Social Media Use, Political trust and Political Participation Among Urban Indian Youth: Evidence from Bengaluru

Abstract

Political engagement in its digital form has pushed social media to the centre of civic discourse. However, the link between online social media activity and its manifestation to offline political participation has not been properly studied, especially in non-western democracies. This study investigates three dimensions of engagement on social media, political discussion, political news sharing and political news consumption affect online and offline political participation of Indian youth using trust as a mediator and gender, age and education as moderators. Using a sample size of 425 respondents in the age group of 18-30, the study uses exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) with bootstrapping. Results indicate that all these three dimensions significantly and positively predict trust in political institutions, which in turn strongly predicts offline (β=0.548) and online (β=0.440) political participation. Political trust consistently mediates this relationship. Moderation analysis shows that gender amplifies the effect of news consumption and sharing on trust. Age strengthens the effects of political discussion and news consumption. Education plays the role of a moderator only the news consumption-trust relationship. The model explains a variance of 36.6% in offline participation and 22.6% in online participation. These findings show that political trust is a crucial bridge between digital engagement and civic action. This underlines its importance for democratic participation in the democracy of emerging economies. These findings are specifically true for urban cities in India with a high English-speaking population. This cannot be generalized for rural India or youth that speak regional languages.