Making Sense of Online Media during French Presidential Elections

Reykjavík.
The next speakers at ECPR 2011 are Jean-Marc Francony and Françoise Papa, who take an information science approach. They begin by noting that their research encountered a number of major methodological difficulties – challenging problems to learn from for further research.

The Web has become more important for the communication of politics in France. TV and traditional mass media still remained the first channels of communication for political parties, and as a tool for politicians to present themselves, and Websites of political parties mainly pursued a top-down communication model in the 2007 presidential campaign, but this is slowly changing. The Web is now established as an additional channel for information; can this new media context change political communication?

The team developed a media observation system which combined a range of media (print, TV, Internet) in order to monitor the election campaigns, and identify agendas, candidate themes, and media themes. The major presidential candidates’ Websites differed strongly from one another: the Royal site was more strongly focussed on debate between interested voters and politicians, while the Sarkozy site focussed on top-down communication and the candidate himself.

What the team aimed to do was to systematically archive Web data, constructing a ‘memory’ of Web content and its chronology during the campaign using the commercial tool Archiv’it. They aimed to daily archive a range of political Websites and extract contents and links – including parties, supporters, mainstream and alternative media, and commentators. This took a classical approach to content archiving and analysis – but this also makes it more difficult to track the multiple dynamics of Websites.

The mechanisms of archiving content were problematic, however; not all the deep content was captured, and archive space was scarce; it proved difficult to trace content and actors through the archive, and to finetune the archiving processes. Relational dimensions and interactional dynamics were especially difficult to extract from the archived data.

The team is now preparing for the 2012 French presidential election campaign; this needs to take into account how much further the contexts of online communication have changed since 2007. There are vast differences in the usage of the multiple channels now available – especially since social networking sites have been much more strongly established over the past years.

Social networking is a central focus of the 2012 project, in fact; the team has already started to monitor the visibility of various candidates on Twitter, for example, and examining the interactions of their various accounts. This can then be correlated with events in the overall campaign itself.