Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign

Abstract

This article evaluates the potential that Twitter affords politicians to communicate to citizens directly, through messages that they broadcast to users who follow them, and indirectly, to the extent that their followers autonomously re-circulate politicians’ messages to their own contacts. Analysis of more than 2 million accounts of followers of 10 national party leaders during the Italian 2013 general election campaign shows that most users are rather inactive and have very small followings. Moreover, the most followed politicians have on average the least active and followed users, and vice versa. Users’ activity and followings are also unevenly distributed, with very tiny minorities accounting for the vast majority of tweets and followers. The most followed followers of politicians are celebrities in realms other than politics, or people who are already highly visible in the politics-media ecosystem. Our findings suggest that most of the potential for indirect communication may lie in the “vital middle” of the Twitter population who are more active than average, but are not part of the restricted elite of high-impact outliers.

Opinion leadership in parliamentary Twitter networks: A matter of layers of interaction?

“…In their study of Twitter-based opinion leadership in the Wisconsin recall election, Xu et al (2014) found that users' high centrality was positively related to the number of retweets received. Last, Vaccari and Valeriani (2013) studied 10 Italian politicians' followers throughout an electoral campaign, and Karlsen and Enjolras (2016) analyzed the number of mentions Norwegian electoral candidates received during the campaign. Their results are interesting since, in the case of Italy, the number of followers a politician had was not an indicator of his/her influence because the most followed politicians had the least active and followed users (Vaccari & Valeriani, 2013, p. 1).…”

“…In the case of the environmental movement in Milan, Diani (2003) found that having a clear public profile and access to the national media, a long tradition of campaigning and access to political institutions were also related to a high indegree. Vaccari and Valeriani (2013) detected that the more active and popular of Italian politicians' followers turned out to be famous sportspeople, pop culture celebrities, famous journalists, or high-profile politicians. Therefore, following metrics usually identify traditionally important and highly visible political or social players (Dubois & Gaffney, 2014;Vaccari & Valeriani, 2013).…”

“…Vaccari and Valeriani (2013) detected that the more active and popular of Italian politicians' followers turned out to be famous sportspeople, pop culture celebrities, famous journalists, or high-profile politicians. Therefore, following metrics usually identify traditionally important and highly visible political or social players (Dubois & Gaffney, 2014;Vaccari & Valeriani, 2013). Regarding other individual factors influencing the centrality positions on Twitter, some studies in South Korea (Shuh et al, 2010;Hutto et al, 2010;Young & Park, 2012), the U.S. (Xu et al, 2014), and Norway (Karlsen & Enjolras, 2016) have deployed multivariate regression analyses to ascertain the importance of individual factors such as geographical location, age, gender, party membership, position on the party list, campaigning style, left-right ideology, Internet behavior, and activity on Twitter.…”

”New’ vs ‘old’ leaderships: the campaign of Spanish general elections 2015 on Twitter

“…It is an issue that academia has already begun to study (Giansante, 2015). Worldwide there are already many important studies related to electoral processes in a variety of countries, for example: the United States (Hendriks and Kay, 2010), Italy (Ceron & d'Adda, 2015;Vaccari & Valeriani, 2015), France (Mercier, 2015), Belgium (D'Heer & Verdegem, 2014) and Holland (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013), among many others. In fact, it is such a productive field that there are even compilations of the most important contributions (Vergeer, 2015).…”

Nuevos’ y ‘viejos’ liderazgos: la campaña de las elecciones generales españolas de 2015 en Twitter

“…Se trata de un extremo que ya ha comenzado a ser investigado por la academia (Giansante, 2015). En el ámbito internacional, contamos con ya con abundantes trabajos significativos ligados con procesos electorales en diversos países, por ejemplo respecto de EEUU (Hendriks & Kay, 2010;Vargo, Guo, McCombs & Shaw, 2014); Italia (Ceron & d'Adda, 2015;Vaccari & Valeriani, 2015); Francia (Mercier, 2015); Bélgica (D'Heer & Verdegem, 2014) u Holanda (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013); entre muchos otros. De hecho, se trata de un campo tan fructífero que podemos encontrarnos incluso con trabajos cuyo propósito es compilar las aportaciones más relevantes (Vergeer, 2015).…”