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.

Designing for Democracy

Designing for Democracy addresses the question of how to “fix” digital technologies for democracy by examining how the design of the built environment (whether streets, sidewalks, or social media platforms) informs how, and whether, citizens can engage in democratic practices. “Democratic spaces”—built environments that support democratic politics—must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Each corresponds to a necessary democratic practice. Clearly bounded spaces make it easier to recognize what we share and with whom we share; they help us form communities. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to the communities they house and the other members within them; they help us sustain communities. And flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habits required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. These three practices—recognition, attachment, and experimentalism—are the affordances a built environment must provide in order to be a “democratic space”; they are the criteria to which designers and users should be attentive when building and inhabiting the spaces of the built environment, both physical and digital. Using this theoretical framework, Designing for Democracy provides new insights into the democratic potential of digital technologies. Through extended discussions of examples like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, it suggests architectural responses to problems often associated with digital technologies—loose networks, the “personalization of politics,” and “echo chambers.” In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing Democracy provides blueprints for democracy in a digital age.

Unrepresentative Claims: Speaking for Oneself in a Social Movement

Sometimes, people engaged in politics actively refuse to speak for anyone but themselves. These unrepresentative claims multiply in social movements in times of crisis. During the French Yellow Vest movement of 2018–2019, such unrepresentative claims were routinely made by Yellow Vest leaders, to the point of being a condition for having a leadership position in the movement. By making these unrepresentative claims, they declined any representative mandate, asserting their freedom from any instituted influence. However, by claiming to speak only for themselves, they also selected the aspects of their identity they performed. This allowed them to embody the people sharing this identity, recalling the medieval repraesentatio identitatis, but in a way adjusted to today’s greater personalization of politics. Drawing on this movement and on other examples of unrepresentative claims, we can delineate three broad ideal-types of identities that may be put forward by unrepresentative claims: generality, particularity, and individuality.

From the theater to the hippodrome: A critique of Jeffrey Green’s theory of plebiscitary democracy and an alternative

The article argues that the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD), originally developed by Max Weber, is in its somewhat rejuvenated version a helpful framework in interpreting longer-term and more recent empirical trends in contemporary democracies, such as the growing personalization of politics, the emergence of populist leaders, rising levels of polarization, and the growing importance of social media. However, to realize the potential of the theory, it should be detached from Jeffrey Green’s most original, yet insufficiently realistic elaboration of plebiscitary democracy that he made a decade ago. The article argues that instead of a passive and unifiable entity, the citizenry should be thought of as reactive and deeply divided, a setting which can be characterized by the metaphor of the infamous Byzantine chariot races rather than that of the theater, implicit in Green’s theory. Plebiscitary democracy should be thought of as representational, where popular control is manifested as the veto power of the popular voice. Additionally, despite its realist minimalism, the theory we propose may still have some critical potential, because it adopts the refurbished ideal of competition. The article closes by identifying further avenues of theoretization leading towards a more elaborate view of PLD.

The personalization of party politics in Western Europe (1985–2016): evidence from an expert survey

The personalization of politics has been extensively studied from different angles and in different national contexts. Nonetheless, an easily comparable and longitudinal study of the personalization of politics at both the country and the party levels is still missing. In this article, we fill this gap by presenting data from an expert survey on the personalization of politics for around 110 parties and a series of Western European countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s. The dimensions analyzed concern the impact of the personalization of politics in general elections, and also party leaders' room for maneuver in candidate selection, the definition of the party's policy-making agenda, and party leaders’ intra-party control. Different reliability tests confirm the goodness of the data collected. At the same time, first descriptive analyses show that there has not been a homogenous diffusion of this phenomenon in Western Europe, and diverging personalization trends are present for different groups of countries or different dimensions of this phenomenon.

John Pym and Libellous Politics in Early Civil War England

This article explores the royalist libels that afflicted the parliamentarian leader John Pym during the early 1640s to argue that the period marked an important turning point in English libellous politics. First, like many of the political libels circulating in early Civil War England, royalist attacks against Pym transitioned unsteadily from manuscript to cheap print and then finally into official court-sponsored publications throughout the period as contemporaries grew more comfortable with openly libellous language. That medial transformation, in turn, was informed by a broader personalization of politics that drew on early Stuart modes of ‘politic thinking’ to frame the nascent military conflict as a battle of rival political personalities. Both contexts informed the creation and dissemination of the most vicious anti-Pym libel of the period: an allegation that Pym's mother had once committed the act of bestiality with a horse, and that Pym himself was the miscegenated result of their illicit union. Rather than a spurious invention, moreover, the horse libel in fact possessed tangible roots in an embarrassing episode of Pym's family history thirty years prior. Consequently, it demonstrates the importance of oral and scribal transmission alike in shaping and sustaining the vitriolic libellous politics of early Civil War England.

The Consciousness-Raising of #MeToo: Mobilizing Political Empathy in the Digital Age

The lasting effect of #MeToo’s suggests that we are at a critical moment in the study of communications and media studies. This MRP will be speculative in nature, however, it is my contribution that we must move beyond literature that defends “slacktivism” and the notion that digital mediation is an impoverished form of communication (McCafferty, 2011; Baym, 2017), and instead build upon emerging frameworks that focus on the affordances of the social media age in activism theory by integrating rationality from offline, or “real life”, areas of literature. In the case of #MeToo, the personalization of politics and mobilizing structures share logic with feminism practices that predate the digital age. This indicates that perhaps an effective way to make meaning out of new and complex phenomena like #MeToo is not diminish the human element, but rather acknowledge it as an integral part of online protest. Building on this assumption, this MRP is a commentary that considers the complexity of the events that brought #MeToo to fruition. I will evaluate #MeToo using emerging literature at the intersections of activism and social media, while contextualizing both the viral moment and the continued movement within feminist theory that is grounded in visceral emotions like vulnerability, anger, empathy, solidarity, and catharsis. Combining both literature that focuses on the technological and human elements should be considered in future research in order to develop theoretical frameworks that create a more holistic understanding of the cultural events that occur due to activism in the digital age.

The Consciousness-Raising of #MeToo: Mobilizing Political Empathy in the Digital Age

The lasting effect of #MeToo’s suggests that we are at a critical moment in the study of communications and media studies. This MRP will be speculative in nature, however, it is my contribution that we must move beyond literature that defends “slacktivism” and the notion that digital mediation is an impoverished form of communication (McCafferty, 2011; Baym, 2017), and instead build upon emerging frameworks that focus on the affordances of the social media age in activism theory by integrating rationality from offline, or “real life”, areas of literature. In the case of #MeToo, the personalization of politics and mobilizing structures share logic with feminism practices that predate the digital age. This indicates that perhaps an effective way to make meaning out of new and complex phenomena like #MeToo is not diminish the human element, but rather acknowledge it as an integral part of online protest. Building on this assumption, this MRP is a commentary that considers the complexity of the events that brought #MeToo to fruition. I will evaluate #MeToo using emerging literature at the intersections of activism and social media, while contextualizing both the viral moment and the continued movement within feminist theory that is grounded in visceral emotions like vulnerability, anger, empathy, solidarity, and catharsis. Combining both literature that focuses on the technological and human elements should be considered in future research in order to develop theoretical frameworks that create a more holistic understanding of the cultural events that occur due to activism in the digital age.

Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections.