The Impact of Political Efficacy, Discussion, and Expression Through Social Media on Youth Political Participation: A Systematic Review

Existing literature indicates that political efficacy, discussion, and expression are contributing factors in increasing political participation of youth through social media. However, recent literature has not been systematically reviewed. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper aims to synthesize the available evidence on the impact of these political activities on youth political participation through social media. Scopus and Science Direct databases were searched, and finally, 10 articles were critically evaluated. The results suggest that there is a relationship between political efficacy, discussion, and expression through social media on the political participation of youth. However, some studies showed that there is no relationship between online political expression and self-political efficacy. Social media plays a significant role in facilitating dynamic political behaviors. In conclusion, various determining effects on youth political participation through social media were detected. This paper provides a comprehensive knowledge of the variables that leads to a deeper understanding of methodological connections, literature gaps, and recommendations for future studies.


Introduction
In recent years, digital communications have changed the world drastically. Social media, for example, has significantly changed interpersonal interaction and patterns of contact, developed civic skills, promoted bridging social ties and also impacted on social and political discussion. Hundreds of researches have been conducted on different aspects of the use of social media (Ahmad et al., 2019). These researches indicate that the political activities through social media play a significant part in informing the public on political issues, sharing the information to its users and trying to engage them in offline political activities. These researches also conclude that political activities through social media, act as effective and engaging factors in political discussions, mobilizing voters and organizing political activities (Macafee & Simone, 2012;Skoric & Zhu, 2016). Besides, youth's political engagement across social media is also widely debated. The arguments ranges from very positive to extremely critical (Allaste & Saari, 2019). Those debates consider social media as a vital platform for political discussions, expression and political participation for the youth.
Social media has become coordinating tools for almost all political activities in the world since its emergence in 1997. Facebook and other social media platforms have been used to mobilize people to exchange information and ideas around the world in order to take part in political activities such as protest (Tiwari & Ghosh, 2017). For instances, the protest incidents of the Philippine President Joseph Estrada impeachment trial on 17 January 2001and the "London Youth Riots" in the summer of 2011 (Ariani & Astuti, 2016) were greatly mobilized by social media. In addition, some researchers argued that political activities through social media space could have significant roles in restructuring political institutions of the state, preventing the passing of state laws and challenging nation-states territorial sovereignty (Chitidze, 2015). Thus, social media could serve as a double-edged sword, as a result of the way we communicate and behave in social media, not just in groups and society, but with each other as well (Graciyal & Viswam, 2018).
At the same time, the issue of political participation through social media is getting more attention in political science studies. Researchers like Gil de Zúñiga (2012); Kushin & Yamamoto (2010); and Macafee & Simone (2012) have done extensive researches on the issue. Moreover, many researchers have changed their focus from social media usage such as the aspects of involvement and intensity to the precise types of social media activities. The two most studied forms of social media usage are searching information especially receiving news and communicating or sharing political views (Gil de Zúñiga, 2012;Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010;Macafee & Simone, 2012). While seeing how social media impacts political participation, the researchers have also identified few other research issues such as difficulty to measure and compare electronic participation (e-participation) and incoherent methods of defining and measuring political involvement. Hence, those issues have caused inconsistency in the research results.
Many studies have focused on the impact of social media on political participation and the results are different, therefore a systematic review on these previous studies is crucial. Thus, the current study aims to provide an established knowledge base by doing a systematic literature review (SLR) on the studies of the impact of political activities through social media on political participation. SLR is "a review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review" (Siddaway, Wood, 2015). Therefore, SLR is a method that analyzes, selects, and reviews previous studies objectively to answer the question formed in a study (Mohamed Shaffril et al., 2020). In conducting an SLR, a protocol or plan is specified before the review process. It is a coordinated and open method in which the search effort is carried out over multiple databases. Other researchers may replicate and repeat a similar procedure. It deals with a rigorous search strategy which helps researchers to answer a given question (Xiao & Watson, 2019).
Even though some studies attempted to review the issue on the rise of online participation and e-participation systematically, nevertheless, their focus was not on online political activities through social media such as expression, efficacy, and discussion. A study by Boudjelida et al. (2016), for example, tried to examine e-participation through an extensive literature review, which their result showed that social welfare is the dominant domain in which e-participation was conducted. Furthermore, they also showed that social media 14 platform was the most used to conduct e-participation. Overall, insufficient studies on the impact of political activities on political participation through social media has led to little understanding and lack of systematic comprehension of the existing literatures.
In short, this paper seeks to contribute to the existing knowledge by developing a systematic literature review on the impact of political efficacy, discussion, expression through social media on youth political participation. Before the review process, in methodology, an SLR protocol is specified.

Methodology
This systematic review presented to examine the internal validity of all the published articles that related to the topic in both Scopus and Science Direct databased in objective and critical manners. The specific keywords used to identify related articles in this study were derived from a study of relevant reviews (Romli et al., 2018). By using the Person, Exposure, Comparison, Outcome (PICO) format (Prasad, 2014), the academic journals in the databases were searched to identify articles that obtain the keywords.

Search Strategy
A comprehensive review of the selected databases, Science Direct and Scopus, was performed to search for potential papers published in 2010 to November 2019. Keywords and search string used to search for different constructs could be seen in Table 1 below: Keywords and search string used ScienceDirect ("youth" OR "young adult" OR "young") AND ("expression "OR "discussion "OR "efficacy "OR "debate") AND ("social media" OR "social networking" OR "Facebook" OR "Twitter") AND (" Democracy" OR "Participatory")

Scopus
( TITLE-ABS-KEY ("youth" OR "young adult" OR "young") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("expression" OR "discussion" OR "efficacy" OR "debate") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("social media" OR "social networking" OR "Facebook" OR "Twitter") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("participation" OR "politics" OR "decision making" OR "participatory democracy")) All these keywords were identified in titles and abstracts of the articles to ensure that a significant amount of information was collected.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
The present review included studies that meet the following inclusive criteria: a) consisted of a medium-aged youth sample size from 18 to 29 years. b) analyzed youth participation as an outcome variable. c) used cross-sectional/comparative and cohort/longitudinal research design. d) employed quantitative approach. e) published in a peer-reviewed full-text journal from 2010 to November 2019. Moreover, studies were excluded from reviews if they: a) used samples that failed to make generalization of the population. b) were not written in English language. c) are in the form of book chapter, lecture notes, conference paper, and dissertation or thesis. d) employed qualitative approach.

Assessment of Study Quality
In the research quality assessment, the data was evaluated for their accuracy and relevance subjectively. The author and co-authors reviewed one another's initial screening of the selected research articles. The leading researcher extracted all data selected from the databases based on the keywords listed in Table 1. In the case of an article's analysis that brought dispute, reassessments were made to achieve a consensus.

Critical Evaluation
Critical quality and internal validity assessments identified by different issues, such as 1) was the research questions or objectives clearly stated? 2) Was there a review of the relevant literatures? 3) Were the sampling methods described in detail? 4) Was the size of the sample justified? 5) Were the outcome measures reliable? 6) Were the outcome measures valid? 7) Were the results reported in terms of statistical significance? 8) Were the analysis methods appropriate? 9) Was the conclusion appropriate? Based on these considerations, the selected articles were reviewed and assessed using the ranks of weak, moderate and good (see Table 2). The authentic detailing of the selected articles is presented in Table 3 in Appendix A, which describes the purpose of the study, samples, methodology, location study, and summary of the findings.

Results
As shown in Figure 1 above, in identification stage, the search identified 248 papers that related to the impact of political expression, political discussion, and political efficacy through social media on youth political participation. 138 articles were identified in Scopus database and 110 articles in Science Direct. However, 13 articles were filtered out due to duplication and left 235 articles. At the screening level, the titles and abstracts were screened based on the inclusion criteria. Correspondingly, 53 papers were to be included in the analysis based on their title; but only 33 were remained after the abstracts were screened. Finally, in the last level, after reviewing the full-text papers extensively and also considered the exclusion criteria, only 10 articles were selected for the final examination as they contain all the applicable variables. In the process of selecting related articles, no attempt was made to examine grey or unpublished content. In other words, 238 articles were excluded because they did not meet the requirements. Of the excluded reports, 73.39 % of the articles (including duplicates) were insignificant, 5.24 % were duplicates, and 21.37 % articles' titles were entirely related to the subject.

Discussion
There are five main themes developed through thematic analysis on the selected articles. In this section, the impact of the key variables such as political expression, political efficacy, political discussion and social media usage on the political participation of youth were reviewed and discussed.

Political Expression and Political Participation of Youth
Traditionally, political participation has been conceptualized by scholars (like Verba, Nie & Kim, 1978, Verba & Nie, 1987 in formal dimension of political activities as such as in participating in electoral process, contacting officials or politicians and engaging in party or organizational activities. Nowadays the dimension has been extended to online realm where the political participation has a new platform in social media network. In an expanded view of political participation, Rojas and Puig-i-Abril (2009) explain that, "expressive political participation constitutes a sub-dimension of political participation, one that is particularly critical for societies in which democratic institutions are not fully established. Furthermore, we contend that expressive political participation in the online domain for such societies may operate as a precursor to other forms of participation, including voting, donation activities, and community volunteering in the offline domain". In the similar context, Phang (2018: 13) specifies online political expression in a range of political activities such as 'sending messages with political information'; 'commenting news online'; 'participating in online forums'; 'posting comments to political blogs'; and 'using social networking sites to express their opinion on current affairs'. As online political expression has increased in social media, it has led researchers to further study the effect of online political expression on political interaction across social media. Kushin and Yamamoto (2010) argued that online political expression was substantially associated with political engagement in the circumstances, but not with political self-efficacy. The study shows that what the youth hears is connected with their need to know the result. Since young people go online to express opinions, discuss questions, or share information, they participate more cognitively in the elections. Furthermore, the understanding of the insignificant relationship between online expression and political self-efficacy is not completely clear. This might be due to the political information is not received credibly within the online communication (Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010). The results show that the use of social media leads to dynamic behaviors, such as sharing information, which is a kind of expression.
Moreover, Chen et al.'s research shows that connecting with social media users leads to an increment of democratic participation of young adults. However, the researchers found that the relationship between online political expression and campaign attention is not significant. For university students, the sharing of their political opinions online during a presidential campaign does not lead to physical involvement of the campaign (Chen et al. 2016). This insight is somewhat consistent with what other researchers have noted since they discovered that participatory actions through social media are often situational and ideological. Large proportions of young adults have not used social media for all types of political participation (Keating & Melis, 2017;Kushin & Yamamoto, 2010;Moffett & Rice, 2018). Although online political expression is relatively extensive among young adults in Britain, institution-oriented participation online is significantly less prevalent (Keating & Melis, 2017). Since, it is more likely that users who know more about politics are interested in political expression, and public services are developed online, but the studies show that there are also significant differences in intergenerational online political participation. Social media platforms are being provided to allow young adults to speak through online and offline about politics. This result may help to explain why young adults are prepared to against policy restrictions and engage themselves in online political activities (Moffett & Rice, 2018).

Political Efficacy and Political Participation of Youth
According to Campbell et al. political efficacy is "the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have an impact upon the political process" (Wen et al., 2013). Current Studies have demonstrated that the impact of political efficacy through social media on the political process plays a significant role in politics and political participation among youth. According to Kushin and Yamamoto (2010), political efficacy refers to an individual elector's belief that his or her actions can affect the political processes. Political efficacy has two dimensions: internal efficacy viewed as an individual's self-competence in understanding and taking part in politics; while external efficacy refers to the individuals' perceptions of the responsiveness of government to citizens' demands (Michael Chan et al., 2012;Wen et al., 2013).
Empirical evidence proposes that the usage of internet and political activities through social media in building relationships among the users, have a positive relationship with political efficacy. This indicates that most of the respondents firmly accepted that they used social media for political issues. From the usage, they got political information and discussed political issues (Anim et al., 2019). Additionally, the previous studies emphasized on the impact and relationship of political efficacy with other political activities through social media. Kushin and Yamamoto (2010) found that there were no apparent ties among social media, political self-efficacy and situational participation for political campaign information. As well as, there were no causal inferences on the relationship between political internet usage and political decision-making. They also stated clearly this was due to the issue of political information's credibility in the transmitting information between users through social media.
In contrast, in Dong, & Ji (2018) findings, social media has effective impact on developing the efficacy of both internal and external policy, and it also leads to real political participation. Moreover, Ahmad et al.'s (2019) study on political efficacy through social media indicates that majority of the respondents agreed that they used online media and felt wellaware of political issues. This means that online political activities have a significant impact on political efficacy and political participation. Also, most of the respondents reported that they used social media for the purpose of obtaining political information and discussions. Besides, the study conducted by Anim et al. (2019) in Ghana agrees with Ahmad et al.'s (2019) findings. They found that there is a significant association between online political activities and political efficacy, where political efficacy mediates the relationship between users' activities through social media and political participation, and it creates political efficacy among young voters to interact with candidates and politicians.

Political Discussion and Political Participation of Youth
From the existing reviewed literature, there is only one study that examined the direct and indirect associations of political discussion to political participation through social media, meets the inclusion criteria of this systematic review. In the article by Wen et al. (2013), they found a significant variance between female and male respondents in various forms of political participation through social media, although they had similarity in educational backgrounds. However, the study showed that political discussion and political efficacy were significantly correlated with online political participation for Singaporean students, especially female students who depended on political efficacy and discussion to participate in politic. At the same time, male students tended to be motivated in their political participation by political efficacy. Even though the political discussion was only significantly related to female 19 students' political knowledge, there has been no record for male students in the same area. The findings also show that female respondents were less likely to engage in political discussions and were less likely to participate in political activities offline and online than male respondents.
Based on this study it is highly reasonable to deduce that the gender factors played a significant role in political participation among students. The female students are less likely to be motivated in the political discussion in Singapore. The study focused on the gender gap, which is significant in online political participation. Female respondents were less likely to engage in online political activities via social media than male. The samples of the study are university students, thus is not enough or valid to generalize the population of Singapore. Therefore, the study should be furthered to investigate if the Singaporean woman's political participation is passive even though there is a new platform to voice their opinions and expressions. On the other hand, the study tries to confirm there is gender factor plays a significant on political participation among the Singaporean students, where it leads directly to conclude that the female respondents are less active in political participation than male respondents. Besides that, the results of the study also showed that the act of consuming political news via social media contributes to political participation for both males and females, from that we can see there is disagreement on the results that confirm women were less likely to engage in political activities through social media than men.

Social Media Usage and Political Participation of Youth
Indeed, young people use social media to receive political content and commentaries from other social media communities. Receiving information from new sources and campaigns has a significant impact on political participation in real-life (Chen et al., 2016). Moreover, free opinions and participatory behavior are one of the real democratic conditions. Wen et al. (2013) found that the variable of gender factor is significant in political participation after they analyzed the role of news consumption, political performance, and political discourse through social media in women's and men's political participation. Although young women are politically less active than men, their occupation of social media increases their political participation.
In the same way, Anim et al. (2019) have similar result to the previous findings. Their findings showed that the usage of social media for political activities could increase social media users' political efficacy and political participation. Their study also found that youth may consciously or unconsciously get political information from politicians or political parties. The politicians and parties may promote themselves to get youth's interest. The involvement of the government leaders in political activities through social media leads the youth to real political participation (Anim et al., 2019).
Previous studies demonstrated that contemporary youth are not detached from politics, and social media plays significant roles in facilitating their dynamic behaviors, such as sharing political information and political discussion. Similarly, Pang's (2018) empirical study demonstrated that mobile-based political communication through social media has opened up a new place for political participation. However, the new communication technology rapidly rises the political expression among youth, especially when it would promote the sharing of user-generated political content and access to such content would cause political expression with other users, and leading to the offline political participation of youth. Moreover, Dong & Ji, )2018) argued that connecting with public figures on social media does promote democratic participation of youth and lead them to select the right choice that has benefits to the state.
Overall, the results provided insight into the effects of future demonstrations led by youth and provide valuable insight into the relationship between social media and political participation. The researchers considered the significant role of social media in promoting youth's political participation as a great value that affords free space to discuss and express a different opinion. Besides, previous studies have shown that education level and gender factor have no significant influence on political participation (Keating & Melis, 2017). The results indicate that it is a political interest drives online political participation among youth, rather than their educational or socio-economic resources, or ethnicity, which means there is a significant impact of social media use on political participation among youth and there is a significant relationship between social media and political participation.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the current systematic review provided detailed information on the impact of political activities through social media on young people's political participation, such as political efficacy, political discussion, and political expression. The study provides significant contributions to practice and knowledge through different study designs and data collection methods. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have also shown some beneficial results. In the elicited review, the inconsistent operationalization and assessment of researchers were common. Online expression was also closely linked with situational political participation but did not reliably predict real political participation of social media users and shared political information. Moreover, social media does provide some youths with a new access; it does not reengage young people who have already lost interest in politics. There are fewer studies on the effect of political debates on the political engagement of youth citizens on social media. The author found an article that examined the impact of political discussion on political participation through social media. This political discussion plays a significant role in achieving political participation. Furthermore, the researchers confirmed that youth 18-29 old years are most of the social media users, where they were focused on the relationship between social media behaviors and political participation. The researchers in this study were, therefore, unable to draw accurate conclusions. The current review suggests that future research uses more reliable, validated instruments to measure the effect of political debate on young people's political engagement in social media. Based on current knowledge, more studies are required to research underlying mechanisms to draw sound conclusions about the effect of political speech and discussion on political participation through social media.