Towards a European public sphere? A comparative study of the Facebook activities of Danish and Spanish members of the European Parliament (original) (raw)
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Key to the idea of a democratic public sphere has always been the ongoing conversations among citizens and between citizens and politicians (Koch, Mansbridge, Habermas, etc.). The conversations between politicians and citizens in the Danish political system have traditionally taken place at political party meetings and at public meetings and hearings. However, the rise of new social media like Facebook provides new, interesting platforms for these conversations—and many opinion makers and scholars have high expectations for their democratic potential. This chapter examines what happens when traditional democratic conversations between citizens and politicians are moved away from the old face-to-face meetings and into Facebook. Through interviews with Danish Members of Parliament (MPs), the paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of online democratic conversations on Facebook as experienced by the MPs. The paper builds on a former quantitative mapping of the political conversation activities between Danish MPs and their followers on Facebook (Sørensen 2016).
Political conversations on Facebook – the participation of politicians and citizens
Media, Culture & Society
Political conversations are according to theories on deliberative democracy essential to well-functioning democracies. Traditionally, these conversations have taken place in face-to-face settings, for example, in party meetings and town meetings. However, social media such as Facebook and Twitter offer new possibilities for online political conversations between citizens and politicians. This article examines the presence on Facebook and Twitter of Members of the Danish National Parliament, the Folketing, and focusses on a quantitative mapping of the political conversation activities taking place in the threads following Facebook posts from Danish Members of Parliament (MPs). The article shows that, in comparison with previous findings from other countries, Danish MPs have a relatively high degree of engagement in political conversations with citizens on Facebook – and that a large number of citizens follow MPs, read posts from the MPs and discuss politics with them and other citize...
Aslib Journal of Information Management, 2023
Purpose-Social media have become the main channel of direct communication between members of parliament and constituents. The study analyzes the content in all Israeli MPs' Facebook channels throughout an entire term of parliament and asks if the results are consistent with the equalization or the normalization hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach-The study uses automatic analysis to produce a birds-eye-view of the content uploaded to the Facebook pages of all Israeli MPs during a full term of parliament. All 106 MP pages were automatically scraped. Some complementary information was added to each post in the dataset, such as post length (number of words) and whether the page belongs to a member of the opposition or coalition. The total of 441,974 posts was analyzed to compare engagement and publication rates between pages, coalition vs opposition MPs, MPs vs users etc. Findings-The findings demonstrate that the MP-Facebook sphere is non-egalitarian, in that it follows skewed distributions by MPs in terms of post publication and engagement rates; non-inclusive, in that pages of coalition members receive significantly much more engagement visa -vis pages of members of the oppositions; and "top-down", in that MP-authored posts receive dramatically more engagement then user-authored posts, suggesting MPs have a near-monopoly on setting the agendas manifest in their pages, while users have extremely limited agenda-setting capabilities in these pages. Originality/value-Previous studies have looked at the character of the interactions between MPs and constituents on the Internet and particularly on online social media. Yet, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no study provides a birds-eye-view of the content in all MPs' Facebook channels throughout a full term of parliament. Such an analysis provides a more comprehensive understanding of the character and dynamics of conversations that take place in such arenas.
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2015
Given the importance of issue competition in a West European context and the growing use of Facebook in elections, this paper studies how politicians use Facebook to shape the campaign agenda. We analyze the issues addressed in 6388 Facebook posts by candidates in the Danish 2011 parliamentary election. A limited share of Facebook updates is dedicated to issues. The Facebook agenda did not respond to standings in the polls, nor to the media agenda or public agenda. Comparing issue engagement of new candidates and re-running candidates we find that the Facebook campaign agenda is not simply politics as usual.!
Studies in communication sciences, 2022
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 Europarties with an opportunity to raise awareness among European citizens. In our study, we investigated the social media campaign strategies of Europarties by conducting a manual quantitative content analysis comparing their Facebook posts with the posts of national parties from 12 European countries, focusing on the communication elements used to inform and mobilize citizens, especially in relation to the lead candidates. Our results revealed that some Europarties employed the concept of European lead candidates by emphasizing their candidates in their Facebook posts. However, in their relative inactivity on Facebook compared with national parties, Europarties did not seem to counteract the oft-cited lack of a European public sphere.
Political communication on Facebook: Comparing the Regeringen and La Moncloa pages
2020
The citizens' weakened confidence in politics has encouraged political actors to establish direct communication with them. As social media grows in popularity, political institutions have been using it for more autonomy in the creation and dissemination of information. This study analyses the use of Facebook, the most popular social media worldwide, by the Regeringen, the government of Denmark, and by La Moncloa, the government of Spain. First, the core theories of political communication are broached. Then, each country’s political communication cultures are discussed. At last, a structural analysis of the Regeringen and La Moncloa Facebook pages and a manual categorization of the posts published throughout June 2020 are carried out. The posts are categorized according to DePaula, Dincelli and Harrison’s (2018) typology of government social media communication, which consists of information provision, input seeking, online dialogue/offline interaction and symbolic presentation. This research aims at understanding the content of the posts on the Facebook pages and, taking into account the Danish and Spanish political communication cultures, discussing and comparing the results.
Accepted for publication in European Journal of Communication
While plenty of research has provided important insights into the uses of the Internet by politicians during elections, a relatively scarce amount of work has looked into these uses outside of such parliamentary events. This paper seeks to remedy this lack of research by presenting a study on the 'routine' uses of two of the currently most popular social media services -Facebook and Twitter. Focusing on politicians elected to the national parliaments of Norway and Sweden, the paper employs novel methodologies for data collection and statistical analyses in order to provide an overarching, structural view of the day-to-day social media practices of Scandinavian politicians. Findings indicate that use levels are rather low for both services -the median amount of tweets sent and messages posted on Facebook is close to one per day. Further analyses reveal that the most active politicians could be labeled as 'underdogs', as they are more likely to be younger, in opposition and out of the political limelight.
CM-časopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem, 2012
This study examines the use of Facebook in political communication during the 2009 European Parliament elections campaign. Its goal is to explore the possibilities of the European Parliament communication strategy on Facebook as well as the interaction and participation of its online audiences. The analysis has discovered new concepts significant for the field of online political advertising, the specific campaign construction with its key themes and the particular form of interaction. The original contribution of this paper is seen in its efforts to reveal the campaign of the European Parliament on Facebook, which was not previously studied.
This article aims to explore the interrelations between social media technology and users in order to assess whether and how actors drive innovation. I am interested in understanding how social media technology configures users, how users reconfigure technologies to meet their needs and what users do with social media technology. The mainstream perspective on politicians who use social media has been based on the premise that social media technology is, by nature, an innovative tool and that politicians are not using it to its full potential. However I argue that technology is not innovative by nature and further that emerging practices are actually accompanying the use of social media by political actors but that those practices are related to the collaborative production of speech and rearrangement of editorial rules in political communication. Thus the bulk of the paper is devoted to showing that, through the use of social media technology, media and political communication are converging. The article builds upon examples from the use of social media technology by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). I provide empirical insights into how Members of the European Parliament and their staff adapt to social media technology while using it in a creative way and how uses contribute to changes in the technology itself. This article is empirically grounded and aims at providing examples to highlight the role of actors in defining and developing innovation in the field of media technology. The argument of the paper is that innovation in media technology takes place at the level of practices. Yet new and old practices are The Journal of Media Innovations 1.2 (2014) 98
Social Media and European Politics
2017
Our chapter illustrates how citizens can enact varying styles and degrees of political engagement through social media. It also investigates if citizens engage with political content in ways