The Effects of Political Social Media Use on Efficacy and Cynicism in the 2016 Presidential Election

This chapter seeks to expand scholarly understanding of the antecedents and effects of social media by examining the cross-lagged relationships between political uses of social media and facets of democratic efficacy. It presents results from a two-wave panel study conducted during the 2016 US presidential election to assess the associations between the consumption and production of political content on social media and the outcomes. The chapter finds that political information efficacy is associated with an increase in the production and consumption of political information on social media. It identifies an association between external political efficacy and the production/consumption of social media in the first wave of the data collection, the association vanished under the more rigorous tests imposed by the panel design. The chapter considers research on political uses of social media to generate theoretical expectations about the relationship between cynicism, efficacy, and political information efficacy (PIE), as well as the production and consumption of political content on social media.