Bruce Bimber

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB

We take two approaches to understanding democratically corrosive sentiment (DCS) in the US, which we operationalize in terms of populist attitudes, conspiracy beliefs, and expectation of fraud in the next election. Our first approach is media use, which is not well understood as a correlate of DCS beyond generalities about the harms of social media...

Political participation opportunities have been expanding for years, most recently through digital tools. Social media platforms have become well integrated into civic and political participation. Using a cross-national sample from the United States, United Kingdom and France, this article examines whether acts of participation associated with soci...

There is an inconclusive debate on whether male and female users of social media platforms engage with political content differently. While some highlight minimal differences, others evidence an engagement gap where male are more visible within online environments. Drawing on data from a representative survey of citizens in France, the UK and USA,...

This study examines the phenomena of political unfriending and content removal on social media in three Western democracies-France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We seek to understand the role of crosscutting discussion, confrontational discussion style, and ideological extremity in triggering unfriending and content removal on social...

The effects of media exposure differ when people are given the opportunity to choose content compared to when they are forced to view it. Contemporary explanations propose that differences between forced and selected exposure occur because of between-subject differences. We propose that differences also result from within-subject psychological reac...

This study analyzes the predictors of 2 types of media selectivity: interest-based (i.e., choice of entertainment over politics) and partisan (i.e., choice of pro-attitudinal over counter-attitudinal or balanced news). Relying on a large survey-based experiment, we find that issue-specific engagement variables, including perceived issue understandi...

Recent research on activism in the context of digital media has argued that organizing can happen outside of organizations and even without SMOs. This work has been focused primarily on the "supply side" of participation. In this article, we expand this line of work by focusing on the "demand side." We examine the distinction between self-directed...

Research dealing with the nexus of collective action, political participation, and digital media confronts three challenges: conceptualizing digital media as an influence on human behavior, finding common ground among new theories, and connecting together individual-level models with structural-level theories. This article addresses these challenge...

This study examines mediators of the relationship between news consumption and political participation in the contemporary news environment. We test the differential effects exerted by pro- and counter-attitudinal news compared with balanced news on intended participation. Our primary objective is to model three paths that may link news exposure an...

Processes of disagreement are important to public deliberation, but research has not examined the dynamics of disagreement in deliberation of political topics with respect to effects of the channel of interaction. This study analyzes the discussions generated via an experiment in which discussants were randomly assigned either to deliberate online...

This essay provides a descriptive interpretation of the role of digital media in the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 with a focus on two themes: personalized political communication and the commodification of digital media as tools. The essay covers campaign finance strategy, voter mobilization on the ground, innovation in social media,...

In an earlier study, we examined the relationship between digital media use and six acts of political participation in the United States between 1996 and 2008. We found that digital media use was associated with participation more broadly in 2008 than in preceding years and concluded with a question about whether the relationship between digital me...

Political interest is a potentially important moderator of the relationship between digital media use and traditional forms of political participation. We theorize that the interaction between interest and digital media can be either positive or negative, depending on whether the action is voting, an elite-directed act, or a self-directed act. To t...

Selective exposure has been studied for more than half a century, but little research has systematically analyzed the implications of various methodological choices inherent in these designs. We examine how four choices affect results in studies of selectivity in political contexts: including an entertainment option, including or excluding moderate...

An ongoing debate concerns the extent to which political consumerism constitutes political behavior. To address this debate, researchers have examined several predictors of political consumerism, but have not focused on its communicative dimensions, especially with respect to digital media. In this study we conceptualize political consumerism as a...

Research shows that digital media use is positively related to political participation. However, this relationship does not appear in all studies. To date, researchers have generally treated inconsistent findings from study to study and from election to election as an empirical problem that reflects differences in measurement and model specificatio...

We consider a form of media effect involving comparisons between similar events or problems that differ in magnitude along some common dimension. We propose that such comparisons involve "ordinal priming" when they establish a single schema for evaluation and suggest a rank order among two or more cases, as in the statement that the current economi...

Introduction As new technologies are evolving worldwide, many theoretical challenges have arisen that surpass the frameworks used so far to pose questions about digital media and citizens’ lives. There is a great need for broader perspectives to understand what is common and what is different in emerging political practices across nations. That nee...

Challenging the notion that digital media render traditional, formal organizations irrelevant, this book offers a new theory of collective action and organizing. Based on extensive surveys and interviews with members of three influential and distinctive organizations in the United States - The American Legion, AARP and MoveOn - the authors reconcep...

What is the relationship between new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the study of global political communication? This article reflects briefly on four important aspects of this complex question. We begin at the most concrete level, outlining several prominent empirical opportunities and challenges created by a globally interc...

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Br...

Not availablePresentation José Manuel Robles Abstract of Information and American Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2003 Bruce Bimber From Regimes to Ecologies: Globalizing Bruce Bimber’s Model of Information and Politics Steven Livingston Internet, new forms of power and democracy José Luís Garcia Internet: A Technological Tool and Changes in...

How are the news media framing nanoscale science and technology? Primary concerns in the literature have been how news media weigh risks and benefits and how they classify nano with respect to news categories such as business, culture, discovery, or medicine. The authors contribute a new perspective by focusing on issue frames involving how stories...

What can be done to promote student–instructor interaction in a large lecture class? One approach is to use a personal response system (or “clickers”) in which students press a button on a hand-held remote control device corresponding to their answer to a multiple choice question projected on a screen, then see the class distribution of answers on...

This study compares Google News to LexisNexis for finding stories in the New York Times, eight large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and all English-language news outlets in each database. Inter-database agreement between Google News and LexisNexis ranged from 29% to 83%, with much of the discrepancy due to wire service exclusions: LexisNexis missed h...

Increased access to the Internet has dramatically increased the sources from which students can deliberately or accidentally copy information. This paper discusses our motivation to design, implement, and deploy an Internet based plagiarism detection system, called PAIRwise, to address this growing problem. We give details as to how we detect plagi...

The authors analyzed self-reported SAT scores and actual SAT scores for five different samples of college students (N = 650). Students overestimated their actual SAT scores by an average of 25 points (SD = 81, d = 0.31), with 10% under-reporting, 51% reporting accurately, and 39% over-reporting, indicating a systematic bias towards over-reporting....

We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode...

We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode...

Collective action theory, which is widely applied to explain human phenomena in which public goods are at stake, traditionally rests on at least two main tenets: that individuals confront discrete decisions about free riding and that formal organization is central to locating and contacting potential participants in collective action, motivating th...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-208). by Bruce A. Bimber. Ph.D.

In this paper we present a framework for plagiarism detection. Rather than exhaustively or randomly searching sentences in a student paper on the Internet for possible sources of borrowed ideas in student's text, we take a middle ground. With intelligent selection of sentences from papers we will show that examples of plagiarism can be found just a...

College students exploit information technology to cheat on papers and assignments, but for the most part university faculty employ few technological techniques to detect cheating. This paper reports on a trial of software for the detection of cheating in a large undergraduate survey class. The paper discusses the decision to adopt electronic means...

Incorporating a significant amount of technology into a classroom is an important, but extremely difficult task. In this paper we describe the next generation of the UCSB digital classroom, called the Collaborative Technologies Lab (CTL). The primary goal of the CTL is to investigate the challenges of deploying technology for technology's sake. We...

As more universities and research institutions develop digital classrooms, a common theme is arising: the need to manage complexity. As more technology is added to a classroom in order to facilitate the presentation, transmission and recording of digital media, the complexity of the environment increases dramatically. By planning the design and imp...

To provide a comprehensive evaluation of the internet in American democracy, Bruce Bimber sets the contemporary information revolution in historical context, asserting that past developments in American history offer important lessons for understanding how the internet is affecting politics. He examines how citizens and organizations use it for pol...

Some aspects of democracy appear more sensitive than others to the availability throughout society of political information. Individual-level political engagement poses a puzzle in this regard. An instrumentalquantitative conception of information that is central to rational theories and is also found in some behavioral theories of participation ap...

Objective. This paper evaluates differences in men's and women's presence on the Internet, testing for the presence of gender-specific causes for different rates of Internet use. Methods. The paper presents new survey data collected by the author in 1996, 1998, and 1999 showing trends in Internet use, and presents regression models of Internet acce...

The Internet offers a new means by which citizens may contact government to express their views or concerns, and it raises interesting empirical and theoretical questions about whether citizen contacts are affected by communication media. This article uses survey data to explore hypotheses about whether means of communication shape contacting activ...

this paper is to scrutinize the changes in technology assessment and articulate a vision for its reconstitution in the US. It is vital to raise the importance of technology assessment to match the resurgent importance of, and controversy around, technology itself, and to facilitate progressive, rather than problematic, technological 3

This article examines the extent of Internet-based political mobilization during the 1996 election season. Using a sample of politically engaged Internet users from an online survey, along with data from random-digit-dial phone surveys, the article analyzes the extent of political use of the Internet and the nature of contacts with citizens made by...

The swift development of the Internet has inspired two sorts of claims that large-scale transformations in the structure of political influence in the U.S. are under way: the populist claim that the Internet will erode the influence of organized groups and political elites, and the community-building claim that the Internet will cause a restructuri...

The pluralistic logic of American government facilitates the creation of new agencies while posing obstacles to their elimination, making the outright closure of an agency an unusual event. The Republican majority elected to Congress in 1994 announced a priority of attempting that feat. This article examines the first of its few successes, the term...

It is possible to give a concrete meaning to the usually vague concept of decentralization by examining four core components. First, at the crux of decentralization is a downward shift in decision-making power. Administrative decentralization entails shifts internal to the institution. Political decentralization shifts authority to external forces...

There are competing claims about the role of information and expertise in congressional politics, and empirically-based definitions and categorizations differ. Much of the empirical literature suggests that features of congressional structure shape the value of information in the policy process, but the implications of this institutional approach h...

The literature on Marx reveals conflicting claims about the role of technology in social change. Much of the debate is attributable to confusion over what is meant by `technological determinism' (TD). There are several approaches to this concept: `Norm-Based Accounts' interpret TD as a chiefly cultural phenomenon; `Unintended Consequences Accounts'...

The authors analyzed self-reported SAT scores and actual SAT scores for 285 college students. Students overestimated their actual SAT scores by an average of 23 points (SD = 65, d = .72), with 7% under-reporting, 53% reporting accurately, and 40% over-reporting, indicating a systematic bias towards over-reporting. The amount of over-reporting was g...

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Incl. bibl.