Online Election Campaigning

Studies of online campaigning tend to focus on the supply side: the way political parties communicate and campaign using the Internet. This chapter explores the online presences of the main candidates and their parties who stood in the 2012 French presidential election. The research focuses not only on the supply side but also explores demand, utilising data from the Mediapolis survey to ascertain what citizens search for online and in particular what citizens seeking help with their voter decisions seek online. The data shows that citizens are provided with a rich online experience during election campaigns. Information is presented in engaging ways and candidates attempt to mobilise their supporters and offer various opportunities to interact with the campaign and other Website visitors. Interaction is augmented in particular by the use of social networking sites. Citizens, however, appear to mostly go online to find detailed information on the policies and programmes of the candidates. There appears little call for engaging communication, interactive opportunities, or details on the personal lives or personalities of the candidates. The data may, therefore, suggest that information may need to be packaged for accessibility and presented in a way that allows voters to make up their own minds, rather than following the norms of corporate sales campaign Websites.

Using Graph Theory Software for Political Discourse Analysis

In this chapter, the authors show how, using graph theory, one can make a content analysis of political discourse. The premises of this analysis are: we have a corpus of speech of each party or candidate, as empirical data; speeches convey economic, political, and socio-cultural values, these taking the form of words or word families; there are interdependences between the values of a political discourse; they are given by the co-occurrence of two values, as words in the text, within a well-defined fragment or they are determined by the internal logic of political discourse; established links between values in a political speech have associated positive numbers indicating the “power” of those links; these “powers” are defined according to both the number of co-occurrences of values and the internal logic of the discourse where they occur. In this context, the authors highlight the following: a) the dominant values in a political speech; b) groups of values that have ties between them and have no connection with the rest; c) the order in which political values should be set in order to obtain an equivalent but more concise speech compared to the already given one; d) the links between the values that form the “core” political speech; and e) one can get from one value to another by using as few words as possible from the discourse to be analyzed.

Reframing Audience

Analysis of the audiences for the state of the union addresses on Twitter from 2010-2012 provides analytical leverage in unpacking the concept of audience, which has largely inhabited an analytical “black box,” seen as of critical importance but little understood. The authors frame audience as “co-motion” as it evolves from a broadcast medium to a medium of interaction in three moves: hashtags that establish a space for gathering, retweets that share reading, and sharing of urls that serve to communicate importance, evaluative judgment, and justification. They contrast the response of the congressional audience and the Twitter audience and find, while there was substantial overlap in their applause, members of Congress were less responsive than the Twitter audience to the president's calls for them to meet their responsibilities and less responsive to criticisms of major corporations. The authors find a vibrant political discourse on Twitter reaching a potential audience that rivals in size that of television, as audience becomes the public domain.

Microblogging and the News

A particularly important question that has yet to be addressed about microblogging is the extent to which tweeting from politicians influences the traditional media's news coverage. This chapter seeks to address this oversight by tracking print, broadcast, and online news mentions of tweets from political elites during the five-and-a-half years since microblogging started. Consistent with previous research into “new media” effects and journalistic sourcing patterns, the authors find that although reporters, pundits, and bloggers are increasingly incorporating tweets into their news discussions, the group of Twitterers who are consistently quoted is small and drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of nationally recognizable political leaders. In addition to contributing to the emerging literature on Twitter, the analysis presented here suggests a new way of conceptualizing influence on the site. Rather than focusing strictly on Twitter-centric measures of message diffusion, the findings of this chapter suggest that researchers should begin to consider the ways that tweets can shape political discourse by spreading beyond the fairly narrow world of microblogging.

Relationship between Social Media and Political Parties

This chapter analyzes the capacity of social media usage and the social media strategies of political parties that became the members of Turkish Parliament after 2011 election. The social media usage increases in parallel to the improvements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and it becomes an important tool with its communicative functions to realize activities in social, political, and economic fields. In the globalization process, developments in ICTs and changes in the meaning of democracy have been realized parallel to each other. Politics has become more open to interaction and the participation of different actors. ICTs have created new opportunities to interaction and participation of social actors. These improvements require transformations in the role and functions of political parties. They have to arrange their programs and structures according to participative understanding of democracy and new technologies. Social media usage is seen as a requirement for political parties and party leaders for adaptation to these developments, and it is also seen as a device with its potential for realizing participation, communication, and interaction to adapt to the changes in the understanding of politics.

Hungarian MPs' Response Propensity to Emails

Within the framework of empirical research, the authors sent an email to every member of the Hungarian Parliament. They wanted to know how many representatives would answer their letter within a one-week period. As a next step, they listed the answerers, the composition of parliamentary groups, gender, age, and the way the representatives got into the National Assembly in the election (from single-member districts or from party list). On the basis of this, they outline the profile of the responding representative. The typical answers came from women, who are members of the opposition and who are between the ages of 30–39. The least responses came from the members of the governing coalition. As a final point, the authors conclude in this chapter that Hungarian representatives do not differ significantly from their colleagues in the Western countries.

The New Interdisciplinary Fields of Public Policy Engineering and Computational Public Policy

This chapter describes two new interdisciplinary fields defined by Ashu M. G. Solo called “public policy engineering” and “computational public policy.” Public policy engineering is the application of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science to solving problems in public policy. Computational public policy is the application of computer science or mathematics to solving problems in public policy. Public policy engineering and computational public policy include, but are not limited to, principles and methods for public policy formulation, decision making, analysis, modeling, optimization, forecasting, and simulation. The definition of these two new fields will greatly increase the pace of research and development in these important fields.

The New Interdisciplinary Fields of Political Engineering and Computational Politics

This chapter describes two new interdisciplinary fields defined by Ashu M. G. Solo called “political engineering” and “computational politics.” Political engineering is the application of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science to solving problems in politics. Computational politics is the application of computer science or mathematics to solving problems in politics. Political engineering and computational politics include, but are not limited to, principles and methods for political decision making, analysis, modeling, optimization, forecasting, simulation, and expression. The definition of these two new fields will greatly increase the pace of research and development in these important fields.

A Diachronic Analysis of Portuguese Digital Campaigning

Bearing in mind the dearth of inquiry about new media and political campaigns in Portugal, this chapter proposes an unprecedented cross-cutting analysis of the nature of online communication during the period of explosion of the e-campaigns. Such a topography and cartography for Internet communications and political campaigning, comprising distinct elections over time, allows for assessing both the evolution of the campaign online and the most influential contributions of the Internet to those evolving trends. The multiple wave nature of the data involved in the chronological study of the 2000 campaigns in Portugal is further complemented with extensive in-depth interviews conducted with different actors from the limited universe of key respondents with direct involvement in the episodes under analysis. It concludes that the Internet went from a separate operation in previous campaigns to a more central role within all Portuguese campaign divisions. Despite being touted as a revolution and a great communication tool, the core features of the Internet have reinforced the continuity of previous tendencies rather than precipitating a radical break with the past. Moreover, although important interaction flows were created with the voters, those were discontinued once the campaign was over, thus making Websites, online platforms, social networks profiles, and video sharing channels used during campaign as obsolete as old leaflets left on the floor after the rally has ended.

Sources and Formats of Campaign Information on YouTube

This chapter empirically, longitudinally, and systematically examines U.S. Senate campaign information on YouTube over three election cycles. The Internet broadcast yourself world of YouTube offers some sharp contrasts to the television broadcast world. Unlike on television, candidates and the traditional news media are being challenged by citizens in shaping their video presence on YouTube. Interest groups that leverage financial resources to force viewers to watch broadcast advertisements are marginalized on YouTube where accidental exposure is limited. While the broadcast world converges on a few video formats, YouTube campaign videos exhibit substantial diversity of format.