2021
DOI: 10.1177/1354068820985334
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Does social media enhance party responsiveness? How user engagement shapes parties’ issue attention on Facebook

Abstract: Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaigns make use of these new possibilities. To narrow this gap, we use a unique data set covering every Facebook post by party leaders and party organizations in the run… Show more

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Cited by 26 publications
(17 citation statements)
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“…This holds both for focal events that have been the center of many recent studies (Muñoz et al, 2020) and, as we shall argue, more long‐term shifts in attention. Hence, when external events change the salience of an issue, competitors may change a party’s strategic calculus (Ennser‐Jedenastik et al, 2021; Green‐Pedersen, 2019). In other words, the context of an electoral campaign and the salient issues in the media may affect parties’ capacity to set the agenda.…”
Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This holds both for focal events that have been the center of many recent studies (Muñoz et al, 2020) and, as we shall argue, more long‐term shifts in attention. Hence, when external events change the salience of an issue, competitors may change a party’s strategic calculus (Ennser‐Jedenastik et al, 2021; Green‐Pedersen, 2019). In other words, the context of an electoral campaign and the salient issues in the media may affect parties’ capacity to set the agenda.…”
Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Reinforcing the findings of Fazekas et al (2021), we find those who engaged with political party posts were significantly less likely to make any reaction or comment to posts that focused on policy at the EU-level. Hence these engagement patterns may drive the character of EP elections towards a greater ethnocentric focus as parties strive to post content which is attractive to their followers and the wider community (Ennser-Jedenastik et al, 2021). On this basis, EU-level politics may become increasingly invisible during future contests, reinforcing its second-order character.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Provoking users' reactions with their posts is one of the main strategic goals of political actors' social media communication as this is a highly effective way to reach users beyond their followers cost-effectively (Kelm, 2020). Studies show that political actors intensively monitor user engagement patterns (McGregor, 2020) and make efforts to adjust their communication to users' preferences (Ennser-Jedenastik et al, 2021). Consequently, if users are seemingly more interested in national politics, parties are pushed to focus on the national level more intensively to gain reactions, while if users are more dedicated to Europeanlevel content, political actors are motivated to communicate about European-level issues.…”
Section: User Engagement and The Visibility Of European Politicsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Politicians may use social media as a listening post to keep track of the opinions of citizens (Rustad & Saebø, 2013), or to engage with them in an active dialogue on policies and actions (Grant et al, 2010). Parties can track citizens' talk about specific topics on social media in a more organized way, or analyse their interactions and feedback during and between elections (Ennser-Jedenastik et al, 2021). Public administrations can also be responsive through responding to and acting on complaints or suggestions from residents (Sjoberg et al, 2017), and through asking for input, polling citizens, inviting into a dialogue on social media (Mergel, 2016;Sobaci, 2016), or analysing content to understand what users think of policies and actions (Reddick et al, 2017).…”
Section: Theory and Existing Researchmentioning
confidence: 99%