Elections

Up next at ECREA 2016 are Jakob Svensson and Uta Russmann, whose focus is on the use of Instagram in the 2014 Swedish elections, especially by Swedish parties. Instagram is interesting in that it privileges the visual dimension that tends to be underresearched in political communications research. The images that are posted here may be more effective than mere text messages in gaining voters' attention, and are possibly also able to be more persuasive; additionally, Instagram can combine images and text, which may be even more effective.

The focus here is on the use of the platform for mobilisation, image …

The next session at ECREA 2016 starts with Eli Skogerbø, whose interest is in the personalisation of political campaigning through social media. But what do we mean by this term? What are the dynamics of personalisation across different party-political systems?

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Social media give politicians an independent, unedited arena for communicating politics. Individual politicians can use such platforms for getting more direct attention, at the expense of their groups or parties. The same is true in political journalism, however, where there is also a growing focus on individual politicians over their parties – so the idea of personalisation has been …

The final speakers in this ECREA 2016 session are my QUT colleague Brenda Moon and I, presenting our comparative analysis of the uses of Twitter in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election. Below is our presentation:

Social Media in Australian Federal Elections: Comparing the 2013 and 2016 Campaigns from Axel Bruns

The next speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Martin Nkosi Ndlela, who is also a contributor to our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. He shifts our focus to the use of social media in Kenyan elections. What are the democratic implications of rapid change in media systems in developing nations such as this, and what effect do new media have on civic engagement?

How were social media used in the political campaigning process in the 2013 election campaign in Kenya, then? This must also be understood against the context of previous elections in the country, which …

The first morning at ECREA 2016 starts with a session that celebrates the launch of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, and begins with a paper by my co-editor Gunn Enli. Her interest is in the question of authenticity: this has become a big theme in advertising for just about any product or service, also including politics. This may be seen as a response to the artificial aspects of the postmodern world.

The more artificial ands focus group-tested political messaging becomes, the more the idea of authenticity has come to the fore. Such authenticity has been approached …

We start the second session this morning at AoIR 2016 with a paper by Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Patricia Rossini, whose interest is in the social media posts of presidential candidates in the U.S. election campaign in 2016. On their live tracker they are capturing the social media activities of both Clinton and Trump, and these have also been coded by content.

One important aspect of this work is also to connect social media activities and public opinion polling. This provides additional context for online campaigns, and shows the interrelations between social media campaigning activities and current polling performance. In a …

The next speaker at Social Media and Society is Christopher Mascaro, whose interest is in 'big data' on political communication online. Political discourse studies have traditionally been restrained by geographic and social access, and 'big data' from online activities can overcome some of these barriers; it also introduces some new limitations that must be considered, however.

Christopher's focus is on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election: how do networks form around the political issues being discussed on Twitter during the campaign? The dataset was generated using TwitterZombie running on Amazon Web Services, tracking an extensible range of hashtags, user handles, and …

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.