Social Media, Political Institutions and the Principal–Agent Dilemma

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Andrea Ceron
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Principal Agent

scholarly journals Generation Z and Organizational Listening on Social Media

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Reinikainen ◽  
Jaana T. Kari ◽  
Vilma Luoma-aho
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young People ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Generation Z ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Age Cohort ◽  
The Uk

Young people are avid users of social media and have appeared as a powerful force for social change, as shown by the ranks of those who have joined Greta Thunberg in the global climate movement. In addition to challenging political institutions and governments, young people today are also holding the corporate world accountable. To respond to young people’s expectations, brands, and organizations have turned to social media to interact and build relationships with them. However, critics have lamented that these attempts often fail and that young people’s trust in institutions, brands, and organizations continues to decline. This article asks how young people perceive organizational listening on social media and whether their perceptions are related to their trust in the information shared by brands and other organizations on social media. Data for the study were gathered through an online survey in Finland and the UK. The respondents (N = 1,534), aged 15–24, represent the age cohort known as Generation Z. The results show that organizational listening is connected to higher levels of perceived benefits from social media as well as higher levels of trust in the information that brands, public authorities, and non-governmental organizations share on social media. The results highlight the role of competent listening on social media, bolstering the previous literature connecting both organizational listening and trust with higher levels of participation and engagement online.

Vietnam elections may seed nascent opposition

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
Content Type ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Government Leadership

Significance The legislature will pass eight laws and formalise the new government leadership. National Assembly and local People's Councils elections will follow on May 22. Impacts Foreign and social media face growing competition from state-owned media enterprises, and increasing state scrutiny. The National Assembly's institutional capacity is unlikely to be strengthened much, or soon. The intellectual-blogger group of self-nominated NA candidates is unlikely to be elected in this election, but may grow by 2021. Social media will become a more important channel for opposition politics than formal political institutions.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mason W. Moseley
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Educational Networks ◽  
Made In

This initial chapter presents a telling anecdote from the #8N protests in Argentina in 2012. It then introduces the overarching argument of the book: the rise of protest in certain Latin American regimes can be explained by the interaction of two specific phenomena in recent history: (1) the significant socioeconomic gains made in the region during the past decade, which in turn have produced the most politically “engaged” citizenries—via social media, community organizations, and professional or educational networks—in Latin American history; and (2) the persistence of weak political institutions and waning political legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. Thus, rather than emphasizing how worsening economic conditions and mounting grievances fuel protest, this theoretical approach attributes rising contention to the improvement of economic conditions amid low-quality political institutions.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Augusto Valeriani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Political News ◽  
Electoral Mobilization ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
The Relationship

To understand the relationship between social media and political participation, the book focuses on politically relevant outcomes of citizens’ use of social media rather than on the technical affordances of digital platforms or the sheer frequency with which people use them. Encountering political content one agrees with, being accidentally exposed to political news, and being targeted by electoral mobilization can all lead citizens to participate more in politics. This is especially the case among citizens who are less interested in politics and less attentive to a general election campaign. Differences in the kinds of voters who may be mobilized by social media may also affect electoral competition. Political institutions can also shape the relationships between political experiences on social media and participation.

Mining a news desert: The impact of a local newspaper’s closure on political participation and engagement in the rural Australian town of Lightning Ridge

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Magasic ◽  
Kristy Hess
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
New South ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Credible Information ◽  
The Impact

This article examines how a local newspaper’s closure impacts the way everyday people in a rural Australian town are informed about and engage with political affairs. It draws on a two-month focused ethnographic study in the outback town of Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, and explores people’s media-related practices following the closure of the town’s only newspaper, The Ridge News, in 2015. While social media is considered to have partly filled a news void, there is an increasingly fragmented and less vibrant local public sphere that has led to growing complacency among individuals about political affairs. Local residents highlight a dearth of reliable, credible information and lament the loss of the newspaper and its role in community advocacy and fostering people’s engagement with political institutions, especially local government.

scholarly journals The Limits of Commercialized Censorship in China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Principal Agent ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Large Databases ◽  
Principal Agent Problem ◽  
The Government ◽  
Media Company

Despite massive investment in China’s censorship program, internet platforms in China are rife with criticisms of the government and content that seeks to organize opposition to the ruling Communist Party. Past works have attributed this “openness” to deliberate government strategy or lack of capacity. Most, however, do not consider the role of private social media companies, to whom the state delegates information controls. I suggest that the apparent incompleteness of censorship is largely a result of principal-agent problems that arise due to misaligned incentives of government principals and private media company agents. Using a custom dataset of annotated leaked documents from a social media company, Sina Weibo, I find that 16% of directives from the government are disobeyed by Sina Weibo and that disobedience is driven by Sina’s concerns about censoring more strictly than competitor Tencent. I also find that the fragmentation inherent in the Chinese political system exacerbates this principal agent problem. I demonstrate this by retrieving actual censored content from large databases of hundreds of millions of Sina Weibo posts and measuring the performance of Sina Weibo’s censorship employees across a range of events. This paper contributes to our understanding of media control in China by uncovering how market competition can lead media companies to push back against state directives and increase space for counter-hegemonic discourse.

scholarly journals Post-Truth Politics, Digital Media, and the Politicization of the Global Compact for Migration

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maximilian Conrad
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Global Compact ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The debate over the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in late 2018 showcases the crucial role of digital and, in particular, social media as vehicles of disinformation that populist actors can exploit in an effort to create resentment and fear in the public sphere. While mainstream political actors and legacy media initially did not address the issue, right-wing populist actors claimed ownership by framing (presumably <em>obligatory</em>) mass immigration as a matter of social, cultural, economic, and not least political risk, and created an image of political and cultural elites conspiring to keep the issue out of the public sphere. Initially advanced via digital and social media, such frames resonated sufficiently strongly in civil society to politicize the GCM in various national public spheres. In this article, these dynamics are explored by comparing the politicization of the GCM in three EU member states, namely Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Using a process-tracing design, the article (a) identifies the key actors in the process, (b) analyzes how the issue emerged in social and other digital media and travelled from digital media into mainstream mass media discourse, and finally (c) draws comparative conclusions from the three analyzed cases. Particular emphasis is placed on the frames used by right-wing populist actors, how these frames resonated in the wider public sphere and thereby generated communicative power against the GCM, ultimately forcing the issue onto the agenda of national public spheres and political institutions.

scholarly journals Making sense of democratic institutions intertextually: Communication on social media as a civic literacy event preceding collective action

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Informal Learning ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Civic Learning ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
Civic Literacy

Communication on social media preceding coordinated street demonstrations is assayed for evidence of practice-based informal civic learning about conventional politics and mainstream media. This is done to offset a mounting interest in activist self-organisation and self-reflexivity with a scrutiny of networked communication as a civic literacy event. The article proposes that scepticism and criticality directed at media and political institutions provide fertile justification for their challenge, thereby rendering intertextual informal learning an expedient to collective action.

Outside the Bubble

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Augusto Valeriani
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Political News ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Electoral Mobilization ◽  
Societal Problems

The ways in which citizens experience politics on social media have overall positive implications for political participation and equality in Western democracies. This book investigates the relationship between political experiences on social media and institutional political participation based on custom-built post-election surveys on samples representative of Internet users in Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2015 and 2018. On the whole, social media do not constitute echo chambers, as most users see a mixture of political content they agree and disagree with. Social media also facilitate accidental encounters with news and exposure to electoral mobilization among substantial numbers of users. Furthermore, political experiences on social media have relevant implications for participation. Seeing political messages that reinforce one’s viewpoints, accidentally encountering political news, and being targeted by electoral mobilization on social media are all positively associated with participation. Importantly, these political experiences enhance participation, especially among citizens who are less politically involved. Conversely, the participatory benefits of social media do not vary based on users’ ideological preferences and on whether they voted for populist parties. Finally, political institutions matter, as some political experiences on social media are more strongly associated with participation in majoritarian systems and in party-centric systems. While social media may be part of many societal problems, they can contribute to the solution to at least two important democratic ills—citizens’ disconnection from politics and inequalities between those who choose to exercise their voice and those who remain silent.

scholarly journals Reaching out to the voter? Campaigning on Twitter during the 2019 European elections

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205316802091725 ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. Daniel ◽  
Lukas Obholzer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
European Elections ◽  
Standard Tool ◽  
Lead Candidate ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Twitter Activity

This article draws upon the literature on comparative political institutions in order to re-examine the logic of Twitter usage during campaign periods, now that social media has become a standard tool that is used across the political spectrum. We test how electoral institutions and individual characteristics shaped Twitter activity during the 2019 European elections cycle and compare the nature of this usage with the previous 2014 campaign. Our findings allow for an evaluation of social media campaigning against the backdrop of its dynamic evolution, while also confirming its normalisation in the European elections’ revival of the Spitzenkandidat process. Rather than seeking to differentiate themselves from party-internal and external competitors or highlighting their own qualities, our findings suggest that Members of the European Parliament used Twitter in 2019 to emphasise the lead candidate that they have in common.

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