Assesing a measurement model for digital political participation

The events of the past year have drawn the attention of public opinion to the importance that the Internet can have for political and social change. Both the so-called "Arab Spring" and the Icelandic and Spanish new social movements were born and developed on the Internet. These movements are raising questions and arousing interest about the new concept of  Digital Political Participation (DPP). Our starting point is that we don’t consider DPP as part of the broader concept of traditional political participation, but we consider it as a form of participation in itself. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, no validated tools are available in the literature for its measurement. Thus, the objective of this study is double. On one hand, the elaboration of the construct of DDP. To accomplish with this objective we will present a review of the literature, extracting the relevant dimensions of the construct and explaining our proposal for their measurement. On the other hand, we want to assess the validity and the technical qualities of the elaborated questionnaire. To accomplish with this second objective, we will present some preliminary results of the validation test of the constructed scale, with a comparison between samples to test factorial invariance.