Media effects research has established a positive relationship between media and news consumption and political action—a “more-more” pattern. This paper identifies a coexistent “more-less” pattern in which more political engagement on social media is associated with limited political behavior offline. Traditional approaches that treat media behavior as an independent variable and political behavior as dependent miss this finding. Instead, this paper treats configurations of media and political behavior as styles, identified through latent class analysis (LCA). The data come from an original survey of American citizens about their encounters with political content on social media, their media habits, and their online expression of political attitudes to assess whether and how these media behaviors undermine their political and civic engagement offline. The latent class analysis of these data reveals three styles, which we label “actives,” “passives,” and “armchair citizens” (i.e., more-less). We then seek to make sense of this armchair citizen style—who would choose this style of media and political participation? An LCA regression model predicting membership into the armchair citizen class suggests that armchair citizen style is associated with experiencing what Giddens’ called “ontological insecurity.”

媒体效应研究在媒体和新闻消费与政治行动之间建立了正相关关系——一种“更多”模式。本文确定了一种共存的“多-少”模式，在这种模式中，社交媒体上更多的政治参与与线下有限的政治行为相关联。将媒体行为视为独立变量并将政治行为视为相关变量的传统方法错过了这一发现。相反，本文将媒体配置​​和政治行为视为风格，通过潜在类别分析 (LCA) 识别。这些数据来自对美国公民的原始调查，内容涉及他们在社交媒体上遇到的政治内容、他们的媒体习惯、以及他们在网上表达的政治态度，以评估这些媒体行为是否以及如何破坏他们线下的政治和公民参与。这些数据的潜在类别分析揭示了三种风格，我们将其标记为“主动”、“被动”和“扶手椅公民”（即，多或少）。然后，我们试图理解这种扶手椅公民风格——谁会选择这种媒体和政治参与风格？LCA 回归模型预测扶手椅公民阶层的成员资格表明，扶手椅公民的风格与经历吉登斯所说的“本体论不安全感”有关。然后，我们试图理解这种扶手椅公民风格——谁会选择这种媒体和政治参与风格？LCA 回归模型预测扶手椅公民阶层的成员资格表明，扶手椅公民的风格与经历吉登斯所说的“本体论不安全感”有关。然后，我们试图理解这种扶手椅公民风格——谁会选择这种媒体和政治参与风格？LCA 回归模型预测扶手椅公民阶层的成员资格表明，扶手椅公民的风格与经历吉登斯所说的“本体论不安全感”有关。