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Political Individuals 12:12
democracy than the uninformed. But increased availability of low-cost
information is not likely to change greatly who is informed and who
is not.
DIFFUSION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
AMONG INDIVIDUALS
In a short period of time, a good deal of new evidence about informa-
tion technology and political engagement has become available from
surveys. Ideally, panel designs or quasiexperimental evidence tracking
individuals’ knowledge over time could be used to test for effects of the
information revolution, but such data are not available. Instead, sev-
eral useful cross-sectional surveys repeated every year or two can be
used to provide repeated snapshots of the public’s use of the Internet.
A number of inferences can be made from such evidence. For my anal-
ysis, I rely on several sources. The first is data I gathered through the
Omnibus Survey Program administered at the University of Maryland
in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2001, with funding from the National Science
Foundation and the Center for Information Technology and Society at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. These random digit–dial
probability samples each produced about 1,000 responses, and they em-
ployed design-effect weighting and poststratification weighting for sex,
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education, and region. The data include demographics and responses
to a set of questions about Internet use, including the kinds of polit-
ical use, although cost limitations prevented asking a complete set of
questions about political participation. The second source of data is
the 1996, 1998, and 2000 American National Election Studies (NES)
surveys. These surveys included very limited questions about Internet
use, but are useful for their data on political participation and use of
other media. The two sources of survey data are therefore complemen-
tary. I also supplement these surveys with evidence from other sources,
as noted.
Examining how citizen access to the Internet has grown in the United
States is a good starting point for considering all this data. Figure 5.1
shows growth in the percentage of adults in the United States who report
having access to the Internet from home, school, or workplace, based on
time series data from NES, the Pew Center for the People and the Press,
and my own surveys. As the figure shows, in mid- to late 1996, around
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The sampling error is about 3.5 percent in each survey.
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