Pseudo-discursive, mobilizing, emotional, and entertaining: identifying four successful communication styles of political actors on social media during the 2015 Swiss national elections

Keller, Tobias; Königslöw, Katharina Kleinen-von

doi:10.1080/19331681.2018.1510355

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Hence, to grasp these less studied aspects, we apply Van Aelst and colleagues’ (2012) conceptualization that differentiates between two main dimensions of personalization: (1) Individualization means that instead of parties, individual politicians appear as central actors in the political arena; and (2) privatization means that politicians are presented as private individuals—their personal characteristics and lives are at the forefront of communication instead of their professional features. Interestingly, Keller and Kleinen-von Königslöw (2018) argue that in social media both dimensions are present as part of the entertaining political communication style; however, individualization is more common than privatization. Small (2016) also found that political leaders’ personalization strategies on Twitter primarily rely on individualization, while privatization is rather marginal.…”

Section: Visual Political Communication On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Patterns and Effects of Politicians’ Image-Based Political Communication Strategies on Social Media

Farkas

Bene

2020

The International Journal of Press/Politics

113

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Although images have always been part of politics, research on the visual aspects of political communication recently gained momentum, especially with the spread of social media–based political communication. However, there are still several significant research gaps in this field. The aim of this article is to identify and compare the patterns and effects of Hungarian politicians’ ( n = 51) image-based communication on Facebook ( n = 2,992) and Instagram ( n = 868) during the Hungarian parliamentary election campaign in 2018. By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. This work is designed to fill three gaps in the literature. We argue that existing research of visual political communication (1) treats images predominantly as illustrations, (2) is limited to single-platform studies, and (3) does not investigate the engagement effects of images. To move beyond these limitations, this study investigates images as objects of interest on their own; it adopts a cross-platform comparative approach and examines the engagement effects of visual cues by applying a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. Our results show that images are often used to personalize communication. While on Facebook the individualization dimension of personalization is more common and popular, on Instagram its privatization dimension prevails. Furthermore, on Facebook, users like more politics-related candidate-centered images, but on Instagram we could not find similar effects for more informal visuals.

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Section: Visual Political Communication On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Patterns and Effects of Politicians’ Image-Based Political Communication Strategies on Social Media

Farkas

Bene

2020

The International Journal of Press/Politics

113

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“…Social media have become an important channel through which political actors communicate with the voters and an arena for political participation in which citizens can respond to political messages (Keller & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2018). On Facebook, these responses can take the form of "likes," "comments," "shares," and "reactions."…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on the logic of virality (Klinger & Svensson, 2015), when users engage with content through any of the above means of interaction, political actors' posts are spread to wider audiences. The more interactions with a post, the more visible it becomes, not only to political actors' followers but also to their respective networks (Bene, 2017;Keller & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2018). This increased visibility, in turn, has the potential to attract new voters (Bene, 2018), party members (Gibson et al, 2017), media attention (Bene, 2018;Chadwick, 2017), and even contribute to the electoral success (Bene, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We measured engagement by the total amount of interactions ("likes," "comments," "shares," and "reactions") a post received. While these represent different qualities of interaction, they all increase the visibility of Facebook posts and can be used as an indicator of how successful communication on Facebook is (e.g., Boulianne & Larsson, 2021;Gerbaudo et al, 2019;Keller & Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2018). Further, interactions with posts can be used as metrics of civic engagement and political participation online (Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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All About Feelings? Emotional Appeals as Drivers of User Engagement With Facebook Posts

Bil-Jaruzelska

Monzer

2022

PaG

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Political campaigns routinely appeal to citizens’ emotions, and there is evidence that such appeals influence political behaviour. Social media, an important arena through which political actors communicate with voters, provide a rich source of data for investigating not only which communication strategies they use but also which of these engage followers. Building on political psychology and political communication literature, the present study investigates the relationship between appeals to specific emotions (fear, anger, enthusiasm, and pride) and the engagement that such posts generate on Facebook. We created an engagement index sensitive to the Facebook page follower count and employed multilevel modelling techniques. We conducted a manual content analysis of posts by British political parties and their leaders (<em>N</em> = 1,203) during the Brexit referendum debate on Facebook. We found that engagement with a post substantially increases when appeals to anger, enthusiasm, and pride are present. Conversely, there is no relationship between appeals to fear and engagement. Thus, the results indicate with observational data what we know about the effects of emotions from experimental research in political psychology. Emotions of the same valence (e.g., fear and anger) have a different relationship with user engagement and, by extension, political behaviour and participation online. This indicates that to fully understand the role of emotions in generating user engagement on Facebook, we must go beyond the positive and negative dichotomy and look at discrete emotions. Lastly, British political actors used Facebook communication to generate online political participation during the Brexit debate.

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“…This study has implications for the use of social media and how it influences politics (for example see Kim et al 2018;Keller andKleinen-von Königslöw 2018, Fitzi et al 2018). Our unique contribution is entrenched in how no previous study has looked at how Reddit influences behaviour.…”

Section: Consequences Of Outcomes Observed and Implications For Practicementioning

confidence: 92%

Reddit: Affordances as an Enabler for Shifting Loyalties

Prakasam

Huxtable-Thomas

2020

Inf Syst Front

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This paper examines the affordances of Reddit, a digital media platform where Users share and discuss content. The aim of the study was to understand the affordances of Reddit, and how the affordances of Reddit through various features of the platform lead to outcomes, specifically those relating to political loyalty and the creation of political narratives. The study contributes an insight into the evolution and understanding of affordances as a result of examining the ways in which individuals who were previously members of another political group constructed narratives around switching their support to the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential elections. The study specifically focusses on an exclusive membership community called r/The_Donald. As a result of analysing posts on common themes using Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA), we conclude that the features enable membership of a community to be rewarded, switched or denied. As a result, this study has identified five affordances of Reddit, which include credibility, expressing oneself freely, echoing beliefs, creating membership and the metaaffordance 'Redpilling'. The outcomes of these affordances are that ingroups are created, support can be switched, extreme or hateful views are legitimised and a new brand of conservatism is given credibility. This in turn is concluded to have realised impacts outside of the virtual environment in this case on the self-reported behaviours of voters.

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Pseudo-discursive, mobilizing, emotional, and entertaining: identifying four successful communication styles of political actors on social media during the 2015 Swiss national elections

Cited by 24 publications

References 62 publications

Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Patterns and Effects of Politicians’ Image-Based Political Communication Strategies on Social Media

Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Patterns and Effects of Politicians’ Image-Based Political Communication Strategies on Social Media

All About Feelings? Emotional Appeals as Drivers of User Engagement With Facebook Posts

Reddit: Affordances as an Enabler for Shifting Loyalties

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