Replication data for paper entitled - Can Online Forums Address Political Disengagement for Local Government?

These two uploaded datasets relate to a paper entitled (Can Online Forums Address Political Disengagement for Local Government?). In terms of reversing political disengagement, little empirical investigation has been conducted into whether it is beneficial to build online forums in conjunction with local government as opposed to media or community organizations. This paper explores this issue and examines what forms of participatory democracy such forums can support. To conduct this research, a sample of 138 online forums was selected. This paper argues that online forums built in conjunction with local government will not address political disengagement because they mainly consist of participants who are information providers and secondly such forums do not support direct democracy. The methodology of this paper consisted of collecting, inputting and analyzing a sample of 138 online forums. Data entry consisted of examining each of the 138 forums and categorizing them across variables within SPSS. Data analysis consisted of running frequencies, crosstabs, bivariate logistic regression analyses and binary logistic regression models.