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Social media and political agenda setting


Gilardi, Fabrizio; Gessler, Theresa; Kubli, Mael; Müller, Stefan (2022). Social media and political agenda setting. Political Communication, 39(1):39-60.

Abstract

What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, we validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 2.78 million articles published in 84 newspapers, 6,500 tweets posted on official party accounts, and 210,000 tweets posted by politicians on their own accounts from January 2018 until December 2019. We first use the classifier to measure the salience of the four most relevant issues of the period: the environment, Europe, gender equality, and immigration. Then, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, we analyze the relationship between the three agendas. Results show that not only do the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians influence one another but, overall, no agenda leads the others more than it is led by them. There is one important exception: for the environment issue, the social media agenda of parties is more predictive of the traditional media agenda than vice-versa. These findings underscore how closely different agendas are tied together, but also show that advocacy campaigns may play an important role in both constraining and enabling parties to push their specific agendas.

Abstract

What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, we validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 2.78 million articles published in 84 newspapers, 6,500 tweets posted on official party accounts, and 210,000 tweets posted by politicians on their own accounts from January 2018 until December 2019. We first use the classifier to measure the salience of the four most relevant issues of the period: the environment, Europe, gender equality, and immigration. Then, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, we analyze the relationship between the three agendas. Results show that not only do the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians influence one another but, overall, no agenda leads the others more than it is led by them. There is one important exception: for the environment issue, the social media agenda of parties is more predictive of the traditional media agenda than vice-versa. These findings underscore how closely different agendas are tied together, but also show that advocacy campaigns may play an important role in both constraining and enabling parties to push their specific agendas.

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Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Political Science
08 Research Priority Programs > Digital Society Initiative
Dewey Decimal Classification:320 Political science
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Communication
Social Sciences & Humanities > Sociology and Political Science
Uncontrolled Keywords:sociology and political science, communication agenda setting, social media, newspapers, supervised machine learning
Language:English
Date:2 January 2022
Deposited On:08 Dec 2021 17:07
Last Modified:27 Sep 2023 01:41
Publisher:Taylor & Francis
ISSN:1058-4609
OA Status:Hybrid
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2021.1910390
Project Information:
  • : FunderH2020
  • : Grant ID883121
  • : Project TitlePRODIGI - Problem Definition in the Digital Democracy
  • Content: Published Version
  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)