Alexander Hanna
ABSTRACT
With the advent of Twitter and the ability to collect large datasets from this technology, researchers have the opportunity to analyze political participation in cross-national electoral contexts. This paper capitalizes on this capability to examine political polarization and citizen engagement during the US and French presidential campaigns. We use the Twitter Gardenhose collection to filter tweets based on keywords around a 50-day window, from March 19, 2012 to May 8, 2012 for the French election and September 19, 2012 to November 8, 2012 for the US Election, particularly focusing on on engagement during the US and French presidential debates on October 3, 2012 and May 2, 2012, respectively. From these data, we constructed partisan alignments based on hashtag usage and retweet networks. We found evidence of more stark political polarization in the French case, while the US case demonstrated less partisan division. This study elaborates commonalities and contrasts in the use of a major social medium by citizens in contexts that differ in political culture and language but feature similar ideological divides, electoral politics, and campaign contexts. We conclude by discussing the implications of computational social science and "big data" in communications, comparative politics, and political sociology.
- A. I. Abramowitz. The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy. Yale University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
- N. Anstead and B. O'Loughlin. The emerging viewertariat and bbc question time: Television, debate, and real-time commenting online. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(4):440--462, 2011.Google Scholar
- W. L. Bennett and A. Segerberg. The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5):739--768, 2012.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. Bimber, A. J. Flanagin, and C. Stohl. Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment. Communication Theory, 15(4):365--388, 2005.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Bollen, A. Pepe, and H. Mao. Modeling public mood and emotion: Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2011.Google Scholar
- M. D. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, M. Francisco, B. Gonçalves, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Political polarization on twitter. In Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2011.Google Scholar
- J. DiGrazia, K. McKelvey, J. Bollen, and F. Rojas. More tweets, more votes: Social media as a quantitative indicator of political behavior. 2013.Google Scholar
- B. Gleason.#occupy wall street: Exploring informal learning about a social movement on twitter. American Behavioral Scientist, 2013.Google Scholar
- A. Hanna, B. Sayre, L. Bode, J. Yang, and D. Shah. Mapping the political twitterverse: Candidates and their followers in the midterms. In Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2011.Google Scholar
- D. Lazer, A. Pentland, L. Adamic, S. Aral, A.-L. Barabási, D. Brewer, N. Christakis, N. Contractor, J. Fowler, M. Gutmann, T. Jebara, G. King, M. Macy, D. Roy, and M. Van Alstyne. Computational social science. Science, 323(5915):721--723, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. T. Metaxas, E. Mustafaraj, and D. Gayo-Avello. How (not) to predict elections. In Privacy, security, risk and trust (PASSAT), 2011 IEEE third international conference on and 2011 IEEE third international conference on social computing (SocialCom), pages 165--171. IEEE, 2011.Google Scholar
- F. Morstatter, J. Pfeffer, H. Liu, and K. M. Carley. Is the sample good enough? comparing data from twitter's streaming api with twitter's firehose. In Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2013.Google Scholar
- B. O'Connor, R. Balasubramanyan, B. R. Routledge, and N. A. Smith. From tweets to polls: Linking text sentiment to public opinion time series. In Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2010.Google Scholar
- Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. One-in-ten 'dual-screened' the presidential debate, 2012. http://www.people-press.org/2012/10/11/one-in-ten-dual-screened-the-presidential-debate/.Google Scholar
- M. Prior. Post-broadcast democracy: How media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
- D. A. Shamma, L. Kennedy, and E. F. Churchill. Tweet the debates: understanding community annotation of uncollected sources. In Proceedings of the first SIGMM workshop on Social media, pages 3--10. ACM, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. J. Stroud. Niche News: The Politics of News Choice: The Politics of News Choice. Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.Google Scholar
- C. R. Sunstein. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton University Press, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- The Nielsen Company. In the us, tablets are tv buddies while ereaders make great bedfellows, 2011. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/in-the-u-s-tablets-are-tv-buddies-while-ereaders-make-great-bedfellows.html.Google Scholar
- Z. Tufekci and C. Wilson. Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from tahrir square. Journal of Communication, 62(2):363--379, 2012.Google ScholarCross Ref
- A. Tumasjan, T. O. Sprenger, P. G. Sandner, and I. M. Welpe. Predicting elections with twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. In Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). AAAI, 2010.Google Scholar
- I. Weber, A.-M. Popescu, and M. Pennacchiotti. Data-driven political science. In Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, WSDM '13, pages 777--778, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Yardi and D. Boyd. Dynamic debates: An analysis of group polarization over time on twitter. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(5):316--327, 2010.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Partisan alignments and political polarization online: a computational approach to understanding the french and US presidential elections
Recommendations
Direct online political communication effects on civil participation in Spain: an experimental study
TEEM'18: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing MulticulturalityThis study aims at updating our previous knowledge in reference with direct online political communication on social media. We focused on analyzing social media users' attitudes toward civil participation in national politics in Spain. It is ...
Government Formation and Political Discussions in Twitter: An Extended Model for Quantifying Political Distances in Multiparty Democracies
The retweet overlap network (RON) method has proved to be successful in quantifying the distances between political parties in multiparty democracies. These distances are frequently used in political science to explain the formation of coalitions and ...
Profiling Online Political Content Creators: Advancing the Paths to Democracy
The Internet has allowed digital media users to be more than just consumers of political information, allowing the chance to create their own online political content. Thus, users can now create personal blogs, post comments on others' blogs, contribute ...
Comments