| 1. |
- Bossetta, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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Cross-Platform Emotions and Audience Engagement in Social Media Political Campaigning : Comparing Candidates’ Facebook and Instagram Images in the 2020 US Election
- 2023
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1091-7675 .- 1058-4609. ; 40:1, s. 48-68
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study provides a cross-platform, longitudinal investigation of pictures depicting political candidates posted to Facebook and Instagram over a 15-month period during the 2020 US election(n = 4,977). After motivating an exploratory research design, we set out to expound: the extent of cross-platform image posting across Facebook and Instagram; the emotion expression of politicians across the two platforms; and the relationship between these emotions and post performance. Our analysis of eight political campaigns (seven Democratic challengers and the Republican incumbent) finds relatively high and stable levels of cross-posting candidate pictures across the two platforms. The exception is the incumbent campaign, where cross-posting activity rose in proximity to the primary elections. Regarding emotions, we utilize both computer vision and crowd coding to identify happiness as the dominant emotion on Facebook and Instagram. Overall, we detect little variation in candidate emotion expressions – across campaigns and across platforms. However, we do find differences in how platform audiences respond to emotions, proxied here through post performance. Results from binomial logistic regressions show that in comparison with Calm, posts exhibiting Anger are less likely to overperform on both Facebook and Instagram. Most interestingly, we find diverging patterns for Happiness, which performs better than Calm on Instagram but not on Facebook. We interpret these findings to suggest first, that Instagram users reward emotionality from politicians. Second and more importantly, we argue that differing audience responses to emotions – captured through social media metrics – may reveal a generation polarization in what different segments of the electorateprefer their political leaders to be.
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| 2. |
- Dahlgren, Peter
(författare)
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The Internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation
- 2005
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1091-7675 .- 1058-4609. ; 22:2, s. 147-162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The theme of the Internet and the public sphere now has a permanent place on research agendas and in intellectual inquiry; it is entering the mainstream of Political communication studies. The first part of this presentation briefly pulls together key elements in the public sphere perspective, underscoring three main analytic dimensions: the structural, the representational, and the interactional. Then the discussion addresses some central themes in the current difficulties facing democracy, refracted through the lens of the public sphere perspective. In particular, the destabilization of political communication systems is seen as a context for understanding the role of the Internet: It enters into, as well as contributes to, this destabilization. At the same time, the notion of destabilization can also embody a positive sense, pointing to dispersions of older patterns that may have outlived their utility. Further, the discussion takes up obvious positive consequences that follow from the Internet, for example that it extends and pluralizes the public sphere in a number of ways. Thereafter the focus moves on to the interactional dimension of the public sphere, specifically in regard to recent research on how deliberation proceeds in the online public sphere in the contemporary environment of political communication. Finally, the analytic category of deliberative democracy is critically examined; while useful, some of its rationalist biases, particularly in the context of extra-parliamentarian politics, limit its utility. It is suggested that the concept of civic cultures offers an alternative way to understand the significance of online political discussion.
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| 3. |
- Hellmeier, Sebastian, et al.
(författare)
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In the Spotlight : Analyzing Sequential Attention Effects in Protest Reporting
- 2018
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 35:4, s. 587-611
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- During waves of contention, international media attention can be of crucial importance for activists and protest participants. However, media attention is a scarce resource and the competition over news coverage is high. While some emphasize the agenda-setting power of news outlets and argue that receiving coverage is determined by factors outside the protest movement, others suggest a dynamic relationship between media attention and activism where social movement organizations are assumed to have some agency to make it to the news. In this paper, we contribute to the latter and analyze how protest can endogenously trigger more coverage. Building on insights from communication science, we argue that widely covered protests attract media attention and temporarily lower the selection threshold for subsequent incidents. Using fine-grained data on anti-regime protest in all authoritarian countries between 2003 and 2012, we find robust empirical evidence for this hypothesis. We also show that this effect becomes weaker and eventually disappears with increasing spatial and temporal distance from a highly salient event. These findings are important for research in contentious politics, since they allows us to gauge the extent to which protest activity on the ground may under certain circumstances be over-reported in the media.
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| 4. |
- Kruikemeier, Sanne, et al.
(författare)
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News Media Use and Political Engagement Among Adolescents: An Analysis of Virtuous Circles Using Panel Data
- 2017
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 34:2, s. 221-242
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study analyzes reinforcing spirals between news media use and two manifestations of political engagement: political interest and participation intention. Drawing on a three-wave panel study among adolescents, we test the Virtuous Circle Thesis (VCT) in both an online and an offline setting, by distinguishing between selection effects and media effects as key ingredients of the VCT. Overall, the findings lend mixed support to the general argument. While the relationship between specific forms of news media use and political interest appears to be driven primarily by selection effects, reciprocal relations were found mainly between television news and participation intention. The VCT assumption of reciprocal influences was supported most clearly when adolescents’ total news media use was considered. Taken together, virtuous circles appeared to operate rather similarly online and offline.
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| 5. |
- Miklikowska, Marta, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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A Little More Conversation A Little Less Prejudice: The Role of Classroom Political Discussions for Youth's Attitudes toward Immigrants
- 2022
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 39:3, s. 405-427
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Although previous research has shown that deliberative discussions have consequences for intergroup attitudes, very little is known about this impact during the formative adolescent years. In addition, the mechanism explaining the mechanism through which discussions affect intergroup attitudes is not clear. This 3-wave study of Swedish adolescents (N = 892, 51.1% girls, M-ageT1 = 13.41, nested in 35 classrooms) examined the role of teacher-initiated political discussions in the classroom for the development of youth attitudes toward immigrants. The results of multilevel analysis showed that adolescents who perceived political discussions to be less frequent increased in anti-immigrant attitudes compared to youth with more frequent discussions. Similarly, classrooms with less deliberative atmosphere were more negative toward immigrants than classrooms with a higher frequency of discussions, and this effect remained two years after the students moved to new schools. Mediation analysis revealed that general political interest (but not news consumption) explained the effects of classroom discussions on attitudes: Youth who perceived that their teachers frequently initiate political discussions developed higher general political interest and, in turn, lower anti-immigrant attitudes than youth with less frequent discussions. The findings show an important role of classroom political discussions for the formation of intergroup attitudes in adolescence. The findings suggest that frequent discussions reduce the risk of prejudice development by stimulating youth general political interest.
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| 6. |
- Oleskog Tryggvason, Per, 1987
(författare)
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The Winner-Loser Spiral in Political News Coverage:Investigating the Impact of Poll Coverage on Subsequent Party Coverage
- 2021
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 38:6, s. 672-690
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. One consistent finding within journalism research is the media’s heavy reliance on the so-called game frame when covering the political process. One main component of this frame is the frequent use of horse race polls, a tool that by its zero-sum nature provides journalists with immense opportunities to portray political actors as either winners or losers. While there is an extensive literature on how horse race reporting can influence opinion formation and political behavior among citizens, little is known about how such coverage affects journalists’ coverage of political parties. To remedy this, this paper investigates how the tone toward political parties in media’s poll coverage affects the subsequent tone toward political parties in general (non-poll related) news coverage. This is done by using time-series regression on a large dataset of daily Swedish top news stories (n=7553), covering a period of 4 years (2014–2018). The main finding is that positively framed poll stories appear to affect the tone in subsequent coverage, while there does not appear to be a corresponding effect of negatively framed poll stories.
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| 7. |
- Shehata, Adam, et al.
(författare)
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A Matter of Context : A Comparative Study of Media Environments and News Consumption Gaps in Europe
- 2011
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - London : Routledge. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 28:1, s. 110-134
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Research has shown that individual-level characteristics such as socioeconomic status and political interest are becoming more important as predictors of news consumption in a rapidly changing media environment. Despite this general trend, this article argues that the importance of individual-level predictors of news consumption varies between national media environments. We use extensive survey data from 16 European countries and multilevel modeling in order to investigate both contextual-level as well as cross-level effects on news consumption. The results show that media environment characteristics have additional effects on news consumption beyond the effects of individual-level characteristics such as education and political interest, but also moderating impacts on these individual-level predictors of news consumption. More specifically, national media environments characterized by higher levels of newspaper-centrism are related to smaller gaps in newspaper reading between those with high and low levels of education and political interest. Lower degrees of newspaper-centrism is, on the other hand, related to a weaker “lower class bias” of television news and larger gaps in news consumption between those with and without high political interest. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on news consumption, knowledge- and participation gaps as well as cross-national comparative research.
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| 8. |
- Shehata, Adam, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Members of Parliament, Equal Competitors for Media Attention? : An Analysis of Personal Contacts Between MPs and Political Journalists in Five Countries.
- 2010
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 27:3, s. 310-325
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Power relations between politicians and journalists are often depicted as an ongoing tango with one actor leading the other. This study analyzes interactions between politicians and journalists not by posing the question of who leads whom, but rather by investigating which politicians are invited to dance in the first place, and which are better positioned to take the lead. Building upon theories and past research into press-government relations, comparative politics, and an economic perspective on journalist-source relations, three groups of hypotheses on a personal, party, and political system level are derived and tested using a unique survey with members of parliament (MPs) in five democratic corporatist countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark). The results display a similar pattern in all five countries where parliamentary experience and institutional position increase the frequency of contacts that MPs have with journalists. While these party variables have a more modest influence on the frequency of contacts, it is also shown that there are clear differences between countries attributed to parliament size in general and higher inter-MP competition in particular.
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| 9. |
- Shehata, Adam, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Television Channel Content Profiles and Differential Knowledge Growth : A Test of The Inadvertent Learing Hypothesis Using Panel Data
- 2015
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 32:3, s. 377-395
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study uses four waves of panel data to analyze inadvertent learning—that is, learning in the absence of interest or motivation—from watching public service television channels. Previous research suggests that motivation-based gaps in political knowledge are at least partly a function of the political information opportunities provided by the major television channels in a country, which influence the likelihood of being inadvertently exposed to news and current affairs programs. The present study puts the inadvertent learning hypothesis to a thorough empirical test by analyzing individual-level growth in knowledge over time, based on panel data collected during five months leading up to the Swedish 2010 national election. Using multilevel growth curve modeling and an extensive battery of surveillance knowledge questions, the results show not only (a) that public service channel viewing was related to learning, but also (b) that knowledge growth occurred among public service viewers independently of their political motivation and news attention, and (c) that such learning was even more pronounced among viewers lacking an interest in politics. The findings are discussed in light of ongoing media environmental transformations as well as cross-national comparative media systems research.
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| 10. |
- Strömbäck, Jesper, 1971
(författare)
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Media-centric or politics-centric political communication research? Some reflections
- 2022
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 39:2, s. 280-285
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whether political communication research is media-centric or politics- centric is an interesting question. In this article, I argue however that it is important is to clarify whether the answer depends on the extent to which the focus is on media or on politics, or the extent to which the role of the media in political processes is viewed positively or nega- tively. With respect to the assessment of the role of media in political processes, it is also important to distinguish between assessments based on a priori normative assumptions and based on empirical results. In conclusion, it is argued that the strength of political com- munication research lies in its interdisciplinarity. From that perspective, it is imperative that political communication scholars include relevant theories regardless of their disciplinary origin.
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