Political Communication and Social Media

Abstract

Social media has profoundly changed the political communication environment. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have transformed the ways in which politicians and parties interact with their followers, as well as how people consume political information. Papers in the panel focus on both the supply side - showing how politicians employ social media to bring over their messages, how they employ negative framing and how they communicate transnationally – and the demand side (e.g. how online political content evokes user responses and affects political behavior differently compared to the consumption of information presented in traditional outlets). Papers in this panel use data from panel surveys and social media; and combine statistical methods with computational methods such as machine learning, text mining and network analyses.