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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

              35
                The sampling error is about 3.5 percent in each survey.
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