| Item type: | Article | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Journal or Publication Title: | ACM Transactions on Internet Technology | ||||
| Publisher: | ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY | ||||
| Place of Publication: | NEW YORK | ||||
| Volume: | 22 | ||||
| Number of Issue or Book Chapter: | 1 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 1-25 | ||||
| Date: | 2022 | ||||
| Institutions: | Languages and Literatures > Institut für Information und Medien, Sprache und Kultur (I:IMSK) > Lehrstuhl für Informationswissenschaft (Prof. Dr. Udo Kruschwitz) Informatics and Data Science > Department Human-Centered Computing > Lehrstuhl für Informationswissenschaft (Prof. Dr. Udo Kruschwitz) | ||||
| Identification Number: |
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| Keywords: | POLITICAL COMMUNICATION; CAMPAIGNS; CONVERGENCE; CANDIDATES; OWNERSHIP; TWITTER; COMPETITION; AVOIDANCE; MESSAGES; FACEBOOK; Computational social science; eDemocracy; issue engagement; twitter; political communication | ||||
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 000 Computer science, information & general works > 000 Generalities, Science 000 Computer science, information & general works > 020 Library & information sciences | ||||
| Status: | Published | ||||
| Refereed: | Yes, this version has been refereed | ||||
| Created at the University of Regensburg: | Yes | ||||
| Item ID: | 57243 |
Abstract
A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters' minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing ...
Abstract
A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters' minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize issue engagement and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians' communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public's use of Twitter or politicians' communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians' social media data.
Metadata last modified: 29 Feb 2024 12:52
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