Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it