The Same Views, the Same News? A 15-Country Study on News Sharing on Social Media by European Politicians

ABSTRACT

Social media allow politicians to circumvent the gatekeeping role of news media by providing a platform on which they can communicate directly with and to their electorates. Still, politicians share news items on their online platforms to promote themselves, criticize their opponents or to inform their following. Doing so, they signal the relevance of those news items and the outlets that published them to their online audiences, serving as secondary gatekeepers in the flow of information. In this paper, we study the ideological link between politicians and the audiences of the outlets they share on social media. Combining comparative survey data (N = 22,145) with Facebook posts (N = 21,061) by 2,142 MPs in 15 European countries, we assess whether the ideological alignment with news outlets’ audiences drives politicians’ online news sharing. Findings confirm that the ideological alignment between a politician and a news outlet’s audience predicts the politician’s sharing of news by that outlet. Moreover, this connection is stronger for radical party politicians and in media systems that are characterized by higher levels of political parallelism. The results have important implications for partisan selective exposure to news and polarization in the digital information environment.

KEYWORDS:

• news sharing
• social media
• news media
• political actors
• political parallelism

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS) for granting us access to their survey data.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Willem Buyens, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. Because parliamentary elections were held during this period in France and Hungary the end point of the data collection for those two countries was limited to one day before the elections, 11/06/2022 and 02/04/2022, respectively.

2. The survey was approved by the ethics committee of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR secretariat, Ethics Committee, University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15,793, 1001 NG Amsterdam; [phone]; [email protected]).

3. For the exact question wording, see Appendix J.

4. As a robustness check, we ran multilevel logistic regression models (see Appendix F and Appendix G) on a binary dependent variable (0 for no occurrence of the politician-outlet dyad, 1 for at least one occurrence) and multilevel OLS regression models (see Appendix H and Appendix I) on a continuous dependent variable (share of news shared by a politician that was published by the outlet in the dyad). The results of these regression analyses are mostly in line with those described in the results section.

5. The numbers in Appendix C exclude respondents who did not report their left-right positioning and were thus excluded from the analyses reported in the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) under Grant G096621N.

Notes on contributors

Willem Buyens

Willem Buyens is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp.

Peter Van Aelst

Peter Van Aelst is a Professor of Political Communication in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp.

Cristian Vaccari

Cristian Vaccari is Chair of Future Governance, Public Policy and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.