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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

8. Restoring Online Political Trust

Author : Andrea Ceron

Published in: Social Media and Political Accountability

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Chapter 8 introduces an index of online trust in political institutions, based on sentiment analysis, which has been continuously measured from 2012 to date. This index will be analyzed to establish whether the actions of policy-makers can affect online trust. Statistical analysis suggests that corruption scandals have negative effects, while policy reforms in line with the demands of citizens (such as the abolition of public funding of parties) can genuinely restore the level of online political trust. Conversely, different forms of engagement with SNS users and different forms of online voting display mixed and partially counterintuitive results.

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The analysis was done by two trained coders. Intercoder reliability is 0.88. Compared to hand-coded documents in the training set, the root mean square error of the estimates is 1.5%. This confirms the accuracy of the results.

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Since July 2016 the party has started to use a new online platform called “Rousseau,” which is available to party activists only (http://www.beppegrillo.it/2015/07/rousseau.html). Still, I look at blog posts reporting the results, which are announced after the end of the voting.

Discriminating between referenda on policy issues, on party organization issues or on the selection of candidates running for office positions does not yield significant differences in the outcome.

For representational purposes the variable is expressed in hundreds of articles.

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Title: Restoring Online Political Trust
Author: Andrea Ceron
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Social Media and Political Accountability
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52626-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-52627-0

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52627-0_8