A study from Pew Research suggests that the much-ballyhooed Democracy 2.0—the Web-based phenomenon that supposedly propelled Obama to the presidency and now has the GOP plotting to "do it in the Facebook"—may not be quite the upgrade that many thought. The evidence so far suggests that, instead of leveling the playing field between rich and poor when it comes to political participation, Democracy 2.0 has exacerbated the differences.

At a weekend conference on "IT and the public good," put on by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and hosted by Microsoft and Google, Henry E. Brady of UC Berkeley gave a talk entitled "Internet Political Participation and Socio-Economic Stratification in America." The talk covered data from a recent Pew survey on offline and online forms of political participation, in an effort to determine if online forms of political participation are less stratified by income bracket, or more stratified.

Brady said that the survey data was collected right before the November presidential election, and it drew on a random telephone sample of 2,251 adults over 18. The Pew Internet and American Life Project carried out the survey, with questions designed by Brady and his two collaborators, Kay Lehman Schlozman of Boston College and Sidney Verba of Harvard University.

The survey looked at a selection of "traditional" political acts, like writing a letter to an official or giving money to politics, and at a roughly analogous selection of Internet-based political acts, like writing an email to an official or giving money over the Web. It then broke down the percentages of respondents who reported doing these acts by socio-economic status, using the following quintiles:

Dimension of Socio-Economic Status SES quintiles Education Family income Top fifth College Graduate $110,000 Fourth fifth Some College $60,000 Middle fifth High School plus Technical or Trade $45,000 Second fifth High School Graduate $35,000 Bottom (1st) fifth Incomplete High School $15,000

Remarkably, what the survey found was that political participation was much more highly stratified by SES quintiles for Web-based political acts than for traditional political acts; this result held even when controlling for age and broadband access, and the stratification exists even within age groups. Indeed, the results for simple use of social networking sites weren't even remotely as stratified by SES.

The bottom line is that the web has not solved the problem of political stratification in America, and maybe we should not have thought that it could... the simple fact is that it hasn't lead to a Jeffersonian paradise in which everyone, regardless of their class, is equally involved in politics.

For respondents reporting participation in offline political acts, the stratification was 35 percent in the bottom quintile and 75 percent in the top quintile—more than a two-to-one ratio in participation between the top and bottom quintiles. For online, Web-based political acts, the participation rates were 11 percent in the bottom quintile and 65 percent in the top quintile—more than a six-to-one ratio. Compare these results to the numbers of respondents (ages 18-30) who reported using social networking sites: 52 percent in the bottom quintile and 82 percent in the top quintile. Clearly, the folks in the bottom quintile are going online to connect to others, but they aren't connecting politically.

The depressing take-home from Brady's talk was that, at least when it comes to participation in politics, the Web isn't quite the democratizing force that many of us had hoped it would be—in fact, it makes things worse.

"The bottom line," Brady told the audience, "is that the web has not solved the problem of political stratification in America, and maybe we should not have thought that it could... the simple fact is that it hasn't lead to a Jeffersonian paradise in which everyone, regardless of their class, is equally involved in politics."

Brady's brief talk offered no explanation for why Web-based political activity is more highly stratified than offline political activity, though he did offer to share some of his ideas on that subject during the question-and-answer session. Unfortunately, the conversation in the Q&A didn't return to that topic.

The Q&A conversation was interesting though, and of particular note was the response to Stanford political science professor Joshua Cohen's insistence that, despite conventional wisdom, the Internet was not, in fact, responsible for putting a Democrat in the White House this election cycle. Cohen argued that between two unpopular wars, an economic crisis, and President Bush's historic low approval rates, a Democratic victory was all but guaranteed this past November, and that the Internet had "nothing to do with it."

The audience and panelists seemed to agree with this point, but one particularly astute audience member then suggested that we could look to the Internet as the deciding factor in determining which Democrat we ended up with. This suggestion was very well received, even by Cohen, and most of the folks that I talked too at the rest of the conference seemed to agree that if it hadn't been for the Internet and the Obama campaign's deft use of the Web for fundraising and organizing, we'd be reading headlines about President Clinton.