No / This book examines how political communication and the mass media have played a central role in the consolidation of emerging democracies around the world. Covering a broad range of political and cultural contexts, including Eastern and Southern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, this new volume investigates the problems and conflicts arising in the process of establishing an independent media and competitive politics in post-autocratic societies. Considering the changing dynamic in the relationship between political actors, the media and their audience, the authors of this volume address the following issues: Changing journalistic role perceptions and journalistic quality The reasons and consequences of persisting instrumentalization of the media by political actors The role of the media in election campaigns The way in which the citizens interpret political messages and the extent to which the media influence political attitudes and electoral behaviour The role of the Internet in building a democratic public sphere.

This thesis is based on a case study of Tanzanian youths’ political participation in urban Mwanza. The purpose of this study is to examine how urban youths understand their participation in various political activities in an emerging democracy like Tanzania. The research question guiding the study is how youths understand and value voting in elections in comparison to other forms of political participation. The study focuses on three different political activities; to vote, to contact a politician and to participate in a demonstration. The three political activities are combined with Verba et al.’s (1995) theory of the attributes of political activities into a theoretical analysis model. The thesis uses a qualitative methodology based on 19 semi-structured interviews with Tanzanian youths living in urban Mwanza. The results indicated that the youths in Mwanza understood voting as their prime opportunity to communicate their political voices to politicians. However, the youths expressed that political activities beyond voting facilitate them with opportunities to communicate more specific political messages to politicians multiple times.