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Average marginal effect of "high-performing issue" by manifesto emphasis (95-percent confidence intervals). Note: Based on Model 2 of Table 3.
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Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaig...
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Context 1
... examine the interaction effects in Models 2, 3, and 4, we plot the average marginal effects (AME) of the highperforming issues variable as a function of the major party indicator and the manifesto emphasis variable (logtransformed). Figure 3 depicts the average marginal effect of "highperforming issue" by an issue's salience in the party manifesto. Across the empirical range of the manifesto emphasis variable, the AME slopes downward as issue salience increases, with the lower bound of the 95-percent confidence interval hitting zero somewhere around three percent. ...
Context 2
... examine the interaction effects in Models 2, 3, and 4, we plot the average marginal effects (AME) of the highperforming issues variable as a function of the major party indicator and the manifesto emphasis variable (logtransformed). Figure 3 depicts the average marginal effect of "highperforming issue" by an issue's salience in the party manifesto. Across the empirical range of the manifesto emphasis variable, the AME slopes downward as issue salience increases, with the lower bound of the 95-percent confidence interval hitting zero somewhere around three percent. ...
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... They explore the effects of negative or emotional content, issues salience, populist communication strategies, or news factors on the number of Likes, Shares, Retweets, or comments (e.g., Bene, 2021;Trilling et al., 2016). Other studies examine whether political or media actors use interactions as a measure of success and align their future content strategies accordingly (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2021;Jost, 2023). The introduction of Facebook Reactions has expanded the body of research with studies that interpret interactions as emotional reactions with discrete valences (e.g., Eberl et al., 2020;Jost, Maurer, et al., 2020). ...
... 6 When interpreting the results, the specific socio-demographic characteristics of the users should be considered. For example, people who follow one or more political actors on a social network site tend to sympathize more with the actor and his or her political stance and are more interested in politics (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2021). Accordingly, popularity indicators are likely to be interpreted as reactions of party supporters. ...
This entry explores the concept of "popularity indicators"(PI), defined as aggregated metrics that represent user engagement and interaction with online content, including actions such as liking, sharing, or commenting. PI provide insights into how users perceive and evaluate content, shape the selection decisions of platform algorithms, and indirectly influence the content of political communication. The entry explores two research perspectives that conceptualize user interactions either as cues that influence how users process information or as outcomes that reflect how users evaluate content, and concludes that the notion of PI accommodates both perspectives. It then differentiates user interactions according to their degree of standardization, visibility, and valence, before outlining current research that uses PI as dependent variable. Despite methodological challenges and limitations, PI provide valuable insights into the reception and evaluation of content, enrich the methodological framework, and contribute to understanding the complex landscape of political communication on digital platforms.
In Nai, A., Grömping, M., & Wirz, D. (Eds). Elgar
Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Edward Elgar Publishing. Accepted version.
... It has made data central to new campaigning practices and to the choice of issues around which parties seek to define their political communication strategies. Among these digital data, those that measure the audience of publications and level of user engagement have become key (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022). The volume of likes, comments, and shares has become a valuable indicator for analysing the reception of different types of content. ...
... Scholars argue that analysing user engagement and perceived audience expectations allows candidate teams to monitor their campaigns on social media, especially Facebook (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022;Kalsnes, 2016;Kelm, 2020). However, these studies rarely distinguish between different types of user engagement despite how important this distinction is. ...
p>Research on data-driven campaigning has mostly focused on the strategies of central campaign teams. However, there is a lack of evidence explaining how parties and supporters use data-driven campaigning techniques to organise their social media campaigning. Do user engagement metrics influence the choice of campaign themes by encouraging political parties to concentrate their communication on issues that are most liked, commented on, and shared? Our study focuses on the use of Facebook by French political parties and their supporters during the 2022 presidential election campaign. We conducted a supervised content analysis based on machine learning to examine their Facebook posts (n = 17,060). We also conducted interviews with 26 page managers. Our results show that political parties did not address the political issues that generated the most user engagement, in particular because the engagement of followers is more likely to be stimulated by divisive issues. The parties' electoral communication is always organised at the intersection between their traditional issues, those that most distinguish them in the political landscape, and some divisive issues that emerged during the campaign. Finally, we argue that campaign strategies are not fundamentally changed by social media metrics. Rather, they differ significantly according to the status of the parties (governing VS opposition parties), which influences the way they manage their Facebook pages during the presidential campaign.</p
... Using social media allows parties the freedom to debate any topic they choose (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013;Ceron, 2017). Despite this autonomy, recent studies reveal that, just as in parliament, the topics that parties address on social media are still influenced by societal interests (Barberá et al., 2019;Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022) and by those issues that dominate the press (Gilardi et al., 2022). As a result, the political agenda often reflects similar issues across both parliamentary and social media domains (Peeters et al., 2021;Russell & Wen, 2021). ...
... For example, Barberá et al. (2019) found that US Congress legislators usually follow citizens' attention to issues online and address those issues on their social media profiles. This finding was supported by Ennser-Jedenastik et al. (2022), who demonstrated that high-performing issue-related posts on the profiles of major mainstream parties in Austria are more likely to reappear again in party posts. Similarly, Gilardi et al. (2022) found a high level of congruence between issues in the media and issues on the social media profiles of parties in Switzerland (see also Buyens et al., 2024;Ceron et al., 2023;Heidenreich et al., 2022). ...
Social media has become an increasingly important tool for parties to set issues on the political agenda. However, its rapid rise raises questions about the role of traditional venues such as parliaments. This study hypothesizes that parties strategically choose to initiate issues in parliamentary debates instead of on social media to establish dominance through real-time discussions. Consequently, only after these issues are introduced and debated in parliament do parties use digital platforms like social media to reinforce them on the political agenda. Analyzing over 430,000 parliamentary speeches and 240,000 Facebook posts by parties in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, and the UK, from 2010 to 2022, the study reveals that issues discussed in parliamentary debates—primarily those raised by opposition parties—typically do not initially emerge on social media but only attract online attention after being introduced in parliament. These findings offer new insights into the strategic decisions of parties in agenda-setting.
... This phenomenon occurs because viral cases often generate significant public pressure, forcing the government to act immediately so as not to appear slow or insensitive to issues that are currently in the spotlight. In addition, the influence of public opinion formed by a viral case can have a major political impact, prompting governments to respond quickly to maintain or improve their image in the eyes of the public (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022;Wouters et al., 2023). Viral cases also have the potential to affect more people and sectors of society, so a quick response is considered important to minimize the negative impact or take advantage of the existing momentum. ...
... In China, the response can also be swift but often takes the form of censorship or removal of content deemed sensitive (Wang et al., 2023;Yuan et al., 2024). In the UK, responses are usually swift and focused on transparency and accountability (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022;Johnston et al., 2024). Meanwhile in Indonesia, responses can vary depending on the issue and public pressure, sometimes fast and intensive, especially in cases that have a wide public impact, but can also be slower depending on the complexity of the government structure and challenges in managing information on social media. ...
... The importance of citizen reporting is also underscored as a tool for democratizing information by giving voice to groups or issues that may be marginalized in mainstream media coverage (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022;Goyanes et al., 2021). Citizen reporting provides space for diverse and inclusive perspectives, enriching public debate and helping to balance potentially biased or limited narratives. ...
This study proposes to analyze the influence of netizen (net citizen) accounts on the government's response to public service issues in Makassar over one year. The research method involves using data collected from the user's accounts, focusing on the frequency of reporting, types of issues reported, geographic distribution of reports, types of media used, and government responses to these reports. The analysis indicates that reports through citizen reporter accounts tend to receive quicker responses compared to direct complaints, with respondents evaluating the quality of these responses more positively. These findings suggest that digital platforms, such as social media, are effective in enhancing responsiveness due to emergency events, public priorities, and social pressures resulting from viral reporting.
... As an alternative, parties can engage more in topics from the media agenda and from their political rivals (Seeberg, 2022), and therefore "ride the wave" of currently salient topics (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1994). In doing so, parties show responsiveness to the upcoming issues that most concern the citizens (Ennser- Jedenastik et al., 2022;Klüver & Sagarzazu, 2016). ...
p>In times of declining party identification, parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election (Dassonneville et al., 2012). Setting topics in such a way that voters are convinced to cast their vote has become an essential prerequisite for success in modern election campaigns. Social media are suitable for this, as parties can set their own topics or highlight the topics most important to the voters and communicate them to a large audience in organic posts or target specific voter groups with ads. While tendencies of issue ownership in posts on Facebook are repeatedly shown empirically (e.g., Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022), there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions in Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this paper investigates whether parties communicated consistently on Facebook with regard to the issues they set in organic posts, sponsored posts, and ads during the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign. The results of a manual quantitative content analysis (n = 1,029 posts, n = 1,197 sponsored posts, n = 2,643 ads) show that parties focused on issue ownership in their posts. Still, their investments in sponsored posts and ads followed different strategies. Here, most parties highlighted social policy, contradicting issue ownership for some parties. The paper provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences.</p
... Consequently, parties' communication on Facebook can be specifically designed to stimulate user engagement (Bene et al., 2022). In turn, political parties are more likely to discuss an issue on Facebook if this generates a higher level of user engagement (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022). ...
Crises were highly relevant in the 2022 Italian general election. The label of “crisis” was associated with multiple policy issues, ranging from the environment and health to foreign policy. Previous studies have extensively discussed the impact of crises on voter behavior, demonstrating that voters are particularly concerned with parties’ valence attributes, such as the effectiveness of policies and leaders’ ability to resolve emergencies. However, limited attention has been paid to assessing how parties mobilize the crisis paradigm on social media. This study seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing the impact of crisis-related content on Facebook user engagement, with a special focus on distinguishing the relative effectiveness of populist versus mainstream parties in deploying such narratives. Moreover, this research explores how the intertwining of crisis narratives with portrayals of party responsibility or irresponsibility influences the virality of social media posts. To answer these questions, we manually coded 4,827 election campaign posts to create an original dataset. The evidence shows that crises have an impact on boosting user engagement, although this effect seems to be limited to populist parties. The results also suggest that irresponsible claims cease to be rewarding during a crisis. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic use of crisis narratives by political parties on digital platforms and underscores the complex interplay between crisis communication and public engagement in the contemporary political landscape.
... Studies in both the U.S. (Kreiss, et al., 2018) as well as in our current case country of Norway (Kalsnes, 2016) have shown that parties spend plenty of time and resources on analyzing voter behavior on platforms. Relatedly, results from Austria (Ennser-Jedenastik, et al., 2021) suggests that such insights also influence future party postings, leading them to focus more on the types of content that they know will generate reactions and, as shown here, shares (see also Kreiss and McGregor, 2017). As such, the results presented here further stresses the "warning sign" [22] proposed by Eberl and co-authors (2020). ...
Political campaigning is increasingly undertaken by means of social media such as Facebook. Indeed, having content spread on Facebook by means of users sharing the posts of political parties and politicians has been pointed to as highly important. Based on suggestions from previous research, we investigate the relationship between shares and other Facebook post engagement opportunities such as comments and reactions. Formulating a series of hypotheses and research questions, a longitudinal study of the Norwegian political context is presented. The main findings show that while the Angry and Sad reactions emerge as positively related to the number of shares, Love and Care variations do not exhibit such clear relationships. Reviewing the findings in the light of previous scholarship, the results are interpreted as significative of the importance of negative emotions for online success.
... Unlike traditional means of political communication, social media is not a 'one-to-many' channel, but rather a twosided 'many-to-many' communication channel. On the one hand, political actors can respond to the priorities of potential voters, evaluate engagement, and embed feedback and insights from online campaigns to optimize their political strategies (Ennser-Jedenastik et al. 2022). On the other hand, recipients of political communication can be influenced, and potentially be informed by the political content they are exposed to (Bode 2016). ...
Ensuring transparency and integrity in political communication on climate change has arguably never been more important than today. Yet we know little about how politicians focus on, talk about, and portray climate change on social media. Here we study it from the perspective of political advertisement. We use Meta’s Ad Library to collect 602,546 ads that have been issued by US Congress members since mid-2018. Out of those only 19,176 (3.2%) are climate-related. Analyzing this data, we find that Democrats focus substantially more on climate change than Republicans, with 99.7% of all climate-related ads stemming from Democratic politicians. In particular, we find this is driven by a small core of Democratic politicians, where 72% of all impressions can be attributed to 10 politicians. Interestingly, we find a significant difference in the average amount of impressions generated per dollar spent between the two parties. Republicans generate on average 188% more impressions with their climate ads for the same money spent as Democrats. We build models to explain the differences and find that demographic factors only partially explain the variance. Our results demonstrate differences of climate-related advertisements of US congress members and reveal differences in advertising characteristics between the two political parties. We anticipate our work to be a starting point for further studies about climate-related ads on Meta’s platforms.
... The study focuses on the connection between the sentiment of posts, issue relevance and user reactions. The Austrian elections of 2017 are also investigated by Ennser-Jedenastik et al (2021). A new perspective is taken by analysing the parties' reactions to user engagement. ...
The 2021 federal election in Germany was very different from previous elections. For the first time, the environmental party, The Greens, ran a candidate for chancellor. In addition, the election campaign was increasingly digital due to the Corona pandemic. Citizens increasingly turned to the internet for information. In this context, Facebook was the most used social network for reading, sharing, and discussing political news. This paper examines the Green Party's use of Facebook during the election campaign to identify characteristics of their communication behaviour and user reactions. The empirical investigation is carried out by means of a qualitative content analysis according to Mayring. In the period from 01/04 to 26/09/2021 a total of 251 posts of the Green Party were analysed. The tool Fanpage Karma was used for this purpose. Based on the number of posts, relevant topics of the online election campaign were identified. We also looked at how often and with which reactions users responded to the party's posts. The results of the study show that the 2021 chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock plays a prominent role. She is mentioned in 30.68% of all posts. In addition, environmental policy, the party's core issue, takes up a comparatively large amount of space with a total of 111 posts (44.22%). Of these, 39.84% deal with climate-related issues. The results of the analysis also show that the party has a broader range of topics. Social issues are mentioned in 38.65% of the posts and the image of being a ‘single-issue party’ is being shed to some extent. It can also be seen that The Greens, who are among the winners of the 2021 election, publish a comparatively low number of posts. At the same time, they receive the second-most ‘Love’ reactions, and the most ‘Loves’ per post. The study shows Facebook's status in the online election campaign of the German environmental party in the 2021 federal election. It provides information about the scope of use and topic setting on the social platform. At the same time, the results show to what extent and with what reactions the posts have been addressed.
... Government responsiveness is considered one of the most important features of democracy (Dahl, 1971;Powell, 2004;Verba & Nie, 1972) and previous studies have examined what kinds of variables explain variations in government responsiveness. It has been revealed that government responsiveness tends to be determined by social media (Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022;Eom et al., 2018;Panagiotopoulos et al., 2013), regime types (Cleary, 2007;Grossman & Slough, 2022;Powell, 2004), party organization (Linde & Peters, 2020), cabinet ministers' professional backgrounds (Alexiadou, 2022), and socio-economic conditions of countries or provinces (Itani et al., 2022;Speer, 2012). ...
This article utilizing unique data on 37,655 public complaints in South Korea from April 2021 to March 2022 aims to unveil the association between sentiments in public complaints or petitions and government response speed. We estimate sentiments in each complaint with five morphological analyzers and employ negative binomial regression models. The empirical results demonstrate that public complaints with the sentiment of Fear tend to receive faster governmental responses while complaints with the sentiment of Sorrow are more likely to be addressed slowly. The influence of the sentiment of Fear and Sorrow is consistently robust in logistic event history models, while the sentiment of Anger is not statistically significant anymore. The results contribute to the literature on political psychology by demonstrating that facing public complaints dominated by different sentiments can influence the efficiency of civil servants. At the same time, this article suggests providing periodical counseling and education for civil servants who continuously face waves of negative sentiments to treat public complaints expertly.
