Sub-National Democracy and Politics Through Social Media by Mehmet Zahid Sobacı & İbrahim Hatipoğlu

Author:Mehmet Zahid Sobacı & İbrahim Hatipoğlu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.3 The Political Uses of Social Media: Previous Research

Social media cause an impact on public discourse and communication, and are increasingly used in political contexts (Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan 2013). Thus, political communication is currently developing within a hybrid system, in which old and new media coexist (Chadwick 2013), a scenario that has spurred considerable research into issues related to electoral processes (Vergeer 2015).

Particular attention has been paid to the use of social media in national election campaigns. Pre-electoral periods have been analysed in countries such as the USA (Carlisle and Patton 2013), Norway (Larsson and Ihlen 2015), Belgium (D’Heer and Verdegem 2014), Italy (Ceron and d’Adda 2015; Valeriani and Vaccari 2016), the Netherlands (Vergeer and Hermans 2013) and Spain (Gámir 2016; López-García 2016). At municipal and local levels, too, studies have been conducted to analyse governments’ use of social media in pre-electoral periods (Effing et al. 2011; Mercier 2015; Criado et al. 2012; Izquierdo 2012). In every case, a common denominator is present: the reproduction in social media (Twitter, in particular), by political leaders, of one-way communications based on arguments provided by the party itself and aimed at a partisan public (party members and sympathisers) (López-García 2016).

Another area of study that has attracted interest from researchers is the relationship between political participation on online social media (Facebook, especially) and turnout. Effing et al. (2011), among others, claim that social media exert a powerful influence in reaching and swaying voters. Such is the influence exerted that even indirect or accidental exposure to political information in social media can have a significant effect on online participation (Diehl et al. 2016; Valeriani and Vaccari 2016).

According to Steinberg (2015), among those who are initially less likely to vote, online participation significantly increases the probability of their voting when elections are held. At the local level, Conroy et al. (2012) performed a qualitative study of politicians and of Facebook use in a municipality in southern Norway, and concluded that participation in online political groups is strongly correlated with offline political participation. In this context, Rustad and Sæbø (2013) showed that politicians in a municipality in southern Norway use Facebook for various reasons, and that there is a dissonance between what politicians say is important (e.g., engaging in dialogue with citizens) and what they actually do (publish statements). Thus, it seems well proven that there is a relationship between using social media and engaging in political behaviour (Valenzuela et al. 2017).

Research interest in the influence of political ideology on innovation and the implementation of e-government initiatives is not new (Tolbert et al. 2008; Rodríguez-Domínguez et al. 2011; Alcaide et al. 2013), although the focus on local government is relatively recent. In the framework of the dialogic communication theory, Sáez-Martín et al. (2015) did not find ideology to be a deciding issue in the application of dialogic principles, in contrast to political competition, which was found to be relevant to the 52 official Twitter profiles of the largest local governments (by population) of each country in the European Union.

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