How Do Online Citizens Persuade Fellow Voters? Using Twitter During the 2012 Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign

Social Science Computer Review

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2016, Pages 135-152

  Hosch Dayican, Bengü ^a   Amrit, Chintan ^b   Aarts, Kees ^b   Dassen, Adrie ^c  

^a TU DORTMUND UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE   (Netherlands)

^c SAXION UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

automated content analysis; campaigning; online political participation; Twitter

Indexed keywords

EID: 84975778607     PISSN: 08944393     EISSN: 15528286     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0894439314558200     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. L.AmpofoN.AnsteadB.O’Loughlin (2011). Trust, confidence, and credibility. Citizen responses on Twitter to opinion polls during the 2010 UK general election. Information, Communication & Society, 14, 850–871.
2. S.AnsolabehereS.Iyengar (1995). Going negative: How political advertisements shrink and polarize the electorate. New York, NY: The Free Press.
3. N.AnsteadB.O’Loughlin (2011). The emerging viewertariat and BBC question time: Television debate and real-time commenting online. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16, 440–462.
4. J.AusserhoferA.Maireder (2013). National politics on twitter: Structures and topics of a networked public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 16, 291–314.
5. J.C.Baumgartner (2013) Internet political ads in 2012: Can humor mitigate unintended effects of negative campaigning?Social Science Computer Review, 31, 601–613.
6. M.A.BekafigoA.McBride (2013). Who tweets about politics? Political participation of Twitter users during the 2011 gubernatorial elections. Social Science Computer Review, 31, 625–643.
7. A.BrunsJ.Burgess (2011). #ausvotes: How Twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election. Communication, Politics & Culture, 44, 37–56.
8. J.BurgessA.Bruns (2012). (Not) the Twitter election: The dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the Australian media ecology. Journalism Practice, 6, 384–402.
9. A.Chadwick (2009). Web 2.0: New challenges for the study of e-democracy in an era of informational exuberance. I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 5, 9–41.
10. S.ColemanJ.G.Blumler (2009). The Internet and democratic citizenship: Theory, practice and policy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
11. B.A.ConwayK.KenskiD.Wang (2013). Twitter use by presidential primary candidates during the 2012 campaign. American Behavioral Scientist, 57, 1596–1610.
12. L.Dang-XuanS.StieglitzJ.WladarschC.Neuberger (2013). An investigation of influentials and the role of sentiment in political communication on Twitter during election periods. Information, Communication & Society, 16, 795–825.
13. W.De NooyJ.Kleinnijenhuis (2013). Polarization in the media during an election campaign: A dynamic network model predicting support and attack among political actors. Political Communication, 30, 117–138.
14. R.K.Gibson (2013). Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning. Party Politics. doi:10.1177/1354068812472575
15. R.K.GibsonM.Cantijoch (2013). Conceptualizing and measuring participation in the age of the internet: Is online political engagement really different to offline?Journal of Politics, 75, 707–716.
16. R.K.GibsonM.CantijochS.Ward (2010). Citizen participation in the e-campaign. In (Eds.), The Internet and the 2010 election. Putting the small ‘p’ back in politics? (pp. 5–18). London, United Kingdom: Hansard Society.
17. R.K.GibsonS.Ward (2011). Political organizations and campaigning online. In (Eds.), The Sage handbook of political communication (pp. 62–74). London, United Kingdom: Sage.
18. H.Gil de ZunigaA.VeenstraE.VragaD.Shah (2010). Digital democracy: Reimagining pathways to political participation. Journal of Information, Technology & Politics, 7, 36–51.
19. J.GolbeckJ.M.GrimesA.Rogers (2010). Twitter use by the U.S. congress. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61, 1612–1621.
20. S.González-BailónJ.Borge-HolthoeferA.RiveroY.Moreno (2011). The dynamics of protest recruitment through an online network. Scientific Reports, 1. doi:10.1038/srep00197.
21. T.GrahamM.BroersmaK.HazelhoffG.Van ‘t Haar (2013). Between broadcasting political messages and interacting with voters. The use of Twitter during the 2010 UK general election campaign. Information, Communication & Society, 16, 692–716.
22. J.GrimmerB.M.Stewart (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21, 267–297.
23. J.GroshekA.Al-Rawi (2013). Public sentiment and critical framing in social media content during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. Social Science Computer Review, 31, 563–576.
24. F.HirzallaL.Van Zoonen (2011). Beyond the online/offline divide: Convergences of online and offline civic activities among youth. Social Science Computer Review, 29, 481–498.
25. R.L.HolbertR.K.GarrettL.S.Gleason (2010). A new era of minimal effects? A response to Bennett and Iyengar. Journal of Communication, 60, 15–34.
26. D.J.HopkinsG.King (2010). A method of automated nonparametric content analysis for social science. American Journal of Political Science, 54, 229–247.
27. N.JacksonD.G.Lilleker (2011). Microblogging, constituency service and impression management: UK MPs and the use of Twitter. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 17, 86–105.
28. L.L.Kaid (2006). Political web wars: The use of the Internet for political advertising. In (Eds.), The Internet connection: Perspectives on the web in campaign 2004 (pp. 67–82). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
29. Y.Kim (2011). The contribution of social network sites to exposure to political difference: The relationships among SNSs, online political messaging, and exposure to cross-cutting perspectives. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 971–977.
30. H.KwakC.LeeH.ParkS.Moon (2010). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?Proceedings of WWW’10 (19th International Conference on World Wide Web). ACM New York, NY, USA, 591–600.
31. A.O.LarssonH.Moe (2012). Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign. New Media & Society, 14, 729–747.
32. A.O.LarssonH.Moe (2013). Representation or participation? Twitter use during the 2011 Danish election campaign. Javnost-The Public, 20, 71–88.
33. R.LauG.Pomper (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of U.S. senate elections. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
34. R.LauL.SigelmanI.B.Rovner (2007). The effects of negative political campaigns: A meta-analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics, 69, 1176–1209.
35. D.G.LillekerN.A.Jackson (2010). Towards a more participatory style of election campaigning: The impact of web 2.0 on the UK 2010 general election. Policy & Internet, 2, 69–98.
36. G.LotanE.GraeffM.AnannyD.GaffneyI.PearceD.boyd (2011). The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1375–1405.
37. P.Mair (2008). Electoral volatility and the Dutch party system: A comparative perspective. Acta Politica, 43, 235–253.
38. C.D.ManningH.Schütze (1999). Foundations of statistical natural language processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
39. K.MossbergerC.J.TolbertR.McNeal (2008). Digital citizenship: The Internet, society, and participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
40. D.Murthy (2013). Twitter. Social communication in the Twitter age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
41. C.S.Park (2013). Does Twitter motivate involvement in politics? Tweeting, opinion leadership, and political engagement. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 1641–1648.
42. H.RojasE.Puig-i-Abril (2009). Mobilizers mobilized: Information, expression, mobilization and participation in the digital age. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 902–927.
43. A.SegerbergW.L.Bennett (2011). Social media and the organization of collective action: Using Twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests. The Communication Review, 14, 197–215.
44. Semiocast (2012). Semiocast social media monitoring. Retrieved June 07, 2013, fromhttp://semiocast.com/
45. D.A.ShammaL.KennedyE.F.Churchill (2009). Tweet the debates: Understanding community annotation of uncollected sources. In Proceedings of WSM’09 (First SIGMM workshop on Social Media) (pp. 3–10). New York, NY: ACM.
46. T.A.Small (2010). Canadian politics in 140 characters: Party politics in the Twitterverse. Canadian Parliamentary Review, 33, 39–45.
47. T.A.Small (2011). What the Hashtag? A content analysis of Canadian politics on Twitter. Information, Communication & Society, 14, 872–895.
48. A.Smith (2009). The Internet’s role in campaign 2008. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
49. K.Strandberg (2013). A social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself? The use of social media in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections. New Media & Society, 15, 1329–1347.
50. Y.Theocharis (2012). Cuts, tweets, solidarity and mobilization: How the Internet shaped the student occupations. Parliamentary Affairs, 65, 162–194.
51. Y.Theocharis (2013). The wealth of (occupation) networks? Communication patterns and information distribution in a Twitter protest network. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10, 35–56.
52. A.TumasjanT.O.SprengerP.G.SandnerI.M.Welpe (2010). Predicting elections with Twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. Paper presented at the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Washington, DC: George Washington University.
53. C.Vaccari (2013). From echo chamber to persuasive device? Rethinking the role of the Internet in campaigns. New Media & Society, 15, 109–127.
54. I.Van BiezenP.MairT.Poguntke (2012). Going, going, … gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 51, 24–56.
55. T.Van der MeerR.LubbeE.Van ElsasM.ElffW.Van der Brug (2012). Bounded volatility in the Dutch electoral battlefield: A panel study on the structure of changing vote intentions in the Netherlands during 2006–2010. Acta Politica, 47, 333–355.
56. J.J.M.Van Holsteyn (2013). The Dutch parliamentary elections of September 2012. Electoral Studies, 34, 321–326.
57. K.VarnaliV.Gorgulu (2014). A social influence perspective on expressive political participation in Twitter: the case of# OccupyGezi. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 1–16.
58. M.Vergeer (2012). Politics, elections and online campaigning: Past, present… and a peek into the future. New Media & Society, 15, 9–17.
59. M.VergeerL.Hermans (2013). Campaigning on Twitter: Microblogging and online social networking as campaign tools in the 2010 general elections in the Netherlands. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18, 399–419.
60. M.VergeerL.HermansS.Sams (2013). Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign style. Party Politics, 19, 477–501.
61. A.S.WalterW.Van der BrugP.Van Praag (2014). When the stakes are high: Party competition and negative campaigning. Comparative Political Studies, 47, 550–573.
62. P.F.Whiteley (2011). Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the democratic world. Party Politics, 17, 21–44.