POLITWEETS: social media as a platform for political engagement between Victorian politicians and citizens

Heritage and Nationalism

“…Some of these studies have chosen typically qualitative methods, such as three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (Azmi, Sylvia and Mardhiah 2018), hermeneutic analysis (Engesser et al 2017) or semiquantitative and simple quantitative types of content analysis including chi square tests and similar (Brown et al 2017;Colliander et al 2017;Di Giammaria and Faggiano 2017;Bronstein, Aharony and Bar-Ilan 2018;Das 2018;Enli and Simonsen 2018). Other research has opted for network analysis (Lukamto and Carson 2016;Del Vicario et al 2017;Badawy, Ferrara and Lerman 2018;Jost et al 2018), geospatial analysis (Badawy, Ferrara and Lerman 2018), regression (Bobba 2019), time series or sentiment analysis (Gorodnichenko, Pham and Talavera 2018). Most published works, however, have focused on examining relatively small data subsets extracted from a wider social media datascape; they have then drawn conclusions referring to a specific universe of social media activists or campaigners.…”

Political communication in Social Networks Election campaigns and Digital Data Analysis: A Bibliographic Review

“…Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook are increasingly present in the electoral campaigns of candidates and parties as a tool to "transmit" their messages, mainly in a top-down way (Jackson & Lilleker, 2011;Peterson, 2012;Adams & McCorkindale, 2013;Amirullah et al, 2013;Di Fraia et al, 2014;Gainous & Wagner, 2014;Pablo et al, 2014;Enli & Naper, 2016;Lukamto & Carson, 2016). There is a general effect of "amplifying" political propaganda (Zhang et al, 2017).…”

Malcolm Turnbull’s conversational career on Twitter: the case of the Australian Prime Minister and the NBN

“…Over the past two decades, there has been an increased scholarly focus on the rise of new communication technologies, such as social media, and the potential for such technologies to reinvigorate the ‘public sphere’ (Dahlgren, 2005; Lukamto and Carson, 2016). In contrast to the traditional, unidirectional mass media that communicate one-way with citizens, this new hybrid media system, and in particular social media platforms, provide the opportunity for dialogue and ‘increased consultation and collaboration to access multiple ideas and viewpoints rather than those of a narrow range of political actors’ (Macnamara et al, 2012: 627).…”

“…A strong theme in existing research suggests that a majority of politicians inside and outside of Australia do not use Twitter for reciprocal engagement with the general public. Several studies have found that politicians are using Twitter as a unidirectional channel to ‘broadcast’ messages that promote themselves and their policies, or as a ‘call to action’ to mobilise supporters (Ammann, 2010; Golbeck et al, 2010; Lukamto and Carson, 2016; Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013). This holds true also for studies that have looked at the wider use of social media platforms by politicians, not just Twitter (Broersma and Graham, 2016; Lilleker and Koc-Michalska, 2013; Macnamara and Kenning, 2011).…”

“…There are two key problems with the existing literature on politicians’ engagement through social media and Twitter. First, existing research has tended to examine politicians’ use of Twitter during election campaigns inside and outside of Australia (Bruns and Highfield, 2013; Gaber, 2016; Jungherr, 2016; Larsson and Moe, 2014; Lukamto and Carson, 2016). The focus on campaign periods neglects some of the nuance of studying social media communications because in Australia and elsewhere there are formal beginning and end dates to a campaign period.…”