Elections

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

Such language constructs social imaginaries – and in the case of Democrat and Republican politicians, perhaps now multiple mutually exclusive social imaginaries – that are constitutive of the socio-communicative realities their voters believe they live in. Jenny’s …

The next presenter in this AoIR 2022 session is my current University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, who shifts our focus to the users of social media platforms. They need political knowledge to make rational decisions, but this is difficult in today’s high-choice informational environments; one key source for such information, of course, are search engines, but research on their role with regard to political issues and referenda remains very limited. The current study explores this in the Swiss content, examining how often Swiss citizens search for information on upcoming referenda. Generally, such search practices may be related to demographic …

I’m chairing the next AoIR 2022 session, which starts with Márton Bene and a focus on populist political communication, which is highly people-centred, anti-elitist, and targetting dangerous ‘others’. Social media have become a key space for such populist communication, and populist elements are often strategically combined with other content elements, and conditioned by actors’ political positions and goals. This project explores this for the 2019 European Parliamentary election, which may be a particularly easy target for anti-elitist populist communication, and less so for people-centred communication.

The question here is how this plays out at the page and post level on …

The final paper in this AoIR 2022 session is presented by my colleague Dan Angus, who shifts our focus to patterns of advertising in the 2022 Australian federal election. The slides are below, too. There are a number of tools for the analysis of online political advertising that have started to emerge in recent times, exploring for instance ad spending, audience targetting, and political messaging. But we need more data from the platforms and develop further tools to do this kind of work at scale and discover dodgy activities. This is also critical for journalists, and academic collaborations with journalists …

Our papers on the Australian election in this AoIR 2022 session start with my presentation on the patterns of social media engagement during the election. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in our AoIR 2022 session on elections is Fabio Giglietto, and focusses on political advertising and coordinated behaviour in the lead-up to the 2021 German election. Sponsored by the Media Agency of North-Rhine-Westphalia, it was interested in micro-targetting of ads on social media as well as coordinated behaviour, and proceeded by identifying the social media accounts of a large number of candidates in the German election. It also worked with a list of relevant political terms compiled by GESIS.

This enabled the project to gather relevant content from Facebook, Facebook ads, Twitter, Instagram, and the researchers then …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Rosa Berganza, whose interest is in the discussion of political scandals on Twitter, and how this might influence the attitudes of both journalists and ordinary citizens. Twitter is a particularly influential medium in this context, as journalists are also very active here.

In particular, different terms and hashtags may be used to frame past political scandals strategically during election campaigns; the present project examined the utilisation of three recent corruption scandals, affecting three different political parties, by their opponents, and explored how the parties affected responded to this.

Such attention was …