Methodological paper on political participation indexes in political communication research

Just had a paper accepted for publication by the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, in which I demonstrate the benefits of an approach for studying political participation and communication that’s somewhat different from the one conventionally used in political communication and political science. Basically, I suggest not to aggregate political participation items into a single “index” whenever we try to delineate precise effects of different media and communication behaviors on political participation. If we do aggregate, often we won’t be able to find many nuanced theoretically interesting effects.

Here's a summary.