Mixing messages: How candidates vary in their use of Twitter

Gelman, Jeremy; Wilson, Steven Lloyd; Petrarca, Constanza Sanhueza

doi:10.1080/19331681.2020.1814929

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Tedesco and Dunn (2018) suggest that her ads had more ad hominem attacks, while Trump's were more likely to contrast his character and policies with Clinton's. Although there is limited analysis of social media on this dimension, Gelman et al (2020) analyze the 2018 Tweets by candidates running for US Congress and for Governor and find that tweets were more likely to be positive than negative in the general election.…”

Section: Types Of Political Campaign Messagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020

Stromer‐Galley

Rossini

Hemsley

et al. 2021

Social Media + Society

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Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning—from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from the Illuminating project at Syracuse University. Our objective is to explore how the stages of the campaign cycle shape political communication. We also explore social media platforms as additional factors. Moreover, given the distinct and anti-normative communication style of Donald Trump, we examine whether his communication is an outlier relative to his competition in the primaries and the general election, and while a challenger in 2016 and an incumbent in 2020. Our results suggest that campaign messaging changes over the stages of the campaign, with candidates more likely to advocate for themselves during the crowded primaries, and then engage in high volumes of calls to action in the general election. The 2016 posts were substantially more attack-focused than in 2020. There is some evidence to suggest that the global pandemic affected the ways in which campaigns used their social media accounts. Of note, campaigns seem to heavily rely on Facebook for all types of strategic communication, even as the academic community primarily analyzes Twitter. Finally, Trump’s sum-total of his discourse is less negative than Clinton’s in 2016 and more advocacy-focused, overall.

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Section: Types Of Political Campaign Messagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020

Stromer‐Galley

Rossini

Hemsley

et al. 2021

Social Media + Society

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“…Partisan identity of oppositional politicians is threatened to a greater extent compared to that of the ruling party members, resulting in a heightened negative partisanship and a stronger desire to lash out at the out-party. For instance, challengers are more likely to engage in negative campaigning and sponsor attack ads than incumbents (Gelman et al, 2020;Lau & Pomper, 2001). Because the Democratic Party was the minority party in the Senate and was not in the White House from 2016 to 2020 (the timeframe AFFECTIVE POLARIZATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA from which we collected the data), Democrats' partisan identity was endangered.…”

Section: Affective Polarization and Elite Expressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective polarization on social media: In-party love among American politicians, greater engagement with out-party hate among ordinary users

Yu¹,

Wojcieszak²,

Casas³

2021

Preprint

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Americans view their in-party members positively and out-party members negatively. It remains unclear, however, whether in-party love (i.e., positive partisanship) or out-party hate (i.e., negative partisanship) more strongly influences political attitudes and behaviors. Unlike past work, which relies on survey self-reports or experimental designs among ordinary citizens, this pre-registered project examines actual social media expressions of an exhaustive list of American politicians as well as citizens’ engagement with these posts. Relying on 1,195,844 tweets sent by 564 political elites (i.e., members of US House and Senate, Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees from 2000 to 2020, and members of the Trump Cabinet) and machine learning to reliably classify the tone of the tweets, we show that elite expressions online are driven by positive partisanship: politicians are more likely to post tweets positive toward their in-party than tweets negative toward the out-party. However, more ideologically extreme politicians and those in the opposition (i.e., the Democrats) are more negative toward the out-party than those ideologically moderate and whose party is in power. Furthermore, examining how Twitter users react to these messages, we find that negative partisanship plays a greater role in online engagement among ordinary citizens (i.e., users are more likely to like and share politicians’ tweets negative toward the out-party than tweets positive toward the in-party). This project has important theoretical and democratic implications, and extends the use of trace data and computational methods in political communication.

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“…Rather, Australian elections are won and lost as a result of changes in the behavior of a smaller group of genuine swinging voters who do change their candidate choices (and preference rankings) from election to election. In contrast to political strategies elsewhere (Gelman et al, 2021;Nuernbergk & Conrad, 2016;Usherwood & Wright, 2017), Australian campaigning on social and other media is thus targeted strongly at such swinging voters. Importantly, this negates much of the "social media incumbency advantage" that Enli and Naper (2016) postulate for the United States and other electoral systems: in Australia, incumbency, and the visibility on social (and mainstream) media that it generates, does not discourage oppositional votes to the same extent.…”

Section: Introduction: the Revolving Door Of Australia's Prime Ministershipmentioning

confidence: 97%

Twitter Campaigning Strategies in Australian Federal Elections 2013–2019

Bruns

Angus

Graham

2021

Social Media + Society

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This special issue of Social Media + Society develops a cross-national, longitudinal perspective on the use of social media in election campaigns. Australia, where leading social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were adopted early and widely by the general population, and where federal election cycles are unusually short (often less than 3 years), provides a particularly suitable environment for observing the evolution of social media campaigning approaches. This article extends our analysis of previous federal election campaigns in Australia by examining Twitter campaigning in the 2019 election; to allow for a direct comparison with previous campaigns, it builds on a methodological and analytical framework that we have used since the 2013 election.

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Mixing messages: How candidates vary in their use of Twitter

Cited by 13 publications

References 35 publications

Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020

Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020

Affective polarization on social media: In-party love among American politicians, greater engagement with out-party hate among ordinary users

Twitter Campaigning Strategies in Australian Federal Elections 2013–2019

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