Media Use and Political Participation in China: Taking Three National Large-N Surveys as Examples

In the age of continuous media change and the coexistence of multiple forms of media, the relationship between the public’s media use and political participation is an urgent area of study. This paper makes use of large national sample surveys from 2002, 2011, and 2015, summarizes the change of the public’s media use by descriptive statistics analysis, and finds that while the Internet has become an important communication channel, the use of Internet for political information and political participation is still overestimated. Compared to the weak impact of different media channels for political information on political participation, the frequency of media exposure and Internet use play a significant role in political participation. Because of the negative effect of the frequency of Internet use on political participation, the democratization function of the Internet needs to be treated with caution. This paper describes media use and its roles in contemporary China, analyzes the impact of media use on political participation, and extends the cross-cultural application of the theory of political communication.