Antecedents of intentional and incidental exposure modes on social media and consequences for political participation: a panel study

This study investigates antecedents and consequences of incidental and intentional exposure behavior to political information on social media. Based on the Social Media Political Participation Model (SMPPM), we investigated how political and non-political motivations predict intentional and incidental exposure modes while accounting for moderators (i.e., personal curation skills and the frequency of social media political exposure). We also examined how intentional and incidental exposure modes affect low- and high-effort political participation. We rely on data from a two-wave panel survey based on representative quotas for the Austrian population (N = 559) to run autoregressive models. Political information motivation predicted the intentional mode, and this relationship was stronger with rising levels of curation skills. By contrast, entertainment and social interaction motivations increased individuals’ incidental exposure mode. The intentional mode led to low-effort political participation but not to high-effort participation. However, the incidental mode was unrelated to both low- and high-effort participation.