The purpose of this research is to find out explanatory variables of political opinion expression in the non-political online community. Despite increasing research interest for the online political behavior, previous attempts to draw a causal statement from between internet use and political behavior were not satisfactory on account of insufficiency of information about the actors in the online space. Therefore, this research aims to examine which variables could explain the actors’ political opinion expression behavior in the online space through empirical analysis.
In order to examine explanatory variable of political opinion expression, this research employed mobile survey method as data collection method and statistical inference like logistic regression for the data analysis. The samples are classified into two groups; participants group those who express their political opinion and spectator group those who do not express their political opinion in the non-political online community. These two groups are independent variable of logistic regression model(keyboardiator group=1, spectator group=0).
This research proposed two main hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 suggests political opinion expression is neither caused by socioeconomic variables such as gender, education, income, nor ‘strategic skills’ for online spaces’ non face-to-face circumstances. Hypothesis 2 which adopted psychological approach, is that political opinion expression is caused by ‘fear of isolation’, ‘experience of intolerant behavior(direct and indirect)’ such as insult, personal attack etc., ‘communication efficacy(internal and external)’. This hypothesis 2 is derived from Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of silence theory and it is modified releasing its assumptions and adopting other variables including communication efficacy and experience of intolerance from others.
The result shows that political expression in the non-political community is not influenced by socioeconomic variables while it is affected by psychological variables including fear of isolation, direct experience of intolerant behavior from others, internal communication efficacy.
In sum, the relationships between political opinion expression and the major independent variables are as follows:
(a) Fear of isolation affects negatively political opinion expression.
(b) Internal communication efficacy affects positively political opinion expression.
(c) Direct experience of intolerant behavior affects positively political opinion expression.
(d) The variables including perception of opinion climate and external efficacy, indirect experience of intolerant behavior can not be regarded as the explanatory variables.
In conclusion, actors in the non-political online community are quite active rather than passive. They are not affected by other community users’ opinion and threatening behavior. They are only affected by self-confidence and their personality traits. When I think of it, it’s because the online space is non face-to-face situation. However, the interpretation cannot be supported by the results of this research since the effect of non face-to-face situation is not explored in this research. This interpretation could be tested empirically through another research, so it is the important implication that this study has proposed more questions for further research.