Nick Anstead

The emerging viewertariat and BBC Question Time: television debate and real-time commenting online

This paper advances the study of microblogging and political events by investigating how one high-profile broadcast acted as a stimulus to real-time commentary from viewers using Twitter. Our case study is a controversial, high-ratings episode of BBC Question Time, the weekly British political debate show, in October 2009, in which Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, appeared as a panelist. The “viewertariat” emerging around such a political event affords the opportunity to explore interaction across media formats. We examine both the structural elements of engagement online and the expressions of collective identity expressed in tweets. Although many concerns noted in previous studies of online political engagement remain (inequality in the propensity to comment, coarseness of tone), we find certain notable characteristics in the sample, especially a direct link between the quantity of tweets and events on the screen, an ability to preempt the arguments offered by panelists, and ways in which viewertariat members add new content to the discussion. Furthermore, Twitter users commenting online express a range of overlapping identities. These complexities challenge broadcasting and political institutions seeking to integrate new, more organic models of engagement.

Social Media Analysis and Public Opinion: The 2010 UK General Election

Social media monitoring in politics can be understood by situating it in theories of public opinion. The multimethod study we present here indicates how social media monitoring allow for analysis of social dynamics through which opinions form and shift. Analysis of media coverage from the 2010 UK General Election demonstrates that social media are now being equated with public opinion by political journalists. We use interviews with pollsters, social media researchers and journalists to examine the perceived link between social media and public opinion. In light of competing understandings these interviews reveal, we argue for a broadening of the definition of public opinion to include its social dimension.

Psephological investigations: Tweets, votes, and unknown unknowns in the republican nomination process

This paper analyzes the utility of using information contained within Twitter posts in predicting electoral outcomes. Particularly, we are interested in patterns in Twitter communications that can help explain differences between published opinion polls and the actual vote. We consider three categories of models. The first is a mentions model that examines the correspondence between the prevalence of communications about a candidate and electoral outcomes. The second series of models treat Twitter similar to a prediction market, aggregating not candidate preferences but predictions of the electoral result. Last, we consider whether the rediffusion of tweets about a candidate is a reliable predictor of the candidates performance. The results find inconsistent support for the predictive value of Twitter mentions as an estimate of the overall vote, but these communications provide some evidence of otherwise undetected shifts in momentum with respect to the aggregated predictions of candidate performance and message rediffusion via retweets containing information about a particular candidate. Given the nature of the information extractable, these data are most sensitive to detecting changes in momentum.

Twenty20 as Media Event

We analyse Twenty20 cricket tournaments as media events, a particular social process with its own logic, function and effects. In Dayan and Katzs original formulation, media events enable a society to assemble, reflect on and legitimate its establishment institutions. Through a global mediatized event in space/time, Twenty20 creates a focal point for an international cricket community to watch, discuss and endorse or criticize the institutions and order of world cricket. Conceptions of the community and its order were present in statements made by different national teams as they approached the 2010 Twenty20 World Cup. We find that discussion engendered by the emergence of Twenty20 media events are structured around binaries of Test cricket, its techniques, sanctity and sporting values, against Twenty20, its ‘hit and giggle’ techniques, its innovations and its association with sporting values. Nevertheless, as all formats adapt and the institutional order evolves, we already find evidence of these binaries beginning to dissolve.

Campaigns and Social Media Communications: A Look at Digital Campaigning in the 2010 U.K. General Election

Social media are said to have the potential to transform relationships between political parties, candidates, and citizens. This chapter is a study of social media use at different levels in the 2010 United Kingdom general election to see to what extent that potential is realized. The research compares the use of Twitter by the national level of the campaign, composed of the three major parties, and their leaders, as well as the campaigns of the three major parties across the nine electoral districts in Englands second city, Birmingham. It examines the candidates and parties’ that various informational and engagement strategies at the national and Birmingham levels of the campaign with respect to their campaign functions. The analysis is carried out using natural language processing to computerize the content analysis. The findings reveal that social media are used at both levels, primarily for the undirectional transfer of information rather than for engagement. However, at the Birmingham level of the campaign there appears to be significantly greater emphasis on the creation of personal connections between candidates and the public than at the national level of the campaign. This suggests that lower profile candidates use social media in a compensatory manner, offsetting their limited media coverage which voters typically rely on in getting to know the candidates.

Data-Driven Campaigning in the 2015 United Kingdom General Election

While we know something of data-driven campaigning practices in the United States, we know much less about the role of data in other national contexts. The 2015 United Kingdom General Election offers an important case study of how such practices are evolving and being deployed in a different setting. This article draws on thirty-one in-depth interviews with political practitioners involved in the use of data for six major UK parties and electoral regulators. These interviews are employed to explore the perceived importance of data in contemporary British campaigns, to understand the data-based campaign techniques being used by UK parties, and to assess how data-driven practices are interacting with the preexisting institutional context of British politics. Going beyond the specifics of the UK case, this study raises questions about the comparative, theoretical, and normative dimensions of data-driven politics.

A Different Beast? Televised Election Debates in Parliamentary Democracies

Research on televised election debates has been dominated by studies of the United States. As a result, we know far less about other national contexts, including many parliamentary democracies that now hold televised election debates. This article makes two contributions to address this. Theoretically, the study argues that traditional approaches for understanding the development of campaign communication practices (particularly, Americanization and hybridization) are limiting when applied to television debates and instead offers an alternative theoretical approach, the concept of speciation drawn from biological science. This is then applied in the empirical section of the article in a comparative analysis of the evolution of televised election debates in four parliamentary democracies: Australia, Canada, West Germany/Germany, and the United Kingdom. Based on this analysis, the article argues that the logic of parliamentary democracy coupled with more diffuse party systems has created a distinctive type of televised debate, generally more open to smaller parties based on their success at winning seats in the legislature.

The Idea of Austerity in British Politics, 2003–2013:

Employing a dataset of 1843 think tank publications containing 37 million words, computer-assisted text analysis was used to examine the idea of austerity in British politics between 2003 and 2013. Theoretically, the article builds on the ideational turn in political research. However, in contrast to much ideational work which argues that ideas are important at times of crisis because they can address uncertainty, this article argues that moments of crisis can lead to the reformulation of ideas. Empirically, this article demonstrates the transformation of the idea of austerity. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, austerity was largely understood either in historical terms or as a practice applied in other countries. In the aftermath of the crisis, both the political right and left attempted to co-opt the idea of austerity for their own ends, combining it with various other ideational strands on which they have historically drawn.

News and Politics: the rise of live and interpretive journalism

At first sight, this volume might appear a backward-looking contribution to the debate about the media’s role in politics. This is because Cushion focuses his energies on a very traditional media form: scheduled television news bulletins. In a world where academic energies are focused on 24-hour news, social media and the hybrid news environments created by these communication channels, this might seem like a strange choice. Cushion’s justification is convincing though. He is not studying news bulletins to the exclusion of these new modes of communication, but rather using a longitudinal data-set (the sort that can only be created if a particular media form has been around for a prolonged period of time) to understand exactly how the content of more traditional forms of news has been infused with the values of newer media forms. Essentially, his aim is to study the mediatization of the media or, put another way, the interaction that is occurring between multiple and distinct media logics. As such, this volume sits within an intellectual approach which seeks to complicate the idea of mediatization, moving it away from a monolithic position. The challenge for any project of this kind is to ground an abstract and contested concept—in this case mediatization—within a measurable, empirical reality. Cushion does this by arguing that particular news genres prioritize certain types of content. Traditionally, evening news bulletins used edited reporter packages, or a news anchor talking directly to camera or narrating a news story over still or moving images. In contrast, 24-hour rolling news employs conversations between the news anchor and reporter, live outdoor broadcasts from a reporter, or studio discussions (p. 27). Cushion’s hypothesis is therefore that, faced by the advent of 24-hour news since the 1990s, scheduled news bulletins have gradually adopted a style more reminiscent of rolling news. This has made scheduled news more “live”, usurping its previous role as a recap of the day’s events. Furthermore, this model of news changes the level of journalistic intervention in news coverage, providing more space for interpretative commentary. It is possible to quibble with Cushion’s operationalization of 24-hour news values. His focus on the journalistic interventionism, for example, neglects the increased scope that rolling news provides for politicians to speak to the public directly, through coverage of speeches and press conferences. Arguably, this type of content also defines the rolling news genre (albeit almost always followed by exactly the type of real-time journalist commentary that interests Cushion). Cushion’s analysis generates some interesting findings, which contradict some accepted wisdom about the evolution of television news bulletins. Soundbite quotes from politicians and others in news bulletins have, for example, not got shorter in recent years, as might be expected. Also in contrast to what might be expected, the

Concluding Thoughts and Tribulations

We have written this book against a backdrop of great upheaval in Europe, the same backdrop against which the research was conducted. More than half a decade of austerity measures in many countries has seen the rise and fall of entire parties, of coalition governments, of the far right, of populist nationalism and new political movements based on attempts at direct and delegative democracy.