Holly Teresi, Ph.D.

holly.teresi@gmail.com

Georgia State University

Country: United States (Georgia)

Research Interests

Networks And Politics

Political Communication

Countries of Interest

United States

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2014) Wired to mobilize: The effect of social networking messages on voter turnout, The Social Science Journal

Teresi, Holly & Michelson, Melissa. (2014). Wired to mobilize: The effect of social networking messages on voter turnout. The Social Science Journal. 52. 10.1016/j.soscij.2014.09.004. Recent scholarship has documented the effect of online social networking on political participation, a relationship hypothesized to be due to the generation of social capital. This paper tests the hypothesis that impersonal get-out-the-vote messages delivered via an online social network can increase voter turnout. Specifically, this study uses a field experiment of randomly assigned students from a large southern public university to test the effect of exposure to political messages via Facebook on the likelihood of them voting in the November 2010 election. The results indicate that encouragements to vote delivered through a social networking site can have substantively large effects on political behavior.

(2013) Browsing Alone: The Differential Impact of Internet Platforms on Political Participation, Japanese Journal of Political Science

Ikeda, Ken'ichi & Richey, Sean & Teresi, Holly. (2013). Browsing Alone: The Differential Impact of Internet Platforms on Political Participation. Japanese Journal of Political Science. 14. 10.1017/S1468109913000121. We research the political impact of how users access the Internet. Recent research suggests that Internet usage may promote political participation. Internet usage is proposed to be beneficial because it increases activity in diverse politicized social networks and through greater access to information. Even though Internet usage may begin as a non-political activity, we outline several reasons to believe that it may spark later political participation. This impact, however, is likely to be non-existent in new forms of Internet browsing such as through mobile phones, where users do less full-scale browsing. The more difficult browsing interface of mobile phones reduces activity in chat rooms and in-depth browsing of online sources of information which promote participation. To test these ideas, we use nationally representative survey data from Japan, a country which has more pronounced usage of mobile phone browsing. Using a Seemingly Unrelated Regression Model, we also show that the chief determinants of using PC's over mobile phones for Internet browsing are age and education. We then show that PC-based Internet activity correlates with increased political participation, but mobile phone usage correlates with less participation.