U.S. Political Candidates on Facebook

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 starts with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, whose interest is in the performance of politicians on Facebook. There have been a few spectacular successes, of course (most obviously, Barack Obama), and social media have now become a key tool in political campaigning, but it remains unclear how widespread such successes really are. Most politicians who use social media are largely ignored, in fact.

Rasmus’s study tracked candidates in the 112 most competitive electoral districts in the U.S. House and Senate races (who might be assumed to have the most resources at their disposal, given the strong competition); however, most of them found only a relatively small audience. Engagement with candidates is concentrated on a small number of politicians; while most people (and most politicians) are online, only a few are actually successful with their online activities. These people may not be ahead of the curve as much as on top of the curve, Rasmus suggests. We should look for the implications of using online media through different lenses, therefore: by examining the institutional and indirect effects of social media in politics.

Rasmus’s study tracked a number of social media platforms, but his focus here is on Facebook: there is a clear long-tail distribution of Facebook followers for the various candidates, with Michele Bachmann (R) and Alan Grayson (D) leading the pack and positioned well ahead of the rest of their colleagues (in November, during the mid-term elections, Bachmann had some 140,000 supporters, but the Republican median is only 2,165; Grayson had 30,000, against a Democrat median of 1,614). These median numbers compare unfavourably with the number of people candidates can reach even simply through their campaign speeches.

There was substantial growth in numbers during the mid-terms, too (+37% for Republicans, +21% for Democrats between September and November), but again the leading candidates are also leading in growth – Bachmann accounts for half of the total growth in Republican Facebook followers, for example. (For what it’s worth, the distribution of followers is more unequal even than the distribution of wealth in the U.S., Rasmus notes.)

Support on Facebook is strongly correlated with support in other social media platforms (such as Twitter or YouTube), incidentally; support is similarly highly concentrated here, which indicates that the utility of social media for direct communication by candidates is limited in a straightforward sense – even if they may generate more indirect benefits in other ways (and are highly valuable for the leading candidates, obviously). As long as such parallel patterns in attention exist, the median outcomes may be disappointed, but the very real extremes which exist must continue to be taken into account…