Who speaks and who is heard on Facebook? Political mobilization and engagement patterns of partisanship and gender in Switzerland’s direct democracy

Maitra, Julian; Hänggli, Regula

doi:10.51685/jqd.2023.008

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

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“…In their analysis of survey data on offline and online political engagement among first-year college students, Hargittai and Shaw (2013) do not find evidence of a relationship between partisanship and a range of engagements with political content online. An analysis of Swiss political parties' Facebook content revealed discrepancies in user engagement depending on which party shared content, with the most leftand right-wing parties receiving bigger shares in engagement (Maitra and Hänggli Fricker, 2023). Some work has found that political affiliation matters for sharing misinformation on social media (Freiling.…”

Section: Political Affiliation and Content Sharingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engaging with COVID-19 content on social media in the United States: Does political affiliation matter?

Fuchs,

Floor,

Hargittai

2023

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While the partisanship of U.S. media outlets is well documented, the role of political affiliation in social media adoption and online discussions is much less studied. Social media allow individuals to contribute to the dissemination of information. As a result, understanding the relationship between political affiliation and content-sharing behaviors provides insight into whose voices are represented in social media content. Political affiliation might be particularly pertinent to engagement with politically charged topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses survey data collected in Spring 2020 to examine the role of political affiliation in both social media adoption and content sharing about COVID-19 on three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subsequently, we look at how these factors relate to COVID-19 knowledge, an important outcome with broader health implications. We find that political affiliation relates to both site adoption and sharing on the platforms, but these are not uniform across all three platforms. We find no connection between political affiliation and knowledge about the virus but we do find that content sharing on two of the examined platforms is negatively related to knowledge. This work has larger implications for other contexts where polarized and politicized arguments take place, such as climate change and other contentious topics as it concerns both whose voices are heard in these discourses as well as what people can take away from engaging with content.

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Section: Political Affiliation and Content Sharingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engaging with COVID-19 content on social media in the United States: Does political affiliation matter?

Fuchs,

Floor,

Hargittai

2023

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Where do parties interact? Issue engagement in press releases and tweets

IVANUSCH

2024

European J Political Res

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To what extent political parties engage in debates about the same issues and how they respond to each other is highly relevant to democratic processes. Existing research on issue engagement has uncovered several interesting patterns and factors, but has neglected one important feature of contemporary democracies: nowadays, political actors have a wide range of communication channels at their disposal with the use of ‘newer’ forms of political communication (e.g., social media) potentially transforming discursive power relations between political actors. However, it remains largely unclear whether the extent and nature of issue engagement varies between more ‘traditional’ and ‘newer’ forms of political communication. To fill this gap, I apply unsupervised topic modelling to press releases and tweets from political parties in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (January 2019–September 2021). The statistical analysis shows substantial differences in issue engagement between political parties in press releases and on Twitter, now X. First, I find a higher likelihood of issue engagement between parties in tweets. Second, Twitter appears to moderate the influence of party‐level factors on issue engagement compared to press releases. The results show that for issue engagement in tweets, the importance of party size is smaller and the role of government parties is larger than in press releases, while the role of ideological distance does not seem to change. These findings add important insights to our understanding of the potential transformative effect of new communication technologies on party competition and political discourse.

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Who speaks and who is heard on Facebook? Political mobilization and engagement patterns of partisanship and gender in Switzerland’s direct democracy

Cited by 2 publications

References 34 publications

Engaging with COVID-19 content on social media in the United States: Does political affiliation matter?

Engaging with COVID-19 content on social media in the United States: Does political affiliation matter?

Where do parties interact? Issue engagement in press releases and tweets

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