Functions of Hybrid Media: How Parties and Their Leaders Use Traditional Media in Their Social Media Campaign Communication

Political campaign communication has become increasingly hybrid and the ability to create synergies between older and newer media is now a prerequisite for running a successful campaign. Nevertheless, beyond establishing that parties and individual politicians use social media to gain visibility in traditional media, not much is known about how political actors use the hybrid media system in their campaign communication. At the same time, the personalization of politics, shown to have increased in the media coverage of politics, has gained little attention in the context of today’s hybrid media environment. In this research we analyze one aspect of hybrid media campaign communication, political actors’ use of traditional media in their social media campaign communication. Through a quantitative content analysis of the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts of Finnish parties and their leaders published during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that much of this hybridized campaign communication was personalized. In addition, we show that parties and their leaders used traditional media for multiple purposes, the most common of which was gaining positive visibility, pointing to strategic considerations. The results have implications for both the scholarship on hybrid media systems and personalization of politics.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR POLITICAL CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATION AND ITS IMPACT ON POLITICAL POLARIZATION AMONG YOUTHS IN UGANDA

The current study is aimed at examining the use of social media for political communication and its impact on the political polarization of youths in Uganda. The study specifically focuses on determining social media platforms that are often used by youths in Uganda, find out the levels of social media usage, political campaign communication, and political polarization among youths in Uganda as a result of social media usage. Lastly, the study also focuses on determining the relationship between social media platforms, social media usage, political communication, and political polarization amongst youths in Ugandans. The study adopts the uses and gratifications theory to help in guiding the study and explaining the available relationships between the variables of the study. A quantitative research design and survey method with a questionnaire as the tool for data collection were used in this study. 192 valid responses were extracted from youths residing in Kampala and Wakiso districts in Uganda as the respondents of the study. The findings of the study reveal that youths in Uganda often use Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram while looking for political-related information to help them form a decision on who to give their support in the election. In addition, the study also reveals that the more the youths look for such political information, the more they become polarized because all the politicians just feed them with information that is divisive and there exists a huge amount of hatred as a result of the consumption of such information on the Ugandan internet space. The uses and gratifications theory is also supported in the study.

Using Campaign Communications to Analyze Civility in Ranked Choice Voting Elections

Theory suggests that ranked choice voting (RCV) may create a more civil campaign environment. As voters must rank candidates, the candidates have an incentive to work with each other more collaboratively. This study uses text analysis software (LIWC) to examine candidate tweets and newspaper articles in RCV versus specifically-chosen plurality cities for evidence of positivity or negativity. In quantitatively comparing the tweets, the results are mixed among the cities. Qualitatively, candidates seem to be more likely to engage each other in RCV cities than in plurality cities. Using LIWC to analyze newspaper articles for campaign tone, one can see that RCV city articles have significantly more positive than negative words. This is the first published study to use direct campaign communication data to study RCV elections and campaign civility. This research validates survey research indicating that citizens perceive RCV campaigns are more civil.

3 Minutes to Midnight: speculative game design for nuclear disarmament

This paper proposes a digital game concept designed to increase the millennial generation’s level of engagement with the campaign for nuclear disarmament. It discusses four key research findings that support the need for the development of this game, and provides helpful information to enable better understanding of the relatively specialized inspiring concepts. The paper argues that activist campaigns should design nuanced communication plans that consider the complexities of the issue and leverage the digital media tools whose affordances best match the goals of the campaign. In the case of nuclear disarmament, I propose a campaign communication strategy in the form of a pervasive social impact game, called 3 Minutes to Midnight, as an effective way to ignite widespread public support in the 21st century.

3 Minutes to Midnight: speculative game design for nuclear disarmament

This paper proposes a digital game concept designed to increase the millennial generation’s level of engagement with the campaign for nuclear disarmament. It discusses four key research findings that support the need for the development of this game, and provides helpful information to enable better understanding of the relatively specialized inspiring concepts. The paper argues that activist campaigns should design nuanced communication plans that consider the complexities of the issue and leverage the digital media tools whose affordances best match the goals of the campaign. In the case of nuclear disarmament, I propose a campaign communication strategy in the form of a pervasive social impact game, called 3 Minutes to Midnight, as an effective way to ignite widespread public support in the 21st century.

Narratives in Televised Political Ads: Toward Alternative Discourses and Critical Voters

Televised political ads are powerful instruments of campaign communication because they are dominant and ubiquitous repositories of narratives by candidates and their strategists. Using Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm and Robert Rowland’s narrative approach, this study looks into the use of narratives in 127 political TV ads in the 2016 and 2019 national elections. The discussion is divided into two major sections. First, the study uncovers dominant, emerging, and missing narratives in the TV ads and reflects on what these narratives reveal about Philippine political culture. Second, through a critique of these existing narratives, this study raises the challenge of reimagining and creating ads that foster critical public discourse. To this end, the paper recommends alternative topics, subjects, and strategies to improve TV ads in the future while recognizing the medium’s constraints such as length and costs.

Political Campaign Communication in the Information Age

According to scholars, the use of mediatization could be understood as communicative representation of politicians. From this perspective, the concept of mediatization in politics is not an automatism, it is a functional principle of media, more preferably the social media. To understand this activity of politicians on social media, the online attributes of broadcasting media could be conceptualized as self-mediatization of politics. The chapter will look through some of the most used concepts in political communication that aim to interpret the communicative nature of politicians in online campaigns. The used communication techniques on social media set the focus of analysis on the insufficiency of above-mentioned concepts). Besides presenting the main difficulties of basic concepts, this chapter aims to introduce the phenomenon of attention-based politics as a possible solution to research on political campaign communication in information era.

Campaign communication in Nigeria’s 2019 General Elections: unfulfilled party pledges and voter engagement without a social contract

Broken campaign promises challenge the sanctity of the electoral process in Nigeria. Six decades after political independence and six electoral cycles in the last two decades of the Fourth Republic, there are inadequate legal frameworks and a lack of political will to change the narrative. Ambushing the voters with plans of action on the eve of every election remains a constant ritual to legitimise party campaigns in both digital media and at heavily mobilised rallies, often with limited substance. The general purpose of this study is twofold. First, to provide analysis of campaign communication and the extent to which it influences the participation of citizens in the electoral process. Second, to investigate the electorate’s understanding of policy issues inherent in the 2019 election manifestos of the two dominant political parties, All Progressive Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and how other elements shape perception and trust in elected representatives/ government. The research design relies on sample surveys and in­depth interviews, and seeks to identify, within the context of an electoral cycle, why conversations between public office seekers and voters do not translate into a concrete social contract or generate time­bound inclusive policies.