In this article, we review existing research on the complementarity of social media data and survey data for the study of public opinion. We start by situating our review in the extensive literature (N = 187) about the uses, challenges, and frameworks related to the use of social media for studying public opinion. Based on 187 relevant articles (141 empirical and 46 theoretical) - we identify within the 141 empircal ones six main research approaches concerning the complementarity of both data sources. Results show that the biggest share of the research has focused on how social media can be used to confirm survey findings, especially for election predictions. The main contribution of our review is to detail and classify other growing complementarity approaches, such as comparing both data sources on a given phenomenon, using survey measures as a proxy in social media research, enriching surveys with SMD, recruiting individuals on social media to conduct a second survey phase, and generating new insight on “old” or “under-investigated” topics or theories using SMD. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages associated with each of these approaches in relation to four main research purposes, namely the improvement of validity, sustainability, reliability, and interpretability. We conclude by discussing some limitations of our study and highlighting future paths for research.
Drawing upon the social psychology concept of identity entrepreneurs (Haslam et al., 2010), we develop a feedback model between politicians and the public that strongly emphasizes the circumstances in which public opinion may facilitate populist discursive elements and politics. We thus consider the success of populism as neither inherently driven by political leaders nor primarily driven by increasing populist attitudes in the public and acknowledge the fragmented nature of the populist discourse emphasized by recent studies. We raise the question of whether there is a populist collective identity, which is accountable in terms of populist rhetorical elements, and how it changes over time. To answer this question, we apply the proposed framework to the case of the rise and development of the populist discourse in Switzerland while accounting for its dynamic adaptation to raising public concerns and for the influence of its core rhetorical elements on individual voting behavior.
Relying on the 2013 and 2016 rounds of individual questionnaires from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), we use multiple correspondence analysis to map Swiss media consumption practices while making use of the longitudinal character of panel data in an innovative way. Our results show that individual practices can be distinguished along two main dimensions: on the one hand, the reliance on new media, which is explained mainly by the age cohort, and on the other hand, the consumption of news, which is explained mainly by changes in political interest as well as by gender.
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