The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.     

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”     

Social Bots in Election Campaigns: Theoretical,Empirical, and Methodological Implications

Social bots mimic and potentially manipulate humans and their behaviours in social networks. The public sphere might be especially vulnerable to their impacts, which is why we first discuss their potential influence on the public sphere from a theoretical perspective. From an empirical perspective, we analyzed Twitter followers of seven German parties before (N = 638,674) and during (N = 838,026) the 2017 electoral campaigns regarding bot prevalence and activities. The results revealed that the share of social bots increased from 7.1% before to 9.9% during the election campaigns. The percentage of active social bots remained roughly the same. An analysis of the content distributed by both the most popular and the most active bots showed that they disseminate few political hashtags, and that almost none referred to German politics. We discuss the results against the background of normative traditions of public sphere theories and address the methodological challenges bots pose in political communication.     

Trump Gave Them Hope: Studying the Strangers in Their Own Land

This article argues that a set of recent books published in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a road map for understanding its outcome and a research agenda for political communication scholars in the years ahead. This article focuses on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a field study that documents the roles that identity, narratives, and emotions play in shaping the political beliefs and behavior of White Tea Party supporters. Building on these insights, through an analysis of 123 content analyses published in Political Communication between 2003-2016, we demonstrate gaps in our field and argue that scholarship can grow analytically and empirically by accounting for the findings of these books. We conclude with suggestions for future research into people’s perceptions of identity, group status, deprivation, and political power, as well as the role of media, political actors, and social groups in creating these narratives of American politics.     

Using Big Data and Algorithms to Determine the Effect of Geographically Targeted Advertising on Vote Intention: Evidence From the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

We develop a new conceptualization of political advertising effects by looking at the effect of the marginal advertising dollar during the heat of presidential campaigns. We argue that in contrast to other studies investigating effects of political ads, our approach is more apt to capture the natural environment in which political ads are encountered during a presidential campaign. We focus on the intense inundation of political ads voters are confronted with in swing states in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, and argue that it is unclear a priori whether we should expect advertising to affect vote intention in that critical circumstance. We empirically validate this hypothesis using a trove of data from the 2012 campaign: daily polling in media markets around the country, detailed data on all registered voters in the country, all TV advertisements by market and exact airtime, and the entire Twitter corpus. We find that neither overall increases in advertising spending nor partisan imbalances in spending expanded the candidates’ electorate. In fact, total Designated Market Area (DMA)-level spending significantly moderates a negative relationship between spending advantages and advantages in vote intention, suggesting a boomerang effect of additional spending late in the campaign. In closing, we discuss the ramifications of our findings for future research, and stress the importance of research tracking advertising effects.     

The Mundane Experience of Political Culture

In light of the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, the present research asks the question of whether the digital media has become the stealth media for anonymous political campaigns. By utilizing a user-based, real-time, digital ad tracking tool, the present research reverse engineers and tracks the groups (Study 1) and the targets (Study 2) of divisive issue campaigns based on 5 million paid ads on Facebook exposed to 9,519 individuals between September 28, 2016, and November 8, 2016. The findings reveal groups that did not file reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC)—nonprofits, astroturf/movement groups, and unidentifiable “suspicious” groups, including foreign entities—ran most of the divisive issue campaigns. One out of six suspicious groups later turned out to be Russian groups. The volume of ads sponsored by non-FEC groups was 4 times larger than that of FEC groups. Divisive issue campaigns clearly targeted battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where traditional Democratic strongholds supported Donald Trump by a razor-thin margin. The present research asserts that media ecology, the technological features and capacity of digital media, as well as regulatory loopholes created by Citizens United v. FEC and the FEC’s disclaimer exemption for digital platforms contribute to the prevalence of anonymous groups’ divisive issue campaigns on digital media. The present research offers insight relevant for regulatory policy discussion and discusses the normative implications of the findings for the functioning of democracy.     

Information Campaigns and (Under)Privileged Citizens: An Experiment on the Differential Effects of a Voting Advice Application

Information campaigns are key elements of elections. Past research has established the importance of campaigns in informing and educating citizens, and ultimately strengthening participatory democracy. While the Internet has increased the possibilities to disseminate information campaigns and eased access to political information, it is still debated whether online campaigns are effective in stimulating political interest and participation among the general public. The issue is not only one of access, but also of use of information. The investigation of main effects of campaigns obscures the fact that citizens may not use information in the same way and reap the same political benefits. In this study, I examine the conditional effects of a new type of Web information campaign, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. By investigating who benefits most from using these apps, I evaluate whether VAAs reinforce patterns of participation or mobilize new people in politics. Building on political behavior research, communication theory, and social psychology, I study the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of the public. However, there is no significant impact on electoral participation. In addition, the evidence shows that VAAs work differently for more or less educated citizens, and that the lower educated users benefit the most from VAAs as they become more interested in the election and more motivated to vote.     

Introduction: Communication and Civic Engagement in Comparative Perspective

The present era is defined by sweeping changes in economies, social institutions, political party systems, and communication processes in many nations. These changes go by various names from globalization to poststructuralism. The impact of these tectonic shifts in the political foundations of nations is greatly debated. In particular, considerable uncertainty surrounds the effects of various changes on the importance of politics for individual citizens and for the kinds of civic activities that people engage in and even regard as political. This is an important time for communication scholars to develop comparative frameworks that bring conceptions of social change together with how people located in various cultural, demographic, and audience groups define their relations to government and, more broadly, to civil society. At stake is our understanding of the role of communication in shaping these political relations, and in shaping the attitudes of citizens about politics, government, and society itself.     

Print journalism as political communication: The Iran hostage crisis 1

Studies of political communication and persuasion typically focus on deliberately persuasive communications of political actors. Contemporary rhetorical theories suggest the importance of rhetorical examinations of a range of communications not normally considered rhetorical/persuasive, including media news reports. Bormann's fantasy‐theme analysis is a rhetorical‐critical method that allows critics to discover the rhetorically created social realities of groups of people through detailed examination of their communication behavior. The method is particularly suited to discovering the motives of social actors who share social realities or “rhetorical visions.” Applied to U.S. print media coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, fantasy‐theme analysis reveals the motives that urged journalists to give the episode massive coverage, that urged Americans to become preoccupied with the episode, and that urged Americans to vote out an incumbent president. Thus, the study reveals the tremendous persuasive impact of “objective” materials like news coverage on electoral politics.     

When a Man Meets a Woman: Comparing the Use of Negativity of Male Candidates in Single- and Mixed-Gender Televised Debates

Much work has been done to analyze the consequences of the increasing representation of women in politics. Usually, this research compares male and female politicians from a female perspective. For instance, many studies in political communication investigate how and why female candidates show campaign styles similar to or different from their male colleagues. In contrast to this, few studies are interested in how men change their behavior when women enter the political arena. Some of these studies have demonstrated that men limit their negativity when confronted with female candidates. Unfortunately, these analyses focus predominantly on (a) the United States and (b) gender differences in campaign advertising. We seek to provide empirical evidence for non-U.S. campaigns from the most important single campaign events: televised debates. To do so, we analyze data covering all German televised debates broadcast since 1997 where male politicians participated in a two-candidate single- or mixed-gender debate. Our results indicate that the gender of the political opponent affects incivility but not the use of attacks in general. In mixed-gender debates there is less incivility. However, differences in the treatment of male and female opponents tend to decline over time. We conclude that female candidates transform campaign communication—not only because they communicate differently from men, but also because they influence male politicians’ political communication.     

The Emotional Deficit in Political Communication

As a consequence of social changes which have weakened the boundaries between different spheres of life, politics is now interwoven with popular culture. This means that we now seek certain kinds of emotionalized experience from politics. The relationship of people to politics has changed, and has come more fully to resemble a mode of consumption. While this consumerization of politics has been much described (and criticized), its implications for the place of emotion in political communications have not been explored. From a base in the sociology of emotion, this article undertakes such an exploration. It notes how some analysts of political communication have already registered the influence of emotional states, and stresses how contemporary emotionality differs from traditional conceptions of the emotional as a domain separable from rationality and as an optional button for message strategists to press. The complexity and omnipresence of emotional states is emphasised. Political advertising is taken as one area where a sophistication of messages to match the complexity and power of audience emotions might have been expected to develop, but does not appear to have done so yet to a great extent. Making good this "emotional deficit" in political communications is not primarily a way for particular parties or candidates to gain electoral advantage (though it could be that), but is essential for the regeneration of the democratic process and the creation of a more viable settlement between reason and emotion in contemporary society.     

How democratic decentralisation facilitates,sustains, and interrupts market-driven development in India

Democratic decentralisation has emerged as an instrument to implement market-driven development, and elected bodies now extend commercial inputs for commodity production and link households to firms. However, the nature of market-driven development under this condition is understudied. This article focuses on an Indian case where, while access to market inputs was shaped by political capital with elected leaders, narrowing market participation, leaders – now market intermediaries – fostered trust in firms, helping sustain market participation. Conflicts over electoral politics interrupted market production. Markets rely on state institutions and are intertwined with politics, contrary to market proponents’ claims that markets stand above society and are unmediated spaces of exchange.     

Affective images of the public political mind: Semantic differential reference frames for an experience of the 1988 presidential campaign

This project seeks theoretical and methodological advances in the study of political advertising effects during election campaigns. On the theoretical side, we hypothesize that racial cues embedded in standard political advertising appeals, involving taxation and government spending, boost opinion constraint by priming global political ideology. On the methodological side, we replicate a lab experiment in face-toface interviews with a probability sample of a large metropolitan area. Results suggest that subtle race cues do increase issue constraint for "racialized" issues such as welfare, affirmative action, crime policy, and the overall size of government. Constraint of opinions about issues less relevant to race, such as abortion, spending on public schools, universal health care, and raising the minimum wage, does not increase as a result of exposure to racial cues. Global ideology is powerfully primed by implicit racial cues embedded in typical political appeals. Finally, though demographic differences in the samples moderate some effects, the general pattern is highly consistent across the two research settings. Implications for strategic communication during campaigns, group centrism in American elections, and the benefits of methodological pluralism in the study of media effects are discussed.     

Emerging political narratives on Malawian digital spaces

Social media platforms are being considered new podiums for political transformation as political dictatorships supposedly convert to overnight democracies, and many more people are not only able to gain access to information, but also gather and disseminate news from their own perspective. When looking at the situation in several sub-Saharan African countries, it becomes clear there are various challenges restricting social media and its palpable yet considerably constrained ability to influence political and social changes. Access to the internet, or lack thereof, is a recognised social stratification causing a “digital divide” thanks to existing inequalities within African and several other societies throughout the world. This article reports on a study that analysed a popular Facebook page in Malawi using a discursive online ethnographic examination of interactions among social media participants seeking to determine the level of activism and democratic participation taking shape on the Malawian digital space. The study also examined potential bottlenecks restraining effective digital participation in Malawi. The article argues that while social media's potential to transform societies is palpable, keeping up with the pace of transformation is no easy task for both digital and non-digital citizens. The study demonstrated social media's potential but also highlighted the problems facing online activists in Malawi, including chief among them digital illiteracy. Therefore, the digital sphere is not a political podium for everyone in Malawi as shown by the analysis of digital narratives emerging from the country's online environment, which opens its doors to only a tiny fraction of the population.     

The role of memes in the construction of Facebook personae

Abstract

This research is based on the assumption that social media sites – such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – have changed the way in which memes (culturally transmitted ideas) are transmitted or spread. It is argued that social media have provided the most fertile environment for the replication of memes to date. The social networking site Facebook is the main social media example used throughout the research. The way in which Facebook is represented in film, as well as the ways in which the offline lives of the characters are affected by their social media profiles, specifically as depicted in the film Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010) are analysed. Lastly, it is argued that one can construct an entirely new persona, or merely experiment with different aspects of who you are, on social media sites. This online persona can be influenced by the memes one chooses to spread online. Naturally, all memes carry connotations, values and judgements. These memes collate with one's profile and, thus, the connotations attached to the memes one shares are then associated with one's online persona/profile. It is found that although a social networking user tries to portray him/herself in an idealised manner, these memetic connotations give a true impression of his/her offline persona. As a result, there is not much difference between the user's online and offline personae.     

A. Lentin,The Last Political Law Lord: Lord Sumner (1859–1934)

ABSTRACT

Non-governmental organisations [NGOs] sought to expand American conceptions of human rights and contributed to shaping the American debate over Nicaragua policy in the 1980s. Progressive NGOs interpreted human rights to include political and civil liberties along with social and economic ones, an interpretation similar to that of the Nicaraguan government and embodied in Nicaraguan democracy. The Ronald Reagan Administration interpreted human rights narrowly to include only political and civil ones whilst recognising electoral politics as the essential ingredient of democracy. The Administration also considered the defeat of communism as its highest priority. Calling the Sandinistas, which controlled the Nicaraguan government after July 1979, both communist and allies of the Soviets and Cubans, Reagan’s anti-communism led him to support a counterrevolutionary force in Nicaragua—the Contras. NGOs and members of Congress regularly accused the Contras of human rights abuse; and NGOs used a lexicon of human rights to oppose Reagan’s Nicaragua policy and challenge the Cold War construct.     

Winners,Losers, and the Press: The Relationship Between Political Parallelism and the Legitimacy Gap

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and ideologically biased media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By combining individual-level public opinion data in 28 countries, an expert survey on media systems, and a variety of country-level indicators, I find that higher levels of political parallelism in a country are associated with a larger winner-loser gap in institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy. The relationship is contingent on whether or not people are actually exposed to said media. This research, which links the study of political communication with the study of comparative political behavior, indicates that the increasing availability of partisan news around the world is a cause for concern.     

Blogwars,by David D. Perlmutter

Little is known about how elected representatives attempt to manipulate public opinion and news media through their participation on regional open line radio or media straw polls. This article examines the systematic attempts by political actors to engage these media in the small polity of Newfoundland, Canada, where politics is characterized by the hyper-local nature of 590-VOCM radio programming. Our mixed-method study draws from talk radio call-in logs, online straw poll vote results, observation of the production of open line programming, and insights from local media personnel. We draw attention to two clandestine media management techniques. First, we analyze call-ins by elected legislators to talk radio that were timed to coincide with the known field dates of a public opinion polling company. Second, we report that handheld communication devices were used by senior members of the governing party to mobilize legislators and party personnel to repeatedly vote on straw polls on regional media Web sites. Our findings show that there is a substantial and statistically significant increase in the probability that legislators will call talk radio when pollsters are in the field. Furthermore, we document and explore the manner in which political elites mobilize to engage online media straw polls, and discover that straw poll questions which address political topics attract a disproportionately higher number of “votes” than nonpolitical questions. This micro-level study offers perspective for interpreting macro-level knowledge about political talk radio, horse race/game and strategic media frames, and about political elites’ mobilization and media management tactics.     

Online clustering,fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition

Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a Twitter dataset including 62 million tweets by 7 million unique users. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, we demonstrate how clusters of users form and evolve over time, the density of interactions between them, and the flow of particular types of information through the clustered network structure. We show that the Egyptian Twitter public developed into increasingly isolated clusters of the like-minded which shared information unevenly. We argue that the growing distance between these clusters encouraged political conflict and facilitated the spread of fear and hatred, which ultimately undermined the democratic transition and won popular support for the military coup.     

Tim Cook: A Remembrance

Sparse literature exists on the topic of intimacy appeals in political advertising, so in this study Horton and Wohl's para-social theory was applied to explain the “relationship” in Israel between television performers (politicians) and spectators (voters) through the intimacy concept. Altogether, 442 political ads from two Israeli election campaigns (1996 and 1999) were analyzed to test three hypotheses on the use of intimacy appeals across campaigns and political parties. The intimacy appeal measure consisted of five intimacy techniques and was thus characterized as a macro-level variable. These techniques appear in the codebook as five questions that examine whether the spots present words of intimacy, intimate situations, families of politicians, nonverbal expressions, and children. The results indicate that intimacy appeals in political spots are quite popular. Religious and left-leaning parties tended to use intimacy appeals significantly more than nonreligious and right-leaning parties. We conclude that politicians indeed use the same intimacy strategies and techniques as other television performers do; therefore, para-social theory accords with the concept of intimacy in political advertising as much as in other communication settings.