Todd Graham, Marcel Broersma, Karin Hazelhoff and Guido van 't Haar (2013), 'Between Broadcasting Political Messages and Interacting with Voters: The Use of Twitter during the 2010 UK General Election Campaign', Information, Communication and Society 16/5, pp. 692-716. (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
Between Broadcasting Political Messages and Interacting with Voters
Information, Communication & Society, 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, we 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.
Political leaders in (inter)action. Twitter as a strategic communication tool in electoral campaigns
The use of social networks, particularly Twitter, in the area of political communication is continually growing. Its capacity to foster direct and personal communication and interaction with the citizenry are two of the factors that explain its growth. The objective of this study is to analyse whether the principal Spanish political leaders (Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, and Albert Rivera) dialogue and interact with the citizenry on Twitter. To that end, a quantitative content analysis is applied, taking as a reference the methodology of Kent and Taylor (1998) and its adaptation to Twitter by Ribalko and Seltzer (2010). The sample is composed of tweets published by the four candidates during the campaign for the general elections held in Spain on 20 December 2015. The results reveal that independent of variables such as number of publications, profile followers, or ideology, none of the political leaders use Twitter to dialogue with their audience. Meanwhile, it is also shown that the use of this platform drives the hybridisation of political actors’ communicative strategies.
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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.
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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...
Communication Research
Political campaigning on social media is a core feature of contemporary democracy. However, evidence of the effectiveness of this type of campaigning is thin. This study tests three theories linking social media to vote outcomes, using a novel 6,000 observation panel data set from two British elections. We find that Twitter-based campaigning does seem to help win votes. The impact of Twitter use is small, though comparable with campaign spending. Our data suggest that social media campaign effects are achieved through using Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. Despite much literature encouraging politicians to engage with social platforms in an interactive fashion, we find no evidence that this style of communication improves electoral outcomes. In light of our results, theories of how social media are changing processes of campaigns and elections are discussed and enhanced.
Journalism Practice, 2012
While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequently, these tweets were increasingly quoted in newspaper coverage. We present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports: they were either considered newsworthy as such, were a reason for further reporting, or were used to illustrate a broader news story. Consequently, we will show why politicians were successful in producing quotable tweets. While this paper, which is part of a broader project on how journalists (and politicians) use Twitter, focuses upon the coverage of election campaigns, our results indicate a broader trend in journalism. In the future, the reporter who attends events, gathers information face-to-face, and asks critical questions might instead aggregate information online and reproduce it in journalism discourse thereby altering the balance of power between journalists and sources.