Socio-economic inequality in access to the internet has decreased in affluent societies. We investigate how gaining access to the internet affected the civic and political participation of relatively disadvantaged late adopters by studying a quasi-natural experiment related to the American National Election Studies. In 2012, when about 80% of the U.S. population was already connected to the internet, the ANES face-to-face study was for the first time supplemented with a sample of online respondents. Our design exploits the fact that the firm (KnowledgePanel) that conducted the web survey and provided the prerecruited respondents had equipped offline sample households with free laptop computers and internet access. The findings show that gaining internet access promotes late adopters’ civic participation and turnout, whereas there is no evidence for effects on the likelihood of political activism. These findings indicate that the closing of the digital divide alleviated participatory inequality.

Close

在富裕社会中，互联网接入方面的社会经济不平等有所减少。我们通过研究与美国全国选举研究相关的准自然实验，调查了访问互联网如何影响相对弱势的晚期采用者的公民和政治参与。 2012 年，当大约 80% 的美国人口已经连接到互联网时，ANES 面对面研究首次补充了在线受访者样本。我们的设计利用了这样一个事实：进行网络调查并向预先招募的受访者提供的公司（KnowledgePanel）为线下样本家庭配备了免费的笔记本电脑和互联网接入。研究结果表明，获得互联网接入可以促进后来者的公民参与和投票率，但没有证据表明对政治活动的可能性有影响。这些发现表明，数字鸿沟的缩小缓解了参与不平等。

关闭