Andreas Jungherr

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg · Institut für Politikwissenschaft

Contemporary media systems are in transition. The constellation of organizations, groups, and individuals contributing information to national and international news flows has changed as a result of the digital transformation. The "hybrid media system" has proven to be one of the most instructive concepts addressing this change. Its focus on the mu...

Cambridge Core - Computing and Society - Retooling Politics - by Andreas Jungherr

Digital technologies have changed the public arena, but there is little scholarly consensus about how they have done so. This Element lays out a new framework for the digitally mediated public arena by identifying structural changes and continuities with the pre-digital era. It examines three country cases – the United States, Germany, and China. I...

The public arena relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to ever greater degrees. Media structures hosting the public arena—such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube—increasingly rely on AI-enabled applications to shape information environments, autonomously generate content, and communicate with people. These applications affect the public are...

The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology’s economic, social, and political consequences. Each new step in the development and application of AI is accompanied by speculations about a supposedly imminent but largely fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) with (super-)human...

Digital trace data are an important resource for the study of social life and human behavior. Digital trace data document users’ interactions with digital information systems. This includes interactions on social media services – like Facebook, TikTok, or X (Twitter) – as well as interactions with devices – such as smart phones or smart speakers. T...

All over the world, political parties, politicians, and campaigns explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help them win elections. However, the effects of these activities are unknown. We propose a framework for assessing AI's impact on elections by considering its application in various campaigning tasks. The electoral uses of AI vary widely,...

Disinformation concerns have heightened the importance of regulating content and speech in digital communication environments. Perceived risks have led to widespread public support for stricter control measures, even at the expense of individual speech rights. To better understand these preferences in the US context, we investigate public attitudes...

The threat of disinformation features strongly in public discourse, but scientific findings remain conflicted about disinformation effects and reach. Accordingly, indiscriminate warnings about disinformation risk overestimating its effects and associated dangers. Balanced accounts that document the presence of digital disinformation while accountin...

This volume offers a variety of research perspectives on political journalism and its coverage. The contributions show different methodological approaches to the analysis. The patterns of political journalism are mainly outlined in the context of hybrid and digital media. One focus is on journalists in social media. Some contributions shed light on...

Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot, present challenges in university education, particularly for paper assignments. These AI-driven tools enable students to (semi)automatically complete tasks that were previously considered evidence of skill acquisition, potentially affecting grading and skill developm...

Digital media have become important elements of political parties and campaign organizations all over the world. Examples from U.S. presidential campaigns dominate the public imagination of digital campaigning. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the uses of digital media in politics vary considerably depending on campaign contexts...

Electoral prediction and social media met in 2010. The reasoning was straightforward: people use social media to express their opinions and, therefore, it should be possible to use that information to capture the mood of the public and even predict electoral results. However, in spite of many attempts, the subfield has still not produced a commonly...

Threats of disinformation feature strongly in public discourse. Digital communication environments are characterized as being especially vulnerable to intentional disinformation or accidental misinformation. Although selected scientific findings feature strongly in this discourse, the overall tenor between public and scientific discourse differs. W...

Game engines have come to feature in areas well beyond gaming—such as architecture, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, public planning, and film and television production. Accordingly, companies developing, providing, and maintaining game engines—such as Epic Games or Unity Technologies—are set to become influential actors in all social and ec...

Interest groups increasingly communicate with the public, yet we know little about how effective they are in shaping opinions. Since interest groups differ from other public communicators, we propose a theory of interest group persuasion. Interest groups typically have a low public profile, and so most people are unlikely to have strong attitudes r...

The international rise of populism has been attributed, in part, to digital media. These media allow the backers of populists to share and distribute information independent of traditional media organizations or elites and offer communication spaces in which they can support each other and strengthen communal ties irrespective of their societal sta...

Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is...

The challenge of disentangling political communication processes and their effects has grown with the complexity of the new political information environment. But so have scientists’ toolsets and capacities to better study and understand them. We map the challenges and opportunities of developing, synthesizing, and applying data collection and anal...

Flags are important national symbols that have transcended into the digital world with inclusion in the Unicode character set. Despite their significance there is little information about their role in online communication. This paper examines the role of flag emoji in political communication online by analyzing 640,676 tweets by the most important...

Die Bedeutung der Digitalisierung für Politik und Gesellschaft ist ein hoch aktuelles Themenfeld, das immer stärker auch politikwissenschaftlich beforscht und gelehrt wird. Die Beiträge des Bandes versammeln dazu programmatische Positionen, welche zentrale Aspekte und Perspektiven der sozialwissenschaftlichen Digitalisierungsforschung darstellen un...

Online platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, provide users with a rich set of features for sharing and consuming political information, expressing political opinions, and exchanging potentially contrary political views. In such activities, two types of communication spaces naturally emerge: those dominated by exchanges between political...

There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties a...

Online platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, provide users with a rich set of features for sharing and consuming political information, expressing political opinions, and exchanging potentially contrary political views. In such activities, two types of communication spaces naturally emerge: those dominated by exchanges between political...

Social media platforms, especially Twitter, have become a ubiquitous element in political campaigns. Although politicians, journalists, and the public increasingly take to the service, we know little about the determinants and dynamics of political talk on Twitter. We examine Twitter’s issue agenda based on popular hashtags used in messages referri...

In this book, 30 contributions provide a comprehensive overview of theories and findings from research on political attitudes and political behaviour, subdivided into the fields of ‘political communication’, ‘political attitudes’, ‘political participation’, ‘voting behaviour’ and ‘methods’.

Over the last ten years, social scientists have found themselves confronting a massive increase in available data sources. In the debates on how to use these new data, the research potential of digital trace data has featured prominently. While various commentators expect digital trace data to create a “measurement revolution,” empirical work has f...

Many studies use the same factors to explain attitudes toward specific trade agreements and attitudes toward the principle of free trade and thus treat both objects as interchangeable. Contemporary trade agreements, however, often reach beyond trade in the narrow sense. Consequently, factors unrelated to free trade may affect citizens’ evaluations...

As political parties expand opportunities for intraparty participation, understanding the effects of participatory events on party actors becomes ever more important. In this study, we investigate the consequences of an intraparty referendum in a state branch of Germany?s Christian Democratic Union on beliefs and attitudes of party members. We use...

Das Internet ist zentrales Element moderner politischer Kommunikation. Trotz seiner Bedeutung wurde dieses Phänomen jedoch in den zentralen Debatten der Politikwissenschaft bisher nur oberflächlich thematisiert. Der vorliegende Literaturüberblick skizziert den sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurs zur Nutzung des Internets in der politischen Kommunikati...

The continuously growing use of digital services has provided social scientists with an expanding reservoir of data, potentially holding valuable insights into human behavior and social systems. This has often been associated with the terms “big data” and “computational social science.” Using such data, social scientists have argued, will enable us...

Over the last ten years, social scientists have found themselves confronting a massive increase in available data sources. In the debates on how to use these new data, the research potential of " digital trace data " has featured prominently. While various commentators expect digital trace data to create a " measurement revolution " , empirical wor...

Im Vorfeld der Bundestagswahl 2017 wird die Nutzung datengestützter Verfahren in Wahlkämpfen viel diskutiert. Kampagnenmacher, Journalisten und Öffentlichkeit stellt sich die Frage nach dem Potential und möglichen Gefahren der Nutzung großer Datensätze und statistischer Modelle durch politische Organisationen. Auch wenn das Thema viel Aufmerksamkei...

Der Microblogging-Dienst Twitter ist zu einem festen Element politischer Kommunikation in Deutschland geworden. Dennoch sind die Dynamiken politisch relevanter Kommunikation auf Twitter, ihre Verzahnung mit dem politischen Geschehen und der politischen Medienberichterstattung sowie ihre Wirkungen nur unzureichend bekannt. Dieser Beitrag vergleicht...

This article presents a case study of the use of digital tools by campaign organizations in Germany’s 2013 federal election. Based on observations and in-depth interviews with key personnel in the campaigns of six of the parties running for Parliament, I examine whether German campaigns’ use of digital tools follows the usage practices that have be...

Twitter has become a pervasive tool in election campaigns. Candidates, parties, journalists, and a steadily increasing share of the public are using Twitter to comment on, interact around, and research public reactions to politics. These uses have met with growing scholarly attention. As of now, this research is fragmented, lacks a common body of e...

In this article, we examine the relationship between metrics documenting politics-related Twitter activity with election results and trends in opinion polls. Various studies have proposed the possibility of inferring public opinion based on digital trace data collected on Twitter and even the possibility to predict election results based on aggrega...

The ever increasing use of digital tools and services has led to the emergence of new data sources for social scientists, data wittingly or unwittingly produced by users while interacting with digital tools. The potential of these digital trace data is well-established. Still, in practice, the process of data collection, preparation and storage, an...

Patterns found in digital trace data are increasingly used as evidence of social phenomena. Still, the role of digital services not as mirrors but instead as mediators of social reality has been neglected. We identify characteristics of this mediation process by analyzing Twitter messages referring to politics during the campaign for the German fed...

During the 2009 election campaign, Twitter not only served as a source of news for the media but also became a public stage for active political users. In particular, hopes were raised about a pluralistic grass-roots sphere of public communication in which political information can be shared in a non-ideological, decentralised and egalitarian manne...

This book offers a framework for the analysis of political communication in election campaigns based on digital trace data that documents political behavior, interests and opinions. The author investigates the data-generating processes leading users to interact with digital services in politically relevant contexts. These interactions produce digit...

Twitter has become a popular element in political campaigns around the world. The posts and interactions of political elites, journalists, and the general public constitute a political communication space. This communication space is deeply interconnected with spaces built not only by media coverage and campaign communication but also following dyn...

The ever growing public adoption of digital services, such as Twitter, has made them important tools in political communication. Accordingly, their uses have been met with increasing research attention. Research on Twitter has focused mostly on adoption rates and usage patterns. Recently, researchers have also started to experiment with digital tra...

This chapter tests the possibility of identifying crucial events during the course of the campaign for the 2009 federal election in Germany. Do shifts in the attention of politically vocal Twitter users, identified by sudden changes in the dynamics of Twitter messages commenting on politics, signify key moments during the campaign and do the events...

Political references on Twitter are highly interconnected with the coverage of politics in traditional media. This chapter will focus on two questions. Given the strong Twitter activity in reaction to a selection of important media events, did Twitter mirror political media coverage reliably? In other words, did temporal patterns in the volume of T...

As the use of online services grows and capabilities in data storage as well as analytics keep on rising, researchers become increasingly interested in what digital trace data might tell them about patterns of human behavior. These data sources potentially hold new information on the mechanisms of human interaction and social phenomena. But before...

All over the world, a variety of digital tools are routinely used in political campaigns. They have changed the way political campaigns are conducted, organized, covered by the media and talked about by the public. Digital tools have created interconnected spaces, contributing to the political communication spheres of traditional media and social i...

Predicting election results with digital trace data has become a popular research topic. Tweets mentioning candidates or parties are seen as indicators for either voting intentions on election day or current political support. In this chapter, I will test two models implicitly underlying the arguments in this literature. The first sees mentions of...

This study contributes to the ongoing debate on how to use digital trace data in the social sciences. It does so by presenting a preliminary framework for the use of Twitter data in the analysis of political phenomena and by examining the characteristics as well as the dynamics of Twitter as a political communication space during the campaign for t...

The Internet has become an important infrastructure for political campaigns around the world, and various online tools have become pervasive campaigning devices. Still, most research on the role of the Internet and online tools in political campaigns focuses on US presidential campaigns. Due to the specific institutional context in the US, this res...

Social media services have become areas of political communication. Politicians integrate them in their campaigns, journalists use them as sources and topics, and the public uses them for the discussion of politics. In this, political activities on social media are clearly interconnected with the coverage of politics by traditional media. This arti...

Political actors increasingly use the microblogging service, Twitter, for the organization, coordination, and documentation of collective action. These interactions with Twitter leave digital artifacts that can be analyzed. In this article, we look at Twitter messages commenting on one of the most contentious protests in Germany's recent history, t...

This literature review covers some 115 studies on the use of Twitter in politics. For this discussion, studies are grouped in three topical categories: studies addressing the use of Twitter by politicians and campaigns; studies addressing the use of Twitter by various publics during election and issue campaigns; and comments on Twitter during campa...

Event detection based on textual data is an approach often used in the social sciences. The method has been used predominantly in the fields of international politics (Schrodt 2010) and public opinion research (Landmann and Zuell 2008). Event detection presupposes that major events leave traces in textual documents. By automatically identifying eve...

Die Geschichte des Internets ist in erster Linie die Geschichte einer rasanten technischen Entwicklung. In den wenigen Jahrzehnten seit den Anfängen des Internets haben Entwickler immer neue Ideen in die Tat umgesetzt, neue Dienste geschaffen, neue Anwendungen vorgestellt.

Ehe man über die gesellschaftlichen Wirkungen des Internets diskutiert oder die Funktionen des Internets in Wahlkämpfen beurteilt, ist es erforderlich, sich ein möglichst genaues Bild von der Internetnutzung in der jeweiligen Gesellschaft zu machen.

Spätestens seit Barack Obamas erfolgreicher, in Medien und Öffentlichkeit vielbeachteter Onlinekampagne vor der amerikanischen Präsidentschaftswahl 2008 ist das Internet aus dem Repertoire von Wahlkämpfern kaum mehr wegzudenken, auch in Deutschland.

Seit fast zwanzig Jahren nutzen Parteien und Politiker in Deutschland und anderen Ländern das Internet in Wahlkämpfen und in wahlfreien Zeiten. Seit fast zwanzig Jahren spekulieren Netzvordenker, Journalisten und Wissenschaftler über die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Internetnutzung von Parteien, anderen politischen Akteuren und Bürgern. Dies...

Das Internet gehört seit Jahren zum Kommunikationsrepertoire von Politikern und Parteien in vielen Ländern. Trotz der stetig wachsenden Literatur zur Rolle des Internets in unterschiedlichen politischen, kulturellen und rechtlichen Kontexten wird in der öffentlichen Diskussion der Begriff der Onlinekampagne fast synonym mit den Kampagnen von Howard...

As the microblogging service Twitter becomes an increasingly popular tool for politicians and general users to comment on and discuss politics, researchers increasingly turn to the relationship between tweets mentioning parties or candidates and their respective electoral fortunes. This paper offers a detailed analysis of Twitter messages posted du...

Purpose – The steady increase of data on human behavior collected online holds significant research potential for social scientists. The purpose of this paper is to add a systematic discussion of different online services, their data generating processes, the offline phenomena connected to these data, and by demonstrating, in a proof of concept, a...

Die Wahlkampf-Kampagne Barack Obamas von 2008 machte Twitter auch in Deutschland bekannt. Aber erst eine Kampagne gegen vermeintliche Internetzensur brachte die Veränderungen durch den Dienst auch hierzulande zum Vorschein: Politik wird zugänglicher und die Kommunikation schneller. Kann die Politik dem folgen?

Das Internet ist aus Wahlkämpfen in vielen Ländern kaum mehr wegzudenken. Politiker und Kampagnenstäbe setzen das Internet als Wahlkampfinstrument ein. Bürger nutzen das Internet, um sich über Politik zu informieren oder in das politische Geschehen einzugreifen. Obwohl das Internet zum Kampagnenalltag gehört, herrscht vielerorts noch Unsicherheit ü...

The German election year 2009 saw the first attempts by political parties to include Web 2.0 services in their online campaigns. The 2009 election therefore offers the opportunity to examine how political parties outside the USA – where online campaigning has become commonplace – choose to use online tools in their campaigns. This paper examines th...

Electronic petitions can serve as an influential mechanism for political participation. We present a study on the dynamics in the German e-petition system which was introduced in late 2008. Drawing on a data set of signatures, we analyze four aspects: (a) the types of petitions found, (b) the temporal dynamics of petitions, (c) the types of users f...

Increasingly, political actors have to act in online communication environments. There they meet overlapping networked publics with different levels of participatory cultures and varying expectations of participation in the (re)making and co-production of political content. This challenges political actors used to a top-down approach to communicati...

Mit der Nutzung von Social Media gehorchen öffentliche Verwaltungen dem Zeitgeist. Außerdem bieten sich Behörden durch den Einsatz sozialer Netzwerke viele neue Möglichkeiten. Die Angebote fordern jedoch Zeit, Lernbereitschaft und eventuell Anpassungen der Struktur der Kommunikationsarbeit.

In their article "Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal About Political Sentiment," the authors Andranik Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger, Philipp G. Sandner, and Isabell M. Welpe (TSSW) the authors claim that it would be possible to predict election outcomes in Germany by examining the relative frequency of the mentions of politi...

The attempt of Web Science to develop a deeper understanding of human behavior on and with the web, as practiced today, struggles to transcend the stage of isolated case studies of individual phenomena with little or no connection to the nature of human behavior as a whole. The authors believe this state can be remedied by a more conscious combinat...

Political discussions on social network platforms represent an increasingly relevant source of political information, an opportunity for the exchange of opinions and a popular source of quotes for media outlets. We analyzed political communication on Twitter during the run-up to the German general election of 2009 by extracting a directed network o...