Social Media for Social Innovation: towards a multi-layered analytic framework

This paper proposes some ideas to ground a multi-layered analytic framework for the study of how social media (i.e., a class of specific Internet-based communication tools) can be strategically employed to promote social innovation (i.e., the actual consolidation of norms guiding democratic and participated policy-making processes). We propose to account simultaneously for a) the type of users; b) the type of Internet-enabled communication; c) the different facets of political processes; d) the multi-level nature of contemporary politics.