Diana Dias Carvalho’s scientific contributions

Results from an online survey with about 8000 respondents concerning their living conditions under the second COVID 19 lockdown between February-Match 2021 in Portugal.

[...] this study resorts to a social media metrics set to assess how Portuguese political parties use social media and how people engage with parties online. We analyse parties’ fb usage across a time span of 7 years (2010-2017) and examine how users’ engage with parties online. Portugal has often been somewhat marginalized in the study of parties’ online communication strategies. The increase in ict usage in the country (internet diffusion increased by 32.3% between 2005 and 2016), along with the current presence of all parties in one or more social media platforms, makes it a worthy case study. While plenty of research has provided important insights on the use of the Internet by political parties during election campaigns, effectively providing us with periodically skewed data, recent research has been focusing on “permanent” (Jackson and Lilleker 2004) or “postmodern” (Vaccari 2008) campaigning – indicating the need to look at these activities beyond election season. As we consider a time span of 7 years (2010-2017), this study contributes to this recent and growing literature by approaching the ways in which Portuguese parties use fb as a communication tool and how the public responds to this new way of political communication. This chapter contributes to the volume’s purpose of addressing the contemporary challenges to citizenship by looking at the current relationship between parties and citizens in the digital context, a space where political action and active citizenship is increasingly undertaken. The chapter is structured in three main sections. The first reviews the literature on how political parties use ICT and social media. The second outlines the methodological phases of the empirical study. Finally, the third presents the findings and discussion.