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This paper examines the use and impact of digital media in the 2008 Canadian federal election. It examines the extent to which different digital media were employed by candidates and parties. The research informs a wider debate between competing schools of thought on the democratizing potential of the Internet. The paper demonstrates a mixed role o...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... addition, as campaign resources are limited, the use of different services would be rationally distributed towards those with the largest market shares (in Canada, Facebook and MySpace). 7 However, as illustrated in Figure 2, this small number of average profiles was concentrated on Facebook rather than distributed according to the market share of respective services. 8 The low number of profiles may imply that candidates have yet to perceive the advantages of the social networking elements of these services (for example, recruitment of volunteers, use of social media to distribute candidate and party messages via friendship groups, the ability of voters to engage one another in dialogue), as opposed to their value as "online brochures." ...
Context 2
... basically supply everything else-the messaging, the materials, the designs, the demographics, you know, the talking points, everything comes from the central party. (Finley, October 29, 2008) The candidate survey focused on direct support (such as training and advice) given to candidates across a range of campaign activities: advertising, canvassing, media relations, use of Internet, and recruitment. As Figure 6 illustrates, candidates perceive that their parties provide the most assistance with media activities (in general and with the Internet) over interpersonal and organizational ones, for example, canvassing and recruitment. ...
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This article offers a longitudinal perspective on communications during election campaigns from a political-party perspective, where strategic considerations about digital media are compared across time. Our analysis is grounded on the concepts of hybridisation and data-driven campaigning, where digital technology tends to play a central role witho...
Citations
... Kalnes, 2009;Klinger, 2013;Lev-On and Haleva-Amir, 2018;Samuel-Azran and Yarchi, 2020;Strandberg, 2013;Vergeer et al., 2013) and the equalization theories (e.g. Carlson and Strandberg, 2008;Chen and Smith, 2011;Gibson and McAllister, 2015;Larsson, 2016;Samuel-Azran et al., 2015;Southern, 2015). This study argues that that lack of a definitive conclusion regarding the role of social media in the structure of political competition can be traced back to three major gaps in the literature. ...
This study is designed to contribute to the debate on whether Facebook is a normalizing or equalizing force in political competition in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections. It argues that conflicting findings in the literature are due to (a) the lack of cross-country investigations, (b) the lack of a multidimensional approach to Facebook performance, and (c) the conceptual confusion around the normalization or equalization theories. This research tests both the absolute and the relative understanding of the hypotheses in all the visibility-related dimensions (adoption, activity, number of followers, user engagement, and ad spending) in a cross-country dataset that includes all the Facebook activity of 186 parties in 28 countries. Findings demonstrate that in absolute terms the equalization thesis prevails in activity and advertising, while the normalization thesis is confirmed in the dimensions of organic direct and indirect reach. At the same time, in relative terms, social media equalize political competition in each dimension.
... Enli and Skogerbø (2013) combined the method of content analysis with interviews when they conducted an explorative qualitative study researching the employment of Facebook and Twitter in political communication during Norwegian elections. A broad array of methods was utilized by Chen and Smith (2011), when exploring the patterns in the adoption of new media by individual party candidates. They combined the content analysis of web pages of political parties with the analysis of campaign videos, as well as a quantification of mentions of party leaders on blogs, and a structural online questionnaire for individual candidates covering their employment of new media in campaigns. ...
The authors explored the research methods of the manifold studies on online political communication published in nine selected scientific journals over an 8-year period stretching from the beginning of 2009 to March 2017 and systematized the results into a comprehensive, methodological, "state-of-the-art" report. The main findings are that the most frequent method of researching online political communication is the quantitative or qualitative content analysis. Still, recurrent is the combination of methodological approaches, where the quantitative and qualitative techniques complement each other. Moreover, the research of political communication in general, but online especially, has become more an interdisciplinary field. Yet the collection and analysis of data from new media and social networks requires more and more advanced expert skills.
... There may be content-specific conditions of websites that facilitate or hinder various kinds of political and social attitudes (Pasek, Moor, and Romer, 2009). The content of websites is very much determined by the resources and human capital available to political interests (Chen and Smith, 2011), and the attempts of politicians to communicate to specific groups of voters (Agarwal et al., 2014;Karlsen, 2011). Qualitative case studies, or even experimental studies, may be the most effective way to do this given that government social media use is just a small sub-sample of the total social media environment. ...
Scholars continue to debate how information and communications technology (ICT) influences civic behavior. Existing studies may be grouped into two approaches: ICT as a tool used to achieve a civic end, and ICT as an unanticipated influencer of how citizens view civic roles. This paper develops the second theory by testing moderated relationships between social media use, political identity, and citizen views of government service provision and spending. Regression results suggest that liberal users show greater preference for an active government, while conservatives show less preference.
... Williams and Gulati 2009b, c;Sweetser and Lariscy 2008;Gulati and Williams 2011;Williams and Gulati 2012;Gulati and Williams 2013;Gueorguieva 2008;Church 2010;Klotz 2010;Steger et al. 2010;Towner and Dulio 2011;Bimber 2014-for other countries seeGibson 2010;Gibson and McAllister 2011;Vesnic- Alujevic 2011;Andersen and Medaglia 2009;Carlson and Strandberg 2008;Larsson and Moe 2011;Larsson 2014;Gilmore 2011;Chen and Smith 2011;Strandberg 2013;Hansen and Kosiara-Pedersen 2014). Similarly, studies related to the use of social media in election campaigns mostly investigate American experiences. ...
Today, social media offer political actors (i.e., politicians, political parties, NGOs, activists) opportunities for political communication, particularly during election periods. Political parties and candidates use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube comprehensively to convey their messages to large audiences, persuade their voters, and mobilize their supporters. The use of social media causes changes in the nature of election campaigns and paves the way for a “co-generated campaign.” However, studies focusing on the experiences of political actors’ use of social media in the campaigns at the subnational level (regional or local) are rare in the relevant literature. In this context, this chapter aims to analyze the net effect of Twitter on the election success of the candidates in the 2014 local elections in Turkey. Findings of our analysis show that when other variables are fixed, candidates with a Twitter account have 4.5 times greater chance of winning the election than those without an account.
This article analyzes social media presence of all parties, leaders, and candidates (PLCs) during Israel’s 2015 electoral campaign, within a transformational era for online campaigns. The article adheres to the theoretical frameworks of normalisation/equalisation hypotheses and personalised politics. Its research design is based on a cross-platform analysis. Findings indicate not only a centralised personalisation trend but rather a depersonalised web sphere. Leaders are more prominent online compared to other candidates; and parties out-perform their leaders, too. Furthermore, findings point to a normalised web sphere, even when referring to new and trendy platforms, revealing that the chances of political newcomers entering the parliamentary arena are scarce.
The paper investigates whether or not political polarization exists in social media by using social networks analysis to analyze a sample of 1,492 users on Twitter.com, a popular microblogging platform, during the 2011 Canadian Federal Election.
Recent advances and innovations in media and information and communication technologies have raised extremely important issue of the necessity of rethinking what we study and how do research on political communication in the context of new media landscape. Thus, the challenge for the paper was to explore the research methods of the manifold studies on political communication in the new media environment and to
systematize the results into a comprehensive methodological “state-of-the art” report. The theoretical-methodological study strives to comprehensively outline the utmost important methodological aspects of the research of a new, yet crucial facet of political communication – one that takes place online, through the new media, as communicating politics online hasbecome an essential part of modern political campaigning and of the everyday lives of both politicians and citizens. The aim of the study is to delineate the methods and techniques of data collection and analysis used in this line of research and to point out and discuss new
trends and tools equipped by political scientists. To that end, the study examines 180 articles published in nine selected scientific journals over an 8-year period stretching from the beginning of 2009 to March 2017. Moreover, examined is the application of these methods in relation to specific topics and research designs, and the limitations of such research of the new media are scrutinized as well.
Real-time commentary, also called ‘live-tweeting’, has become a widely used feature of the social networking site Twitter. Live-tweeting offers new dynamics in political communication by affording a space in which politicians, journalists, and the public alike are present while commenting on televised events in real time. Here, the social, spatial, and temporal arrangements of political communication are intermingled in a new fashion. This article presents a novel framework to theoretically conceptualize the use of live-tweeting. Drawing on the literature of ‘context collapse’ and a phenomenological perspective on media use, the concept of ‘events-as-participation’ is developed to identify a situation in which a public event is commented on online both by the participants present at the actual event and by an audience not physically present. Thus, a pluralization of the event occurs as it is experienced in situ, via broadcast and on various online platforms where new forms of interaction between those present and the audience can occur, blurring the boundaries between places, scenes, and social contexts and creating a new type of interplay between older and newer media formats.
