This article explores how Twitter was used by voters to participate in electoral campaigning during the Dutch election campaign of 2012. New social media networks like Twitter are believed to be efficient tools of communication between electoral candidates and voters during electoral campaign periods. Yet only few studies have been conducted so far to discover in what way the content of online discussions is being used for campaigning. In particular, there have been very few studies of electoral campaigning, which study the content of the social media messages sent by citizens. In order to understand the extent to which citizens utilize Twitter in different forms of electoral campaigning—that is, persuading followers about voting for a particular party or to conduct negative campaigning, we conducted an automated content analysis of a large corpus of tweets collected during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2012. Our findings show that citizens participate significantly in online electoral campaigning on Twitter, whereas they differ from professional users in the style of campaigning. Persuasive campaigning is observed to a lesser extent among citizens than among politicians, while citizens more commonly use negative campaigning. Moreover, qualitative content analysis of campaigning tweets by citizens has revealed that expressions of emotions and opinions make up a large majority of negative tweets, indicating that citizens regard Twitter more as an outlet for expressing discontent than as a medium for negative campaigning.

This thesis explores the opportunities to build a structural policy network model that is rooted in social network theories. By making a distinction between a process of steering in networks, and a process of steering by networks, it addresses the effects of network structures on network dynamics as well as on the production of policy outputs. Proceeding from actor-based models of network dynamics, it hypothesizes on the relations between initial network structures and their structural outcomes. The thesis also presents a set of hypotheses that describe which structural characteristics of policy networks are most likely to produce policy outputs, and what the utility of such outputs might be for both individuals in the network and for governments. PrefaceIt is hard to believe my days as a PhD student are over and that these are the last pages to be written. After four years of hard, but rewarding work it is time to thank those that have played a crucial role in the process leading up to the completion of this thesis. The freedom to manoeuvre that I was granted and your confidence in my capabilities to write a theoretical thesis are much appreciated. I have enjoyed working with you both.

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