A Little Birdie Told Me: Twitter and the 2014 New Zealand General Election (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n = 26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n = 416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, the authors show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.
Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n = 26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n = 416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, the authors show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.
2016
Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines.
New Media & Society, 2014
Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines.
Digital Dialogue? Australian Politicians' use of the Social Network Tool Twitter
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2010
The recent emergence of online social media has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding of this remains less than complete. This article adds to current understanding of the online engagement between politicians and the public by presenting the first quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the social network tool Twitter by Australian politicians. The analysis suggests that politicians are attempting to use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians are noisier than Australians in general on Twitter, though this is due more to broadcasting than conversing. Those who use Twitter to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. Though politicians cluster by party, a relatively 'small world' network is evident in the Australian political discussion on Twitter.
Twitter: A useful tool for studying elections?
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
The 2015 General Election in the United Kingdom was the first to take place in the United Kingdom with Twitter as an important part of the social media landscape. This pilot project looked at 16 constituencies along England’s South Coast in order to investigate what impact, if any, Twitter had had on both the campaign and the result and to investigate the efficacy, or otherwise, of using Twitter as a tool for studying election campaigns in terms of candidate and local party activism. On the basis of an analysis of almost half a million tweets, the analysis concluded that there appeared to be a correlation between the rate at which parties and/or candidates responded to incoming tweets and their relative electoral performance but this was not demonstrable for all parties (it applied in particular to Labour and UK Independence Party candidates). In addition, high rates of reply also appeared to have a positive impact on constituency turnout figures. The findings are not yet conclusive...
Tweet style: campaigning, governing, and social media in Australia
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2019
When politicians use the new tools of social media to talk directly to voters, how strategic are these communications? Do lawmakers change how they present themselves in different situations, tweeting differently during campaigns and when their party is out of power, or tailoring their 'tweet style' to the preferences of constituents? I explore these questions by categorizing 291,091 tweets by sitting legislators in Australia, a nation that features variation in electoral systems in its two legislative houses and which held an election after widespread adoption of social media. When their party controls government, politicians tweet about their personal characteristics and about daily events more often, avoiding clear ideological positions. When an election is called, politicians both in government and in the opposition tweet toward their own sides of the ideological spectrum.
The Using of Social Media on Political Campaigns -Twitter (In 2011 General Elections)
While the technological process evolved from traditional into social and adds people from all walks of life, political platform is also attempting to find its place in this order. During that time in which one way information sharing passed to double-sided and simultaneous information sharing, social mediums have become one of basic campaign arguments of politicians. Conception of mutual interacting with voters in general through internet and particularly through social media began to gain more efficiency during every election period. Politicians now try to be organized by carrying out their campaigns through social media and conveying political messages by this means. The effects of using ‘Twitter’ as political platform during the general elections on 12th June has been considered in this study. Data obtained from study shows that ‘Twitter’ couldn’t reshape politics and voter during this election but could become a strong campaign material during next election.
Forthcoming in SAGE Open
Social media are often discussed in terms of online novelties. But especially within the broader field of political communication, the uses of such services, like Twitter, at the hands of political actors such as politicians and the parties to which they belong, has become something of a fixture of research in recent years. While the study of political Twitter use has provided a series of insightful case studies, often focused on one single election or country, this article presents a comparative study looking at Twitter use at the hands of political actors during two Norwegian elections, 2011 and 2013. We are interested in what overarching tendencies can be discerned from these uses – specifically, if differing usages can be found between the two elections, suggesting developments pertaining to the normalization or equalization hypothesis respectively. This is examined by focusing on two main analytical areas: The level and type of activity undertaken by those up for election, and the repercussions that this activity appears to have in terms of popularity on the studied platform. In short, the results suggest that while Twitter largely remains an ‘elite’ medium in the Norwegian context, smaller political and other actors are making use of the platform at hand to higher degrees than their more well-known peers. Tendencies of both hypotheses are traced in the data, and while the findings could signal an opening for ‘outsiders’ in this regard, the sheer amount of traffic driving the tweets sent by high-end politicians suggest otherwise.
ABSTRACT Political parties and candidates’ adoption of social media technologies engender both optimism and concern about voter engagement in Australia. On one hand, scholars have expressed hope for a more democratic politics freed from traditional media’s gatekeeping role; on the other, researchers find political communication through social media generally fails to transcend politics 1.0. Following international studies, Australian scholarship focused on candidates’ use of Twitter and Facebook for political campaigning has identified a largely unfulfilled potential for a more participatory public sphere. This article contributes original research to this question of online political engagement by examining Victorian state politicians’ social media use during both non-election and election periods. We undertook quantitative content analysis and social networks analysis of politicians’ Facebook and Twitter use in 2014. We find state politicians like their federal and other state counterparts are rapidly adopting digital technologies, particularly Facebook, for political communication. Yet, despite the significant increased social media use by Victorian politicians for public communication purposes, we find that similar to other recent Australian studies the extent of political engagement between politicians and voters on these social media sites remains low. We identify two related factors that impede political engagement in the digital sphere, they are citizens’ negative comments and politicians’ long-standing desire to control the political message.