One of Many Tools to Win the Election

Presidential campaigns today are increasingly integrating social media such as Facebook as an efficient tool to communicate with the public and organize their supporters. In a bid to explore how the Facebook is used by the politicians during election campaigns, this chapter explored official Facebook posts by two presidential candidates ahead of the 2012 US presidential election. The findings suggest Facebook was used in the campaign as a platform to organize like-minded voters, and reporting a virtual presence to the voters. Facebook was used strategically to resonate with the real-life campaign, and disseminate instant messages, rather than engaging in discussion with the public. The two candidates had only minor difference in the characteristics of their Facebook contents. The implication of the research for the online political agenda-building tactics is discussed.

Imperfect Bipartisanship and Spanish Pluralism

The objective of this research is to find if the success of Podemos in the 2014 European Parliament Elections and its activity on Twitter agrees with the theoretical perspectives that Dahlgren (2011) and De Ugarte (2007) developed or if there is a new civic participation paradigm that determines the success of the current political communication strategies. In order to verify this proposal, this study not only has applied Dahlgren and De Ugarte's theories, but it has also developed a tweets sampling methodology that permits collection and analysis of information from Podemos' tweets from the 25th March 2014 to the 24th May 2014. The main conclusion of this research is that there is not a ‘new civic participation model', but there are some emerging social and collective trends that De Ugarte and Dahlgren did not consider in their approaches, but that offer a context for the development of a new concept of “politics”.

Reformulating Government-Citizen Relations in a Digitally Connected World

This chapter analyses the effects of social media on political communication and the role they play in government-citizen relations by focusing on the Twitter ban phenomenon in Turkey in March 2014. The chapter asks the reasons of government intervention in social media, particularly Twitter. It argues that Twitter makes, on the one hand, a significant contribution to the evolution of political participation as it diversifies the process and methods of political communication. On the other hand, it introduces a new type of security dilemma which encourages governments to consider taking measures against social media to protect their authority.

Radical Political Communication and Social Media

This chapter aims to analyze the practices of radical political communication within the context of social mobilizations whose emergence and initial spreading are inherently associated to social media. On the basis of a case study -the #YoSoy132, a university student mobilization during the 2012 electoral campaign in Mexico- the text analyzes the main uses of social media as part of the mobilizations and the interrelationships between online (communication) and offline collective action. The author concludes that, despite the importance of social media and the collective actions based on their use, even the participants recognize the necessity of going beyond the online space. Although social media pluralize the actors of political communication and even force its traditional actors to participate in alternative communication spaces, collective communicative action cannot be confined to the digital space, but it must be understood within the processes of social mobilization, in all its articulations and mediations.

Facebook Photographic Images

“Act, react, impact” was the slogan of the 2014 European Parliament elections. A social media campaign focused on a solid informing practice may constitute the first step in attaining European citizens' actions and reactions. This chapter explores the visual Facebook presence of winning and losing Romanian candidates who stood for the 2014 EP elections. The visual framing analysis shows that the Romanian winning politicians preferred to visually promote themselves as statesmanlike candidates being surrounded by national influentials or by campaign entourage whereas the losing candidate framed themselves either as populist campaigners in the middle of larger audiences or as compassionate candidates interacting with individuals. The analysis of the visual categories highlights that both winning and losing EP candidates in Romania used a hybrid message. Despite the attempt to provide a visual presentation of European campaign paraphernalia, national identity features rendered through religious symbols and traditional elements prevailed.

Post as Much and as Diversely as Possible

The daily interaction between political parties and voters is a driving force in election campaigns and can influence their outcomes. The theory of campaign intensity holds that the timing of message delivery in an election campaign is a key component of the strategies used by political actors. However, this theory also warns political actors to be cautious about the timing of different types of messages sent during the election campaign. Our objective is to examine the intensity and types of messages Slovenian political actors communicated through Twitter during different stages in the 2014 national election campaign. Our study conducts a content analysis of 7,113 tweets posted during the last four weeks of the official election campaign. It includes 17 official accounts of Slovenian parties, party leaders, and influential party twitterians. The results indicated that the stage of the campaign and the differences between established and fringe political parties significantly influenced the intensity of Twitter communications during the study period. The results also revealed that the political actors tweeted different types of political messages (e.g., to inform and to persuade voters) during different stages of the campaign.

Political Communication and Twitter in Greece

Social media already serve as a new place for the development of a “public sphere”, hence the exchange of argumentation on issues of public interest. More specifically, Twitter has been rather frequently used by politicians and parties in their attempt to establish a new way of communicating with the electorate. Drawing on the concepts of public sphere and propaganda and by conducting content and thematic analysis on the tweets of the two biggest Greek political parties, New Democracy (ND) and the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), this chapter examines Twitter as a platform of information dissemination and dialogue. The aspiration of this study is to contribute to a growing volume of research that seeks to examine the potential of microblogging to animate political communication and to increase political participation.

The Performative Role of Hashtags in the Politicization of Europe

The chapter analyses Twitter as one of the several fora where the general public sphere manifests itself. The Twitter debate generated in Italy during the campaign for EP2014 is used as a prism for looking in depth into the mutual shaping between the specific grammar of the micro-blogging platform and the ongoing politicization of the EU within and across national politics. The contribution looks at the ways in which specific socio-communicative features of Twitter have became deeply interlaced with the emergence of Europe-related structure of meanings. Special attention is paid to the performative role of hashtags in summoning publics and in triggering a peculiar kind of ambient affiliation that is more than mere connectivity and rather involves the opening of a discursive space where negotiation of meanings becomes possible.

Social Media Activism

This chapter critically evaluates the role of social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) in contemporary protest movements (Arab Spring, European Movements and Occupy Movement), pointing out continuities and discontinuities of the new wave of contention. From this perspective, it evaluates the societal conditions of different contexts, the interplay between different media formats during the relevant episodes of contention, and the diversity of social actors engaged in these practices that have accordingly influenced the emergence and the prospects of the protests.

Social Media, Participation, and Attitudes

A wide body of evidence shows that the American electorate has become more politically polarized in recent years. There are a wide variety of explanations for this trend, including selective exposure to ideological news sources. This trend corresponds with the increased use of social media for political discussion. There are competing theories regarding whether the spread social media exacerbates or attenuates polarization in the evaluation of political and social groups. The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate these competing claims. This topic is explored using multivariate regression analysis and individual level data from the 2012 American National Election Time Series Study. The findings suggest that social media use actually attenuates rather than drives polarization.