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Usage Of Social Media For Political
Communication
Stefan Stieglitz
Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany, [email protected]
Tobias Brockmann
Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany, [email protected]
Linh Dang Xuan
Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany, [email protected]
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Stieglitz, Stefan; Brockmann, Tobias; and Xuan, Linh Dang, "Usage Of Social Media For Political Communication" (2012). PACIS
2012 Proceedings. Paper 22.
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USAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
Stefan Stieglitz, Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany,
[email protected]
Tobias Brockmann, Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany,
[email protected]
Linh Dang-Xuan, Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Germany,
linh.dang-xuan@ uni-muenster.de
Abstract
Social media enable individuals to share knowledge, experiences, opinions, and ideas among each
other. With regard to political sector, social media can be an enabler for participation and democracy
among citizens. As the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaigns have shown, social media platforms
such as social network sites (SNSs), microblogging services or weblogs can also be successfully used
by political actors to disseminate information to voters as well as to contact and discuss with them. In
this study, we seek to gain insight into the political communication based on social media in Germany
by conducting an analysis of social media presence of German political parties on Facebook, Twitter,
Flickr, and YouTube as well as a survey of members of the German parliament regarding their social
media use. Based on the results, we present an overview of the relevance and potentials of as well as
obstacles to the usage of social media for political communication from the perspective of political
institutions. Further, we derive implications regarding the need for social media monitoring in
political context as well as research implications in information systems.
Keywords: Social Media, Political Communication, e-participation.
1
INTRODUCTION
In democratic countries, political parties feel responsible to canalize and participate in public political
discussion. Traditionally, politicians and journalists bring up and moderate those political discourses.
However, the traditional structure of mass communication in the political context has changed
(Chadwick 2006; Gil De Zúñiga et al. 2012). Based on the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies
and associated social media, internet users are enabled to create content on their own. By using
political blogs or discussion forums, people express their opinion, participate in discussions or find
politically like-minded individuals. As a consequence, professional journalists act no longer as an
institutionalized “gatekeeper” who measures and selects information for publication in newspapers or
television. It has been argued that the diffusion of the usage of social media as well as other factors
(e.g., discussion culture, average age, etc.) have a strong impact on the relevance of public internetbased discourses within the political landscape in specific countries (e.g., Howard 2006; Papacharissi
2002; Tewksbury 2006).
Recently, more than 900 million people worldwide are members of the Facebook network (Facebook
2012) while Twitter counts more than 500 million users in total (Forbes 2012). With this tremendous
growth, these platforms allow both citizens and politicians to participate in political discussions or to
share political content publicly. Furthermore, it is argued that from the perspective of politicians and
political parties it is important to actively join social media based political communication, in
particular during election campaigns. Already, U.S. politicians are said to have a leading role in this
regard with the most prominent example of Barack Obama being able to successfully employ social
media within his last election campaign (Wattal et al. 2010).
However, the relevance of social media for political actors in other countries than the U.S. is unclear.
It seems that most politicians are reluctant to integrate the use of social media into their daily business.
For example, studies have shown that a majority of German politicians do not support political
communication by social media (e.g., Beckedahl et al. 2008; Christmann et al. 2010). However, there
is a lack of academic research investigating the reasons for this reluctance of politicians as well as the
problems politicians might face to contact (mostly young) voters via the internet. In general, the
research field on social media in the political context is still young and has been focusing mostly on
the political landscape of the U.S. Little is known about the relevance of social media for politics in
other countries as well as factors of success for the application of social media for political purposes.
In this paper, we seek to contribute to this research field by examining the relevance of social media in
political communication from the perspective of German political institutions including political
parties and politicians. More specifically, we explore their social media activities during the last two
years. In another step, we identify key aspect for a successful usage as well as concerns that might
impede a wider adoption of social media in political context. Based on our findings, we derive
implications, particularly regarding information systems research on social media in political context.
As an additional contribution, we provide an extensive review of the relevant literature not only from
the field of information systems but also political science, communication studies and sociology.
This paper is structured as follows. The next section provides a literature review on social media and
political communication. In section 3, an overview of current activities of German politicians in social
media is provided. Further, results of a two-year exploratory survey of members of the German
parliament (Bundestag) with regard to the use and potential of social media are reported in section 4.
In section 5, we discuss our findings and derive research as well as practical implications. Section 6
concludes and gives an outlook for future research.
2
RELATED WORK
The growing relevance of the internet or, more generally, new information and communication
technologies (ICT) regarding political issues has been analyzed and documented by researchers since
the 1990s (Davis & Owen 1998; Davis 1999; Römmele 2003; Chadwick 2006). Originating mostly
from the disciplines of political science, communication and sociology, studies for example focus on
the impact of internet access on voting (Tolbert & McNeal 2003), the use of websites to reach voters
(Jansen 2004; Foot & Schneider 2006), the role of the internet as a medium for political
communication during election campaigns (Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan 2012a; Kilinenberg & Perrin
2000), visions of digital democracy and the role of new media (Hacker 2002; Howard 2006;
Papacharissi 2002; Tewksbury 2006).
In general, literature reveals different views on the role of the internet in politics. On the one hand,
according to the democratization thesis, the internet’s interactive potential is seen as transformational
(e.g., Barber 1998). On the other hand, proponents of the normalization thesis (Davis 1999; Margolis
& Resnick 2000) of the institutional adaptation thesis (Chadwick 2006) foresee no internet induced
change in the fundamental political inequalities of the present system. West (2005) takes an
intermediate position by suggesting that slow but steady incremental changes become significant as
these changes accumulate over time. Further, Bimber and Davis (2003) argue that the role of the
internet is supplemental rather than to displace traditional media.
In recent years, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies (O’Reilly 2005; Sester et al. 2006; McAfee 2005) has
further increased the relevance of the internet for political communication. The potentials of SNSs,
blogs, microblogging (in particular, Twitter), wikis, as social software (Bächle 2006; O’Reilly 2005;
Green & Pearson 2005, Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan 2012b) appear to be most promising in political
context as social software can be an enabler for more participation and democracy. Creighton (2005)
defines public participation as the process by which public concerns, needs and values are
incorporated into governmental and corporate decision making. The so-called “e-participation”
focuses not only on this process but also on using the internet as an additional or exclusive instrument
to create dialogues between the elected and the electorate. Related to this, Karpf (2009) introduces the
notion of “Politics 2.0,” which can be understood as the harnessing of the internet’s lowered
transaction costs and its condition of information abundance, toward the goal of building more
participatory, interactive political institutions.
There is a rich body of research focusing on the role of Web 2.0 technologies in political election
campaigns. The recent U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 has shown that Web 2.0 has become an
important tool for political communication and persuasion (Towner et al. 2011; Hoffner & Rehkoff
2011). It became obvious, that particularly social networks could be successfully adapted to contact
and discuss with voters as well as to disseminate important information to them. Especially young
people were inspired to political topics after getting in touch with them by using social software as the
communication platform (Chen 2009; Kushin & Kitchener 2009). Wattal et al. (2010) investigate the
contingent impact of related Web 2.0 technologies on the campaign process. Their results show that in
particular the blogosphere can influence the campaign process and the election outcomes. They also
argue that information systems as a discipline has an important role to play in understanding e-politics.
One approach is to leverage the traditional strengths of IS in comparative-technology, process-oriented
empirical research and to apply that perspective to larger society. In this section, we give an overview
of related work on social media in political context. In particular, we focus on previous studies dealing
with the three major type of social media: SNS, microblogging services, and weblogs.
2.1
Social Network Sites
Previous works have specifically focused on SNSs and their use in the political context. Williams and
Gulati (2007, 2009) investigate the extent of Facebook use by Congressional candidates during
election campaigns. They find that the number of Facebook supporters can be considered a valid
indicator of electoral success. In the context of the 2006 Dutch elections, Utz (2009) shows that SNSs
provide an opportunity to reach individuals less interested in politics. Thereby, viewing a candidate’s
profile further strengthens existing attitudes. On the other hand, politicians who react on the comments
of users are perceived more favorable. Kushin and Kitchener (2009) explore the use of Facebook for
online political discussion. Their results indicate that Facebook is a legitimate location for discussion
of political issues and, to some extent, the discussion appears to have succeeded in overcoming
polarization of online discussion that has pervaded online political discussion in the past.
By examining two years of posts on the Facebook walls of the three major contenders for the U.S.
Presidency in 2008: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, Robertson et al. (2010a)
analyze participation patterns of usage along dimensions of breadth and frequency, and interpret them
in terms of the concept of the “public sphere.” They conclude that SNS are currently the sociotechnical environments that most closely enable public sphere discourse for those who choose to enter
the online “salons” of political candidates. However, it remains an open question whether the outcome
of this dialog is informed political decision making in the form of votes. Similarly, Zhang et al. (2010)
show that reliance on SNS such as Facebook and MySpace was positively related to civic participation
but not to political participation or confidence in government. Rather, interpersonal discussion would
foster both civic participation and political activity.
2.2
Microblogging
The role of microblogging services such as Twitter for politicians has been examined by several
studies. For instance, Golbeck et al. (2010) examine the use of Twitter by U.S. Congress members.
They find that Congress members are primarily using Twitter to disperse information, particularly
links to news articles about themselves and to their blog posts, and to report on their daily activities.
Twitter is rather seen as vehicles for self-promotion. However, Twitter is also facilitating direct
communication between Congress members and citizens, though this is a less popular activity. In a
similar study, Lassen and Brown (2010) find that U.S Congress members are more likely to use
Twitter if they belong to the minority party, if their party leaders urge them to, if they are young, or if
they serve in the Senate. Another study by Ammann (2010) focuses on the use of Twitter by U.S.
Senate candidates and the content of their tweets during the 2010 midterm election season. Results
show that candidates use Twitter as a part of their political campaigns. However, the amount of use
significantly varies by the level of resources a candidate possesses, state size, and the competitiveness
of the congressional race. Also, the content of the tweets is largely related to candidate type and in
some cases political affiliation of the candidate.
Other works focus on the use of Twitter by citizens in political context. Applying social network and
sentiment analysis on the data collected during the 2009 German federal election, Tumasjan et al.
(2010) show that Twitter is extensively used for political deliberation and that the mere number of
party mentions accurately reflects the election result. In other words, microblogging messages on
Twitter validly mirror the political landscape offline and can be used to predict election results.
Conover et al. (2011) examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of
more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm
elections. Using a combination of network clustering algorithms and manually-annotated data the
authors demonstrate that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan
structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly, this
is not the case for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by a single politically
heterogeneous cluster of users in which ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher
rate compared to the network of retweets.
2.3
Weblogs
There are different strands of literature focusing on blogosphere in political context. The first one
deals with the uses and benefits of political blogs. In a survey of 3,747 blog readers, who were
generally young in age and highly educated, Kaye (2005) finds the trend that blogs were basically a
medium for political information seeking and participation. McKenna and Pole (2007) report that the
contents of political blogs are composed of information about news articles from the mass media,
introductions to other blogs’ postings, and criticism about mass media coverage on political affairs. In
another paper, McKenna (2007) also reports that political bloggers construct their blogs from the
motivation of voluntarism and not for commercial purposes. In the light of the 2008 U.S. presidential
election, Wattal et al. (2010) investigate the contingent impact of political blogs, among other Web 2.0
technologies, on the campaign process. Their results show that in particular the blogosphere can
influence the campaign process and the election outcomes.
Another strand of blog research concerns structural or network analysis of political blogosphere,
particularly in terms of social network analysis (Rosen et al. 2011). Farrel and Drezner (2008) argue
that the blogosphere is of significant importance for political communication. By conducting case
studies, they show that political blogs which attract much attention - so-called “focal points” - have an
influence on the agenda setting as they attract a high level of attention from journalists who act as
multipliers. In an empirical work, Adamic and Glance (2005) study the linking patterns and discussion
topics of U.S. political bloggers and provide evidence for a divided blogosphere: liberals and
conservatives primarily link within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged
between them. Regarding political discussions, liberal and conservative blogs focus on different news,
topics and political figures. Also, conservative bloggers tend to link to other blogs (mostly other
conservative blogs) than their liberal counterparts.
2.4
Other Social Media Platforms
A few studies have examined the role of video-sharing platforms such as YouTube in elections
explicitly. Gueorguieva (2007) identifies benefits (as well as challenges and discusses the influence of
YouTube on the 2006 U.S. mid-term election. On the one hand, the benefits include, for example,
increasing the potential for candidate exposure at a low cost or no cost, providing lesser-known
candidates with a viable outlet to divulge their message and allowing campaigns to raise contributions
and recruit volunteers online. On the other hand, the most important challenge is the reduced level of
control that campaigns have over the image and message of the candidate, which is of critical
importance to election outcomes. In an empirical study, Carlson and Strandberg (2007) find that the
use and role of YouTube in the 2007 Finnish elections was rather marginal. Moreover, candidaterelated videos did not in general attract much interest. With some notable exceptions, most of the
videos failed to attract large numbers of views and comments.
3
CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITIES OF GERMAN
POLITICAL ACTORS
Regarding social media use, German politicians and parties are still behind their counterparts in the
U.S. until recently (Christmann et al. 2010). Also, in contrast to the election campaigns in the U.S.
social media did not play an important role in the last election campaigns in Germany (Beckedahl et al.
2008). However, the awareness and relevance of social media haven been steadily rising among
politicians (Kaufmann 2010; Effing et al. 2011). In this section, we seek to gain a most recent
overview of the German social media landscape in political context by conducting an exploratory
website analysis of the most frequently used social media platforms: (1) Facebook (SNSs), (2) Twitter
(microblogging), (3) Flickr (image sharing), and (4) YouTube (video sharing). For each of the five big
political parties in Germany (CDU, SPD, FDP, Linke, Grüne), we track statistics regarding their social
media activity and popularity. While activity measures include number of posted tweets, pictures on
Flickr, and YouTube videos, popularity is captured by number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers,
and YouTube followers (see Table 1).
Statistics are retrieved as of March 2012 and compared to those in January 2011 and June 2010. The
numbers in general indicate the increasing relevance of social media from the perspective of political
institutions as well as citizens. For example, the average number of Facebook fans for all parties rise
from 4.065 (2010) to 20.627 (2012) fans showing an amazing boost of 407% (see Figure 1). This also
holds for Twitter (301% more followers) and YouTube (103% more followers). On the other hand, in
2012 German political parties have become more active in social media by posting 198% more tweets,
73% more pictures on Flickr, and 190% more Youtube videos compared to 2010. This is consistent
with findings by Kaufmann (2010) showing that German politicians have started to follow the ongoing
social media trend.
Activity
# tweets posted
# pictures posted on
Flickr
# YouTube videos
posted
Popularity
# followers on Twitter
# Facebook fans
# followers on
YouTube
Table 1.
Year
CDU
SPD
FDP
Grüne
Linke
Average
2012
2011
2010
2012
2011
2012
2012
2011
2010
1.562
857
461
0
0
0
449
321
235
3.933
1.948
889
3.804
3.585
2.121
482
341
186
1.318
1.186
611
3.067
2.263
1.379
909
614
364
3.159
2.454
1.813
632
972
712
1.058
827
627
5.502
2.851
1.421
1.952
2.022
1.260
1.524
920
113
3.095
1.859
1.039
1.891
1.768
1.094
884
605
305
2012
2011
2010
2012
2011
2010
2012
2011
2010
18.673
10.202
5.315
17.706
9.100
1.787
2.645
2.220
1.727
23.419
11.952
5.448
25.357
15.916
5.418
3.132
2.558
1.950
19.292
10.351
5.494
15.927
9.285
5.428
2.554
2.519
2.208
41.963
20.156
9.225
29.768
15.913
5.039
3.653
2.991
1.932
3.781
1.908
1.211
14.375
6.596
2.652
6.474
4.871
1.260
21.426
10.914
5.339
20.627
11.362
4.065
3.692
3.032
1.815
Statistics on political social media landscape in Germany from 2010 to 2012.
By having a closer look at the activities of different parties, it can be observed that left-leaning parties
have shown more presence and gained more attention from citizens in social media compared to
conservative ones. For example, while the left-wing parties Grüne, Linke, and SPD posted 4,198
tweets on average in 2012, the average number of tweets posted by the conservative parties CDU and
FDP is only 1,440. In addition, Grüne, Linke, and SPD have also more followers on Twitter (23,054
on average) than CDU and FDP in 2012 (18,982 on average). These results are in line with findings
from Mono and Catalfamo’s (2010) “Digital Democracy Study” of politicians in Europe. They pointed
out that the web is generally more left-leaning (Mono & Catalfamo 2010, Efron et al. 2006).
Facebook (fans) 35000 30000 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 2010 2011 2012 CDU Figure 1.
4
4.1
SPD FDP Grüne Linke Growth of Facebook fan base of German political parties.
EXPLORATORY SURVEY OF MEMBERS OF GERMAN
PARLIAMENT
Data Collection
During the last two years, we conducted two surveys of the members of the German parliament
(Bundestag) to examine the relevance of social media for politicians. More specifically, we
investigated their motivation and usage as well as success factors of social media.
The first survey was conducted in June 2010 and the second in October 2011. For each survey, we
contacted 622 parliament members asking them to participate in a short online survey which aims at
capturing the familiarity of politicians with social media, their assessment of the relevance of social
media for political communication in general, and for their own job in particular, as well as how they
use social media for what specific purposes. Moreover, participants were asked to report potential
concerns, which might impede the use of social media on a broader scale. In total, the questionnaire of
each survey comprises 18 questions of different types including 5-point Likert-scale and multiplechoice questions.
We closed the survey after having obtained responses from 109 participants in 2010 and 88
participants in 2011 in total. This yielded response rates of about 18% (2010) and 14% (2011),
respectively. A large fraction of the 2011 survey participants have also taken part in the 2010 survey.
The distribution of party affiliation (CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, Grüne, Linke) among respondents is
highly correlated with that among all parliament members. The average range of age in both samples
is from 41 to 50 years. The allocation of the gender is also identical for both samples with 35%
females and 65% males. This suggests that in essence our samples might well resemble the German
politicians.
4.2
Results
Results of the surveys show that a majority of participants are at least moderately familiar with social
media. They acknowledge the relevance of social media and expect them to become even much more
important for political communication in the future (2010: 75%; 2011: 85%). Accordingly, a large
number of politicians report that they are planning to use social media for political communication
more intensively (2010: 49%; 2011: 55%). Many participants use their favorite social medium or
media (mostly Facebook and/or Twitter) several times a day (2010: 28%; 2011: 40%) to report
political activities from their job (2010: 70%; 2011: 72% ), for self-presentation purposes (2010: 50%;
2011: 56%), to keep in touch with their group members/fans/followers (2010: 49%; 2011: 65%) and to
inform those about current political events (2010: 38%; 2011: 44%). In particular, many participants
use social media to directly communicate with people in their local electoral district (2010: 39%; 2011
35%).
Interestingly, many politicians by using social media also attempt to look for feedback, suggestions
and new ideas from their political peers as well as others for their political work (2010: 30%; 2011:
36%). Moreover, they report the need to detect trends in the shaping of (public) opinion, which is of
particular importance for politicians. However, this is a task that requires much effort, appropriate
tools and, in particular, a systematic approach, which most politicians cannot afford due to limited
resources and capacities. Many participants report that they do not have much time for initiating
social-media activities such as posting a “status update” or a “tweet,” and have to get these things done
by their assistants. Also, a fraction of participants stated that social media are less eligible to make
complex political questions understandable (2010: 33%; 2011: 30%) and to encourage political
debates with citizens (2010: 18%; 2011: 20%).
In sum, there are only little differences in the 2010 and 2011 results. However, in general there are
increasingly more politicians assigning higher relevance to the use of social media for the current and
future political communication.
5
5.1
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Discussion
The relevance of social media based online communities for political communication is steadily
increasing in recent years. Especially, young voters spend more time online in social networks such as
Facebook or MySpace than watching television or reading newspapers (OECD, 2009). As Web 2.0
tools are modern instruments of participation and collaboration, democratic systems may benefit from
this development. Therefore, political actors are advised to take part in the communication at these
virtual places.
Findings from our survey show that politicians indeed have the need to stay updated about current
political discussions and about their own reputation in social media as well as to detect new trends and
identify influential users within different social networks. A major goal for future political
communication from the perspective of politicians is to increase the degree of “e-participation” by
actively engaging in social media while being able to monitor the social web.
This is, however, not a simple task due to time and financial constraints, and, in particular, a large
numbers of different social media platforms and vast amount as well as complexity of information and
unstructured data.
5.2
Implications for Information System Research
We identify two possible contributions of information systems to political communication in social
media. First, information systems research should provide theoretical frameworks as well as technical
solutions for monitoring and analyzing social media data in political context. This is also referred to as
“social media analytics.” According to Zeng et al. (2010), “social media analytics is concerned with
developing and evaluating informatics tools and frameworks to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize,
and visualize social media data, usually driven by specific requirements from a target application.”
However, as Zeng et al. (2010) also point out, social media analytics faces several challenges such as
an enriched set of data or metadata (e.g., tags, user-expressed subjective opinions, ratings, user profile
etc.), human-centered computing with their own unique emphasis on social interactions among users,
semantic inconsistency/inaccuracies, misinformation and lack of structure as well as dynamic nature
of social media data and their sheer size.
Second, information systems research should devote attention to establishing new or improving
existing social media related services to enhance “e-participation.” Moreover, human-computer
interaction related features such as design and functionality of social media platforms should also be
addressed by information systems research to facilitate “e-participation.”
6
CONCLUSION
The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, this paper provides an extensive literature review
on the relevance of social media for political communication. In particular, we identify a number of
recent empirical studies related to public social media platforms such as SNSs, microblogging and
weblogs. Second, based on our empirical results, we show an increasing interest of German citizens in
social media based communication of political parties. We also observe a strong growth of social
media usage by German politicians in the last few years, especially left-leaning parties. Furthermore,
this study reveals that the majority of politicians are willing to engage more in social media and have
the need to stay updated about current political discussions and about their own reputation in social
media as well as to detect new trends and identify influential users within different social networks.
Finally, we derive implications for information systems research regarding the need for social media
monitoring and analysis in political context as well as design and functionality of social media
platforms and services to enhance “e-participation.”
As a limitation, our study focuses on German politicians only. Moreover, the surveys were based on
online questionnaires, which typically encourage more IT-savvy individuals to participate. This might
render bias in the results. Furthermore, the comparison of the results from 2010 and 2011 is based on
similar samples containing many participants who have taken part in both surveys resulting in the fact
that surveyed politicians did not radically change their opinions during the last years at all. As future
research, the survey should be repeated in different legislative periods and with politicians from other
countries.
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