Michael Bossetta

A typology of political participation online: How citizens used Twitter to mobilize during the 2015 British general elections

ABSTRACT This study investigates how, and to what extent, citizens use Twitter as a platform for political mobilization in an electoral context. Conceptualizing political participation as a process, we develop a typology of political participation designed to isolate mobilizing calls for action from the rest of the political discussion online. Based on Twitter data collected one week prior to the 2015 British general election, we then identify the top 100 most retweeted accounts using the hashtag #GE2015, classify them by actor type, and perform a content analysis of their Twitter posts according to our typology. Our results show that citizens – not political parties – are the primary initiators and sharers of political calls for action leading up to the election. However, this finding is largely due to an uneven distribution of citizen-driven mobilizing activity. A small number of highly active users, typically supporters of nationalist parties, are by far the most active users in our dataset. We also identify four primary strategies used by citizens to enact mobilization through Twitter: in-text calls for action, hashtag commands, sharing mobilizing content, and frequent postings. Citizens predominantly expressed political calls for action through Twitter’s hashtag feature, a finding that supports the notion that traditional conceptions of political participation require nuance to accommodate the new ways citizens are participating in the politics of the digital age. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election:

The present study argues that political communication on social media is mediated by a platform’s digital architecture—the technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space. A framework for understanding digital architectures is introduced, and four platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat) are compared along the typology. Using the 2016 U.S. election as a case, interviews with three Republican digital strategists are combined with social media data to qualify the study’s theoretical claim that a platform’s network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and datafication model affect political campaign strategy on social media.

Engaging with European Politics Through Twitter and Facebook: Participation Beyond the National?

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 unhindered by national boundaries. We distinguish between three primary types of content styles (factual, partisan and moral) and four degrees of engagement (making, commenting, diffusing and listening). Moreover, we argue that differences in Twitter and Facebook’s digital architectures encourage certain styles and degrees of engagement over others, and that the two social platforms sustain different levels of transnational activity. Supporting our argument with European cases, we suggest that Twitter is more suitable to fulfil social media’s transnational promise than Facebook, which is better adept at stimulating political participation.

Fighting fire with fire: Mainstream adoption of the populist political style in the 2014 Europe debates between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage:

Advancing the concept of populism as a political style, this study compares the debate performances of two British party leaders, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, as they clashed in a pair of televised debates over Britain’s European Union (EU) membership leading up to the 2014 European Parliament elections. The argument is tested that if under certain conditions, mainstream politicians will adopt a populist style although retaining a non-populist agenda. A mixed-methods approach combines quantitative text analysis with a qualitative rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how the populist and non-populist style can be distinguished and compared systematically. The results suggest that Clegg, while maintaining a non-populist ideology, adopts a populist style after losing the first debate. Farage’s communication style, conversely, remains stable to the point of statistical significance. This suggests that one explanatory factor of populists’ success is the consistency of their message and rhetorical delivery, bolstering their perceived authenticity among voters.

Shouting at the Wall: Does Negativity Drive Ideological Cross-posting in Brexit Facebook Comments?

Using a novel methodological approach to measure emotions in Facebook comments, this Work in Progress (WIP) paper explores the relationship between negative feelings and ideological cross-posting behavior. Using the VoxPopuli data harvester, we collect over 770,000 public Facebook comments1 from the three major political campaign pages active during the Brexit referendum. After sorting users into ideological camps based on their reactions to campaign posts, we then examine their commenting patterns across ideological lines. Using three different methods of sentiment analysis, we identify negative and positive emotions and their fine-grained sub-categories in comments. The analysis reveals one quarter of all comments are cross-ideological posts, with Leave supporters overwhelmingly active in commenting on Remain posts. A comparison across the campaigns shows that Brexiteers are much more likely to express anger than Remainers.