve, and new forms of political engagement like hashtag activism have emerged in the meantime – so how do people engage with politics today? What is their political participation repertoire?
Such political participation may include offline and online participation, lifestyle politics, and selective issue-based participation; the repertoire encompassing these participation styles may vary widely from person to person.
The present study explored this for people in Korea: it examined their news usage, news attention, and ‘news finds me’ perceptions, and the effects of such news exposure approaches to political participation repertoires. This is also likely to be affected by an individual’s levels of objective and subjective political knowledge and internal political efficacy. The study examined this through a two-wave survey which tested for a range of factors.
This found four categories of individuals, with environmental participatory (65%, focussing on environmental issues; low news exposure; high objective political knowledge), lifestyle-participatory (17%, focussing on lifestyle; low news exposure; low objective political knowledge), interpersonal communication and lifestyle-participatory (11%, also affected by interpersonal communication; high news exposure; high objective political knowledge), and omnivore-participatory (7%, highly active and high news exposure; low objective political knowledge) styles.
This disrupts the virtuous circle: confidence, not competence, drives participation, and entertainment and passive news consumption are critical. How is this likely to affect the quality of democratic participation?
