Talking in a Crowded Room: Political Blogging during the 2008 New Zealand General Election

Hopkins, Kane; Matheson, Donald

doi:10.1177/1329878x1214400115

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The predictive accuracy for this part was a low MAD of 0.44%, suggesting the methodology was successful in representing the electorates, although our sample had only a few (n = 6) favoring this party. In New Zealand, the official election campaigning commences 4 weeks prior to Election Day (Hopkins & Matheson, 2012). In the 4 weeks of campaigning the party standing alters as the party candidates "drip-feed" their manifesto elements through the media channels.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

Parackal

Mather

Holdsworth

2018

International Journal of Market Research

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In this article, we report the results of a study that tested a values-based method of predicting political election results. The study was carried out on the 2014 New Zealand General Election, randomly selecting a stratified sample from a consumer panel. The survey of 858 participants used open-ended questions to invoke and capture values relevant to the election. By using corpus linguistic analysis techniques, terms were ranked by weighting based on a log-frequency entropy method. Lexicons for Lasswell and Kaplan's societal value framework reduced the corpus of term-weighted documents to a workable number of eight user-defined societal value-topics. The topics were regressed onto the individual voting decision using a multinomial logit (MNL) regression. The mean absolute deviation (MAD) from the actual vote was 1.8%, much less than the margin of error of 3.5% expected from sampling error alone. The methodology was successful in predicting the outcome for the minor parties with good accuracy, for example, the prediction for the then newly formed Internet-Mana was out by about 0.5%. The framing-balanced, valuebased predictions exhibited reasonable stability, considering they were made six weeks before Election Day. Thus the values relevant to the voters and a good prediction of the voting behavior became evident ahead of the official campaign period, which started four weeks before Election Day in New Zealand. Our study concluded that the value-based prediction shows promise for improving the quality of political journalism and public engagement in the period of election campaigns, and will assist greatly in focusing public debate more on values that are influential on citizens' voting decisions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In New Zealand, the official election campaigning commences 4 weeks prior to Election Day (Hopkins & Matheson, 2012). In the 4 weeks of campaigning the party standing alters as the party candidates “drip-feed” their manifesto elements through the media channels.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

Parackal

Mather

Holdsworth

2018

International Journal of Market Research

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“…That is, they often link to and discuss ''sites with opposing views to highlight alternative, or possibly 'wrong', interpretations of issues'' (p. 92). 6 Furthermore, while researchers in the U.S. and New Zealand (Hopkins and Matheson, 2012) found that political blogs may often have partisan interests-such as supporting specific political candidates or political parties-this is not always the case in the Australia political blogosphere. Certainly Australian political blogs often array themselves on the left or right of the political spectrum, but this does not necessarily translate into the support of any particular politicians.…”

Section: Political Blogging and Deliberative Exchangesmentioning

confidence: 98%

The role of blogging in public deliberation and democracy

Mummery

Rodan

2013

Discourse, Context & Media

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“…What had changed from the 2005 election to the 2008 election for Hopkins and Matheson (2012) was not the blogs or bloggers themselves, as they retained largely the same characteristics across the elections (and in fact many of the same individual bloggers), but rather they found that the levels of debate in the comments sections had increased markedly.…”

Section: Political Blogging In New Zealandmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…115-116), and that part of the attraction appeared to be due to the debate being more "direct, less mediated, and more intense" (p. 116). However, Hopkins and Matheson (2012) did conclude that, despite this, those who participated were quite resolutely partisan, and the ideals of a multiplicity of perspectives being discussed were "not well realised in the New Zealand political blogosphere" (p. 116).…”

Section: Political Blogging In New Zealandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hashtag NZPol: New Zealand Women Twitter Users and Political Participation Construction

Bickerton¹

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<p>This dissertation addresses the research question of “How do women Twitter users in New Zealand construct political participation?” On the issue of the potential of the online spaces as political spaces, historical research has tended to be technologically deterministic, and dichotomous. Further, contemporary quantitative research into the impact of online politics on offline political participation has identified a gap: that the qualitative particularities of political participation online have not been sufficiently researched to provide a more nuanced and complete understanding. In a New Zealand context, what little empirical research there has been on online politics has taken a top-down approach. With a focus on political parties, political figures, and campaigning, there has been almost no research into bottom-up citizen-focused online politics, nor political participation construction more widely in New Zealand. It is in these gaps that this research is positioned. Methodologically, 25 unstructured interviews were conducted using prompt-style questions, either in person or via video-call software, with women based in New Zealand who were active Twitter users. Selective snowball sampling was used as a recruitment strategy, providing a range of participants from different ethnic backgrounds, locations around New Zealand, and levels of political involvement. Interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded from themes based both from the literature and emergent from the interviews themselves. A theoretical framework of narrative analysis was used during this analysis to look for the understandings and social meanings that the participants were invoking in their constructions. The findings were grouped largely into four areas: 1) a propensity towards prioritising primary relationships in political behaviour rooted in experience, the everyday, the personal, and understandings of social location and relationality; 2) an issue-based approach to being political and how discussion, listening, reading, and engagement are foregrounded over traditional political forms, including forefronting an empathetic imperative; 3) specifically online political behaviour that prioritised impact (but indirect rather than direct), complicated simplistic ‘echo chamber’ conceptions of online groupings and different social media platforms, as well as how negativity and diversity was managed; and 4) understandings of what might be a particularly ‘New Zealand’ articulation of political participation that centred a lack of size, being conflict-averse, and a less party-political culture negotiating between global and local political narratives, concluding with an introduction of whakawhanaungatanga. Chapter 9 analyses the critical findings of this thesis: the centrality of primary relationships and relationality, indirect impact, how an issue-based approach to politics is negotiated, and the emphasis on personal experience and emotion. Further, it examines the priority of discursive forms of political participation over traditional forms, and the location of such in the everyday, both in topic and embedding. This is all analysed using Sociology of Space, looking to constructions of political space, place, and boundaries. The conclusion summarises these contributions, suggesting that New Zealand policy around online politics requires understanding of how New Zealanders conceptualise bottom-up political participation.</p>

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Talking in a Crowded Room: Political Blogging during the 2008 New Zealand General Election

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

The role of blogging in public deliberation and democracy

Hashtag NZPol: New Zealand Women Twitter Users and Political Participation Construction

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