Both books under review focus on the impact of digital media on political engagement. In Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide, editors Eva Anduiza, Michael J. Jensen, and Laia Jorba define “political engagement” as falling along three dimensions: participation, information consumption, and attitudes. In contrast, Catie Snow Bailard focuses in Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword on citizen satisfaction, which causes her to consider questions about attitudes and participation, as well as the way information consumption shapes both. Each volume offers an important perspective on the impact that digital media are having on politics worldwide.

In her book, Bailard considers the impact that the Internet has on citizens’ satisfaction with, and evaluation of, their governments’ performances in relation to democratic practices. She argues that Internet use changes the range and quality of information available to citizens and changes the criteria citizens use to measure government performance. She asserts that in democratic systems, the Internet will increase satisfaction with government, while in nondemocratic systems, it will decrease satisfaction. She puts forth the concepts of “mirror-holding” and “window-opening” as central to the shaping of citizen satisfaction. Mirror-holding is related to the new quantity of information and counternarratives outside traditional media systems that the Internet offers to individuals. The window-opening function of the Internet grants individuals a broader view of how other governments are operating, allowing for comparisons of efficacy with their own governments.

Bailard structures Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword around the testing of four hypotheses. First, in nations with high-functioning democracies, Internet use will boost satisfaction—and will achieve the opposite in low-functioning democracies. To test Hypothesis 1, the author uses a random effects regression to examine the impact of Internet penetration on citizen satisfaction in democracy in 73 countries during a five-year period. Her findings confirm this hypothesis.

The second hypothesis is that citizens using the Internet are able to reevaluate their governments’ democratic performances. Here, Bailard moves her testing to the individual level—looking at survey responses of more than 45,000 people in 47 countries with varying levels of Internet penetration. As with Hypothesis 1, Bailard confirms her second hypothesis, finding that satisfaction among Internet users is higher than among nonusers.

Third, the author proposes that in developing democracies, Internet users are more likely to consider democracy in relation to advanced democracies, adopting values for the same democratic norms. To test this, Bailard conducted field experiments in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She offered two months of free Internet usage to individuals and used questionnaires to measure the effect of Internet exposure on subjects’ satisfaction with their democracy. Her findings confirm Hypothesis 3, but with an interesting caveat. In relation to attitudes toward democratization, she found that people exposed to the Internet were marginally more inclined to say that if their present system of government could not produce results soon, then a new system of government should be tried.

Finally, Hypothesis 4 is that government processes that do not meet democratic standards are more likely to be upsetting to Internet users than processes that do meet such standards. To test this, Bailard conducted a field experiment in Tanzania with a focus on the 2010 electoral process there. She confirmed Hypothesis 4, finding that Internet users were more likely to be critical of the elections than were nonusers.

Bailard offers an interesting look at a specific potential impact of the Internet around the world—how citizens feel about their governments—an area that has not been examined closely in this way. Even though her focus is on proving her hypotheses, she takes the time to discuss issues related to her study, such as whether it is meaningful to distinguish between mobile phone use and computer use when accessing the Internet (arguing that it is not).

The author also discusses surprising findings, such as no drop in satisfaction among citizens following the 2008 financial crisis. This finding caused her to test again in 2010—when she again finds no drop. However, her example from 2008 illustrates a potential set of questions about her findings—particularly in light of citizen satisfaction in democracies. For instance, in the United States (which, it should be noted, is not included in her book), a 2014 Pew Research study found that public trust in the U.S. government was at a historic low, a trend that emerged in 2001 and has also been seen in other established democracies (“Public Trust in Government,” Pew Research Center: U.S. Politics & Policy. http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-government). Bailard briefly addresses issues of trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina in relation to a finding that Internet users were somewhat more likely to distrust the government, hypothesizing that this result was related to contextual elements, but her argument about this finding overlooks what appears to be a broader trend across established democracies.

Whereas Bailard’s study is a closely focused look at the impact of the Internet on citizen satisfaction, Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide is a comparative look that draws on in-depth analyses from around the world. The volume’s focus is on digital media and public engagement, and it aims to examine three major components of this larger topic.

First, editors Anduiza, Jensen, and Jorba focus on the direct and indirect ways in which digital media are impacting citizens’ political involvement. Second, their volume examines political orientations, resources, and other factors, such as how people use technology, in order to see whether those involved online are different in some way from those who are not. Third, the book argues that political structures and practices are not separate from digital media and, therefore, the authors seek to understand the impact of contextual factors on the relationship between digital media and political engagement.

The volume begins with a chapter on the global context, moving from there to the United States and the United Kingdom and then to Western European cases. The final three chapters focus on Latin America, Islamic countries, and China. Beyond the overarching themes, the chapters are not uniform in their focuses, although each has a solid grounding in existing literature. For instance, the chapter comparing the United States and the UK seeks to explain the Internet’s role in promoting political knowledge and engagement, while the chapter about the five Latin American countries addresses the ways that the use of digital media is changing patterns of civic and political involvement among civil society organizations.

Tying together this diversity of concerns, the editors assert that the combined cases provide evidence that digital media are having a significant effect on political engagement worldwide. This political engagement, they argue, is varied and includes both attitudinal change and behavioral change. They assert that the chapters about Europe, as well as about the United States, illustrate the varying positive effects that Internet use has on political engagement in established democracies. The chapters that consider places with limited political freedoms suggest that engagement in such countries is more varied than in countries with greater political freedoms—and, interestingly, that the impact of digital media is stronger in these restrictive environments.

The editors are careful to point out that although there is evidence of an observable impact of Internet use on political engagement across cases in the volume, the effects are not uniform and context matters. For instance, they point out that the chapters show that in places that are more politically open than others, digital politics is integrated into the interactions between governments and citizens; in contrast, where Internet diffusion is low, Internet use is concentrated in certain segments of the population, namely, among more privileged classes. Even in places with similar diffusion levels, it is possible to see differences in the amount and type of online political engagement, as the chapter focused on Germany points out—illustrating the differences in the way Germans and Americans engage the political opportunities afforded by the Internet.

A strength of this volume is that the editors have carefully examined the findings in each internal chapter before extrapolating common themes and findings between chapters. That said, the chapters themselves do not necessarily speak to one another beyond having a common subject and common themes. In addition, for a volume on political engagement worldwide, this one leaves out much of the world. The three chapters (of 11 body chapters) that engage with multiple case studies from Latin America, the Islamic world, and China aside, the majority of the world remains unrepresented. While the volume is enjoyable to read, the number of chapters on the United States and Western Europe tip the scales fairly heavily to places that have already been discussed in the literature.

Both works under review purport to speak about global patterns, and both succeed in contributing to the scholarship on global Internet use. Taken together, they offer complementary approaches to an understanding of the impact of digital media on political processes. For instance, while Bailard’s approach is engaged with context to some extent, her real interest appears to be on producing generalizable results. Much of the work on the impact of the Internet on global political processes has focused on single-case studies, and so her volume serves a valuable purpose in looking across countries with varying regime types.

In contrast, the editors allow their volume’s findings to emerge from a diversity of case studies. For instance, the contents of their chapters would confirm, although not directly, Bailard’s “mirror-holding” and “window-opening” concepts. However, the authors in the edited volume would likely argue, in return, that the extent and shape of both the mirror and the window would have everything to do with national context, so that while the concepts are generalizable, what they might look like within each context may not be. Their “messier” approach is, therefore, able to deal with the idiosyncrasies of different contexts, the differences between cases, and the “why” of outcomes more handily than can Bailard’s approach. When read together, these volumes offer important insights into the connections between Internet technologies and democratic politics.