Using Social Media Data to Analyse Issue Engagement During the 2017 German Federal Election

A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters’ minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize issue engagement and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians’ communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public’s use of Twitter or politicians’ communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians’ social media data.

Narrativa de campaña en Instagram: espectáculo y autorrepresentación de candidatos. El caso de las elecciones generales 2019

This article aims to analyze the strategies used by political parties on Instagram posts during the election campaign of November 10, 2019, in terms of their content and media resources, in a politainment environment. A total of 655 publications were analyzed, coming from state and autonomous Catalan parties, through content analysis with quantitative and interpretative focus. From a comparative point of view, a gap is found between new and old political parties in the use of Instagram, and it is evident that the use of per- sonalization varies between formations. In the case of Catalan parties, the campaign is mixed with the effects of the situation of their former leaders. With some exceptions, the programmatic proposals during the campaign are blurred in almost all cases. It is concluded that, on Instagram, the electoral narrative is constructed as a narrative of staged self-referential actions, with the context of the political events in the Catalan case.

Política pop online: nuevas estrategias y liderazgos para nuevos públicos

In the midst of entertainment society, that started off at the end of the twentieth century, pop politics developed as a new communication formula used by the political leaders to share their image and their messages to the citi- zens by means of features from the entertainment environment or celebritiza- tion. In a similar way, the traditional mass media act, including formats of politi- cal infoentertainment to share the political information to the citizens in a frivolous, superficial or satiric format, aiming to increase their audience. This dominant situation of politainment has been transferred to the Internet envi- ronment, where the trend multiplies its effect due to the power of social net- works. In that case, political parties, mass media and prosumers, find a new space to gain votes, increase their audience and achieve advantage. The mono- graph included in index.comunicación introduces several research projects re- lated to politainment, aiming to study its impact upon traditional media and social networks. The new formulas adopted by spectacularized political infor- mation, the kind of issuers that produce them and the consequences upon those who intake them, are the object of analysis of the investigation works published in this thematic number.

Social and Cognitive Psychology Theories in Understanding COVID-19 as the Pandemic of Blame

When faced with adverse circumstances, there may be a tendency for individuals, agencies, and governments to search for a target to assign blame. Our focus will be on the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, where racial groups, political parties, countries, and minorities have been blamed for spreading, producing or creating the virus. Blame—here defined as attributing causality, responsibility, intent, or foresight to someone/something for a fault or wrong—has already begun to damage modern society and medical practice in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Evidence from past and current pandemics suggest that this tendency to seek blame affects international relations, promotes unwarranted devaluation of health professionals, and prompts a spike of racism and discrimination. By drawing on social and cognitive psychology theories, we provide a framework that helps to understand (1) the effect of blame in pandemics, (2) when people blame, whom they blame, and (3) how blame detrimentally affects the COVID-19 response. Ultimately, we provide a path to inform health messaging to reduce blaming tendencies, based on social psychological principles for health communication.

The existence of local parties in the perspective of banda aceh citizens

The legitimacy of local political parties in Aceh results from a peace agreement between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia. Local political parties provide new hope and alternative for people who previously only voted for national parties. Since participating in the election for the first time, local political parties have obtained the people's mandate to fill legislative and executive powers. But along the way, local political parties experienced a crisis of trust. Parliamentary seat gains declined dramatically over the three election periods. This is the starting point for studying local political parties in a limited scope in Banda Aceh City. Through a qualitative approach, the results of this study describe contextual conditions from the perspective of civil society or city residents. The study results explain the lack of seats for local political parties. Residents see that local political parties have not strengthened as a catalyst in influencing policy and have not appeared unique and specific to distinguish them from national political parties. In the future, the role of local political parties is expected to be more critical in fighting for local democracy substantially.

Democratic librarianship in the Nordic model

The purpose of this research is to examine the evolving democratic librarianship and its robust connection to the Nordic societal model. Through an analysis of libraries in Oslo, Tromsø, Stockholm, Aarhus and Helsinki, as well as recent changes in library laws, we have analysed contemporary democratic librarianship in the Nordic countries through four essential factors: (1) citizens in democratic activities within libraries, (2) library managerial decisions, (3) activities of political parties within public libraries and (4) library laws. Through the analysis, we show that this robust and unique ecosystem is supported by (1) discussions at book clubs and shared readings events connected to common societal concerns, (2) criteria of library directors and managers, such as neutrality, freedom of speech and clauses of the Library Act, (3) perception of politicians regarding public libraries as the centre of the democratic community and (4) the Library Acts critically impacting democratic librarianship.

The Journey of Political Parties in Indonesia in the State System

Democratic country like Indonesia usually generates healthy, growing, and rooted from below political party. In Indonesia, political parties have long been known before Indonesia's independence. At that time, the political party became the medium of the founding father's struggle to fight against colonialism. Since Indonesia's Independence Day, the existence of a political party was admitted and supported by the government. This study needs to do from a political point of view. It will enrich learning and understanding the existence of political parties concerning the development of Political Science in Indonesia. The focus of this study is to describe how the political party's history and its role from Orde Lama until the Orde Baru era in Indonesia. This study uses a qualitative research method, and data interpreting will be analyzed using the descriptive analysis method. In the meantime, data validation will be checked and rechecked after collecting data. This study concludes that Indonesian politics has experienced a significant shift in values and practices. Indonesia must begin to review the political system, nation, and state.

The Effects of Political Attitudes on Affective Polarization: Survey Evidence from 165 Elections

How do individual-level political attitudes influence affective polarization on a global scale? This article contributes to the debate on the social distance of party affect by testing a set of hypotheses in 165 elections across the world. With a sample of over 170,000 voters, the results of multilevel mixed-effects regressions demonstrate that ideological radicalism, political knowledge, and external efficacy substantively affect how voters see the main political parties in electoral disputes taking place in 52 countries from 1996 to 2019. Satisfaction with democracy, however, is context-dependent; it positively influences affective polarization only when generalized democratic satisfaction is low. Furthermore, I show that these correlations remain stable regardless of the operationalization of affective polarization—that is, based on two dominant parties and weighted for multiparty competition. These findings provide robust inputs to the study of party preferences and social distance in a cross-national longitudinal perspective.

Exploring the political pulse of a country using data science tools

In this paper we illustrate the use of Data Science techniques to analyse complex human communication. In particular, we consider tweets from leaders of political parties as a dynamical proxy to political programmes and ideas. We also study the temporal evolution of their contents as a reaction to specific events. We analyse levels of positive and negative sentiment in the tweets using new tools adapted to social media. We also train a Fully-Connected Neural Network (FCNN) to recognise the political affiliation of a tweet. The FCNN is able to predict the origin of the tweet with a precision in the range of 71–75%, and the political leaning (left or right) with a precision of around 90%. This study is meant to be viewed as an example of how to use Twitter data and different types of Data Science tools for a political analysis.

The Philosophical and Political Views of M. Ya. Ostrogorsky (1854–1921) and their Modern Significance

Theoretical studies of practical political life conducted by M. Ya. Ostrogorsky allow us to call him one of the founders of Russian political science and party science. His doctrine was the first systematized theory of the emergence, functioning and development of political parties, the laws of their evolution and the technology of activity. He described the tendency to establish an oligarchic leadership of political parties and the failure of moral regulators of political processes taking place in society.