Uta Russmann

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor of Media and Communication Studies with a focus on Democracy Research at University of Innsbruck

For digital political advertising (DPA) on Facebook, parties can complement their organic communication by targeting users with sponsored posts (Facebook-sponsored posts) and advertising campaigns (Facebook ads). Based on the theoretical framework of dissonant public spheres in the digital age, this article provides the first empirical analysis of...

In 2014, the EU introduced the lead candidate procedure to raise citizens’ awareness and interest in the European Parliament (EP) elections and, thereby, voter turnout. We study the use of personalization, centralized personalization (focusing on lead candidates), emotional personalization, and private personalization on Facebook by political parti...

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a fertile space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in mobilizing voters. However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear through political actors’ Facebook communication, and what post- and pag...

In the recent past, social media has become a central channel and means for political and societal mobilization. Mobilization refers to the process by which political parties, politicians, social movements, activists, and other political and social actors induce citizens to participate in politics in order to win elections, convince others of their...

In today’s hybrid media system, communication professions are connected to media convergence, and this leads to a blurring of boundaries between journalism, public relations (PR), and marketing. Our study demonstrates the blurring boundaries of the communication professions through a longitudinal automated semantic analysis of 336,629 job postings...

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a convenient space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in voters’ mobilization (Engesser et al., 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear on political actors’ communication, and wh...

Digitalization has affected working practices in the field of public relations over the past two decades. Consequently, the skills and competences that are expected from public relations professionals are theorized to have undergone stark changes, with obvious implications for educators, role perceptions, and the professionals themselves. Job posti...

The underrepresentation of women politicians in the media is a persistent feature in many contemporary democracies. Gender bias in election coverage makes it harder for women to reach positions of power in politics. Drawing on the special circumstances in Austria during the 2019 election campaign which saw the first female top candidate of a major...

Relating to theories of dissonant public spheres and affective publics, we study negativity, dramatization, and populist content in political party Facebook posts across 12 countries during the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament Election campaigns. A quantitative content analysis of 14,293 posts from 111 (2014) and 116 (2019) political parties shows...

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties’ engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties’ ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less n...

This chapter addresses a neglected issue within the field of social media and political communication. It focuses on interaction processes on Instagram asking how political parties used Instagram—a platform that is centered around images—when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. The focus is on political parties' use of Ins...

The digitization of political communication and major transformations in the European Union (EU) have altered the conditions for European election campaigns. Whereas national political parties remain highly visible political actors in the EU, Europarties attract relatively little attention from the media and citizens. Social media could provide Eur...

Globalisierung, Internationalisierung und Digitalisierung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft führen zu vielen neuen Herausforderungen für Individuen und Organisationen. Damit stellt sich die Frage: Wie kann die Zukunft verantwortungsvoll gestaltet werden? Der vorliegende Sammelband präsentiert Beiträge, die sich mit dieser Frage theoretisch, empirisc...

Facebook has become a major communication channel that is built around relationships between individual users, institutions, businesses, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. When engaging with the platform, Facebook users reveal various behaviours and produce a quantity of data in the form of text as well as still and moving...

Along with the recent boom in support of populist movements in Europe, social media seems to be the ideal place for their interaction with the public. While Facebook has been thoroughly explored for populist campaigning, there is still scarce research on visual aspects of their communication. Analysing the 2019 European Parliament campaign, this st...

It is an old concern in public and academic debates that people are not interested in European-level issues, and even European Parliamentary election campaigns, which are the main democratic tool of the EU to involve ordinary people into political decision-making, are mostly about national-level political topics. Moreover, even when European issues...

Dieser Beitrag widmet sich den verschwimmenden Grenzen zwischen Journalismus, Public Relations und Werbung und der Zunahme von hybriden Kommunikationsformen. Anhand ausgewählter Literatur werden Veränderungen bei der klassischen Aufgabentrennung in der Kommunikationspraxis und damit einhergehende Herausforderungen aufgezeigt. Schließlich werden mög...

Wie gestaltet man die Zukunft verantwortungsvoll? Diese Frage stand im Mittelpunkt des 14. Forschungsforums der österreichischen Fachhochschulen im April 2021. Globalisierung, Internationalisierung und Digitalisierung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft führen zu vielen neuen Herausforderungen für Individuen und Organisationen. Institutionen im Hochsch...

Freie und unabhängige Medien sind die Grundlage einer lebendigen Demokratie. In normativen Demokratiemodellen wird die „Wächterrolle“ von Medien betont, weil neben der Kontroll- und Informationsfunktion der Medien ihr Beitrag zur Legitimierung politischer Prozesse als zentral angesehen wird. Medien unterliegen jedoch im digitalen Wandel einem hohen...

Medien haben eine Lautsprecherfunktion in der und für die Demokratie – insbesondere in Krisenzeiten. Medien leisten folglich einen unverzichtbaren Beitrag zum Funktionieren der Demokratie. Diese Thematik steht auch im Mittelpunkt von Arbeiten des Instituts für vergleichende Medien- und Kommunikationsforschung an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wi...

This book investigates how political parties from 12 European countries used Facebook to inform, interact with, and mobilise voters in the 2019 European Parliament election. Facebook has become one of the most important tools in election campaigning, but cross-country comparisons on its use in European Parliament elections are widely missing. This...

European Parliament (EP) elections provide an ideal context for comparative studies on the communication strategies of political parties at national and European level. The 2019 EP election campaign allows analysing how the different political parties use Facebook to inform, interact with and mobilise voters. The study of the electoral campaign als...

The 2019 European election in Austria was dominated by the ‘Ibiza-gate’ scandal, which led to the collapse of the Austrian coalition government nine days before the election day. With the ‘Ibiza-gate’ scandal, a domestic issue was key in parties’ Facebook campaigns and particularly dominant in the run up to European Parliament (EP) election day. Au...

The study investigates the extent to which political parties, the mass media, and citizens follow qualitative principles demanded by the public sphere concept in political campaign communications. Using the index of a quality of understanding (IQU), it analyses the press releases and Facebook posts of political parties, newspaper articles, and resp...

Im Lichte steigender Flexibilisierungs- und Partizipationsanforderungen greift die Mitarbeiterkommunikation zunehmend auf Ansätze zurück, die auf dialogischem und polyphonem Denken beruhen. In diesem Beitrag skizzieren wird die jeweiligen Ursprünge dieses Denkens, dessen Rezeption in der Unternehmenskommunikationsforschung sowie ausgewählte praktis...

This chapter compares the Facebook campaigns of 90 political parties aggregated by the political groups in the EP to which they belong from 12 countries in the 2019 EP election. Based on these results we identify the contours of a pan-European style of social media campaigning that can be described as follows: national contexts dominated and framed...

To extend their reach to supporters and voters, three election campaign functions are key to political actors: information, interaction and mobilisation. We argue that these three functions are interrelated and function most successfully through interrelationship. Thus, the distinction between top-down and bottom-up communication appears to be rath...

The European Election campaign 2019 enjoyed heightened attention in the European and global public due to the recent emergence of populist actors, new parties, and large European issues such as immigration, climate change, and Brexit. Starting theoretically from the issue ownership theory, shareworthiness, and the second-order character of European...

The Web allows political parties to segment and microtarget specific groups of voters. This paper seeks to measure voter targeting online focusing on catch-all parties and client parties’ websites during the 2008 and 2013 Austrian General Elections and the 2009 and 2013 German Parliamentary Elections. Thereby, this comparative longitudinal analysis...

When using Instagram, political actors have to keep in mind that images and videos are decoded by their viewers, who bring their own ways of seeing and, in this process, make their own meaning from it. This study examines viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of Instagram postings, i. e. of photos and videos including their captions and comments...

This chapter addresses a neglected issue within the field of social media and political communication. It focuses on interaction processes on Instagram asking how political parties used Instagram-a platform that is centered around images-when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. The focus is on political parties' use of Ins...

This paper addresses the subject of letters to the editor as one of the longest standing forums for public discussion and debate by ordinary citizens. To show how the voice of ordinary citizens is presented in letters to the editor during national election campaigns over a period of ten years (2008, 2013 & 2017), we are focusing on the Austrian Kro...

Inspired by Coleman’s call for a more ‘direct representation’, we address two neglected issues within the field of social media and political communication. We study a non-election period in Sweden (two randomly selected weeks in early 2016) and conduct a cross-platform comparison. The article is based on content analyses of the four prominent soci...

Current surveys such as the Reuters Digital News Report 2018 show that trust in the media is at an all-time low in Austria. Among those between 18 and 24 years of age, more people distrust news than trust it. The aim of this study is to analyze young adults’ news consumption and trust in media in Austria through personal semistructured qualitative...

Politics in Austria is still a male business. Even though in 2017, women occupied 34 percent of the seats in Austria's Nationalrat, female MPs are still underrepresented. Moreover, previous studies have shown that women receive substantially less media coverage than men do and this, for instance, disadvantages female politicians to male politicians...

For a few years now, members of the government in Austria have been using Facebook to reach out to the public as well as to the mass media. Following normative guidelines and regulations, tax-funded government communication should be neutral, informative and autonomous of party politics. Using a multi-method approach, combining a structural analysi...

"Im letzten Beitrag dieses Buches mit dem Titel Social Media – neue Räume für Populismus beschreibt Uta Rußmann aus der Perspektive der Kommunikationswissenschaft die zentrale Rolle von Social Media für Jugendliche als intensiv genutztes Informationsmedium für Politik einerseits und für populistische PolitikerInnen als Medium der Verbreitung ihrer...

This paper replicates an Australian study (Lane, 2018) into how public relations practitioners understand dialogue in practice. The original study found practitioners believed they were carrying out dialogue legally required by government, but what they were doing was no more than two-way communication. It also found practitioners’ operating enviro...

Understanding campaign communication as highly strategic, this chapter discusses this digital visual turn in campaign communication based on the previous literature in the fields of visual communication and political communication as well as empirical studies conducted in Sweden and Norway. Following Rose’s (Visual methodologies. An introduction to...

This study uses quantitative content analysis to examine negative user expressions on political parties’ Facebook pages and political parties’ reactions to them. Social media platforms like Facebook are the “new neighborhood pubs.” Citizens often use these new public forums to talk about their anger and lack of faith in politics. In the present cas...

Tweets eines (designierten) U.S. Präsidenten, in denen er seine politischen Gegner als „enemies“ (Feinde) beschimpft, ins Gefängnis bringen will und fragt „Leben wir in Nazi-Deutschland?“ sind im ersten Moment nicht das, was herkömmlich als Regierungskommunikation und staatliche Öffentlichkeitsarbeit gilt. Doch auf seinem privaten Twitter-Account @...

Inspired by Coleman's call for a more "direct representation", we address two neglected issues within the field of social media and political communication. We study a non-election period in Sweden (two randomly selected weeks in early 2016), and conduct a cross-platform comparison. The article is based on content analyses the four prominent social...

Social media platforms like Facebook are the new neighborhood pubs. Citizens often use these new public forums to talk about their anger and lack of faith in politics. Consequently, political parties’ online management of negative user expressions has become increasingly important to build and maintain good relationships with citizens. To explore a...

This thematic issue of Media and Communication focuses attention on the shift towards visual images on social media as well as the transformation of visual communication which has occurred within the online ecology of social media platforms. The sharing of images is becoming an integral part of the social media experience today, and given that soci...

We investigate political parties´ social media strategies, their perceived effectiveness, and how social media campaigns are internally organised. Our study focuses on Austria and Switzerland, countries with consociational political systems with less competitive elections and less personalisation. The paper is based on semi-structured interviews wi...

Der Grundgedanke, journalistische Inhalte von Inhalten der Public Relations, der Werbung und des Marketings zu trennen, zielt auf das Publikum solcher Angebote. Es geht darum, dass Mediennutzerinnen und -nutzer auf eine verlässliche Zuordnung setzen können, die umfasst, dass journalistische Inhalte tatsächlich unabhängig sind, pluralistische Argume...

Politicians and people professionally involved in politics agree that negative campaigning is a frequently used campaign communication strategy by Austrian political parties. Yet, there is no empirical investigation of such claims. The present study examines party-controlled communication channels to identify the use of negative messaging strategie...

This paper directs attention to the use of Instagram by political parties in the Swedish national elections in 2014. It investigates how political parties made use of Instagram-a platform centered around images-when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. Therefore, the paper analysis Instagram images including their captions...

Der Band analysiert die Trennung zwischen redaktioneller Berichterstattung sowie PR-Produkten, Marketing und Werbung, die grundsätzlich gefordert wird und in rechtlichen Bestimmungen unter dem Stichwort „Trennungsgrundsatz“ festgeschrieben ist. Allerdings ist in der Praxis festzustellen, dass zwischen diesen Professionen nicht immer klare Linien zu...

With the rise of social media platforms based on the sharing of pictures and videos, the question of how such platforms should be studied arises. Previous research on social media (content) has mainly focused on text (written words) and the rather text-based social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Drawing on research in the fields of visual, p...

Starting from the contribution to the discussion on a fourth age of political communication, here we argue that, as a consequence of how the Web 2.0 has changed political campaigns, the theoretical time-bound three-phase models of political campaigning must be reconsidered. We propose four ideal campaign types based on their ideal-typical target au...

This article explores Swedish parties’ activities on Instagram during the 2014 elections. Understanding party campaign communication as highly strategic, that is, communication to persuade and mobilize voters in order to win the elections, we ask whether Instagram was used to (1) broadcast campaign messages, (2) mobilize supporters, (3) manage the...

Administrations increasingly use the internet to improve citizens' participation in political processes. While research on online political communication and e-democracy is growing, we still have little empirical evidence on the quality of online participation and deliberation processes. This paper focuses on an online local deliberation process, t...

Instagram is a social media platform on the rise that is centered on sharing pictures. The question is how to study this platform that is rather based on visual communication? In this short reflection we discuss parts of a codebook we developed for the study of Swedish political parties’ use of Instagram during the 2014 election campaign. We believ...

Wahlkämpfe gelten als unverzichtbare Spielwiesen der Demokratie und als Hochzeiten politischer Kommunikation. In ihnen verdichten sich in periodisch wiederkehrenden Abständen die routinemäßig ablaufenden Interaktionen zwischen Parteien, Massenmedien und WählerInnen. Eine Veränderung erfahren diese Austauschprozesse durch das zeitlich befristete Hin...

Die Zeit rund um die Bundestagswahlen am 27. September 2013 und die Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament am 25. Mai 2014 kann als recht wahlintensiv beschrieben werden. Nur die Landtagswahlen berücksichtigend, fanden sechs Landtagswahlkämpfe statt. (Folgende Landtagswahlen fanden statt: 20. Januar 2013 in Niedersachsen, 15. September 2013 in Bayern, 2...

Websites gehören mittlerweile zum Standardrepertoire der Wahlkampfmittel einer jeden Partei. Sie ermöglichen die Präsentation eines Gesamtbilds der Partei. Ziel dieser Studie ist es herauszufinden, welche Möglichkeiten der Information und Kommunikation die Parteien bei den Bundestags- und Europawahlkämpfen im Jahr 2009 und im Jahr 2013 bzw. 2014 au...

Discussion, dialogue, and discourse have long been regarded as important concepts across a range of communication-related disciplines such as public relations, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, and strategic management. These concepts are becoming even more significant with the increasing use of social media and other forms...

Following the notion of deliberative democracy, political decisions are legitimized when they are based on debate that permits the circulation of information, stances, arguments, and ideas to create mutual understanding. We investigate to what extent political parties and the mass media in political campaign communication follow qualitative princip...

Governments and local administrations increasingly use the internet to improve citizens’ participation in deliberation processes. However, research studies have pointed out that deliberation outcomes vary due to the participants’ sociodemographic differences. In this paper, we address this debate by quantitatively measuring different sociodemograph...

In demokratisch organisierten pluralistischen Demokratien sind politische Akteure auf die Zustimmung der Bürger angewiesen – vor allem in Wahlkampfzeiten. Diese konzentrierten Phasen politischer Kommunikation eignen sich zum Studium öffentlicher Diskurse besonders gut. Begreift man sie als öffentliche Kommunikationen von Akteuren über Themen, Posit...

Wie auch immer politische Kommunikation in Zukunft aussehen mag, Social Media als Informations- und Kommunikationsplattformen sind ein fester Bestandteil der von Parteien und Politikern eingesetzten Kampagneninstrumente geworden. Der Politik ermöglicht die Nutzung von Social Media vor allem einen intensiveren direkten Kommunikationsaustausch mit de...

Durch die kontinuierlich steigende Social-Media-Nutzung in der österreichischen Bevölkerung, gewinnt der Einsatz von Social Media in der Unternehmenskommunikation zunehmend an Relevanz. Der Beitrag identifiziert die Präsenz der Top 500 Unternehmen Österreichs nach Umsatz im Jahr 2012 in Social Media und deckt zudem einzelne Verwendungsmuster auf. D...

Administrations increasingly use the internet to improve citizens' participation in political processes. While research on online political communication and e-democracy is growing, we still have little empirical evidence on the quality of online participation and deliberation processes. This paper focuses on an online local deliberation process, t...

Der gegenwärtigen Medienlandschaft wird häufig eine Tendenz zur Offenlegung und Offenheit zugeschrieben. Social Network Sites lassen die Grenzen zwischen Privatem und Öffentlichem verschwimmen, Plattformen wie WikiLeaks und OpenLeaks veröffentlichen geheimes Material, über Filesharing-Netzwerke und open-content-Lizenzen werden vormals proprietäre I...

Scheinheilige Lippenbekenntnisse, Heuchelei, Verschleierungs- und Mogelpolitik – wer derartige Etikettierungen verwendet, der zweifelt an der Wahrhaftigkeit seines Gegenübers. Er wirft ihm vor, dass er anders redet als er denkt, dass er das, was er sagt, gar nicht so meint, kurzum: dass er nicht wirklich authentisch ist und sein Gegenüber täuschen...

Social Network Sites wie Facebook bieten neue Interaktionssräume. Sie erlauben ihren Nut-zern, unabhängig von Zeit und Ort, Informationen auszutauschen sowie in den gemeinsamen Dialog zu treten. Der Beitrag beleuchtet die Nutzung von Social Network Sites von ethni-schen Minderheiten vor dem Hintergrund des aus der SNS-Nutzung entstehenden sozialen...

Social media such as Facebook have the capacity to revolutionize public discourse as they encourage citizens to participate in politics and to engage with politicians. However, simply the fact that there is public discussion on political issues says yet nothing about its specific quality. From the viewpoint of Habermas’ concept of deliberative demo...

The growth of parties' web-based activities over the last decade has led to a more sophisticated use of websites, and Web campaigns are increasingly embedded in a general political marketing strategy. This study investigates the extent to which political parties use the Internet to attract different target groups of voters. The online audience can...

Mitte der 1990er Jahre gingen die ersten deutschen Parteien ins Netz – allen voran SPD, CDU und FDP. Bereits im Bundestagswahlkampf 1998 waren die Onlineauftritte Teil der Wahlkampagnen, allerdings bestanden die Websites aus einzelnen ziselierten Angeboten. An was es fehlte, war eine sorgsam ausgearbeitete Dramaturgie der Webauftritte (vgl. Bieber...

In der Idealvorstellung von einer funktionierenden Demokratie beteiligen sich alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger einer Gesellschaft am politischen Entscheidungsprozeß. Dazu gehört, dass der Diskurs über politische Streitfragen öffentlich ausgetragen wird, mit dem Ziel einer grundsätzlichen Verständigung über das beratschlagte Problem an dessen Ende eine L...

The present study examines 539 press releases of political parties and 369 articles in daily newspapers during the course of the 2008 austrian national elections. The theoretical frame of reference is the "Theory of Communicative action" by Jürgen habermas resp. his perspective of understanding. habermas points out four validity claims (intelligibi...

Mit den zunehmenden Veränderungen der Medienlandschaft stellt sich die Frage nach Agenda-Setting-Effekten durch neue, internetbasierte interaktive Medien. Bleibt das existierende kollektive Gedächtnis der Gesellschaft erhalten oder kommt es mit der zunehmenden Individualisierung der Themenrezeption zu einer Zersplitterung der Themenlandschaft? Die...

This research paper examines in a cross-national study how political parties and top candidates in Germa-ny and Austria are using the Web for campaigning and by this explores similarities and differences of on-line political campaigning in two countries with similar characteristics. Based on a structural analysis of party websites during the Nation...