Mediatisation in Twitter: an exploratory analysis of the 2015 Spanish general election

ABSTRACT

The mediatisation model in politics assumes that media conveys political messages between parties and citizenship, with the risk of promoting issues that frame the electoral content in terms of competition. These dynamics could distract from the debate of ideas and political policies. However, digital media like Twitter provide direct communication channels between parties, candidates and users. The present research explores Twitter content during an electoral campaign focused on the four issues proposed by Patterson (1980) to assess mediatisation: political, policy, campaign and personal (regarding the candidate). The goal of this research study is to evaluate the degree of mediatisation on Twitter using this typology. The research also evaluates the influence of the issue on retweet volume. The study’s basis was a 15.8 million-tweet corpus obtained during the 2015 Spanish General Election pre-campaign and campaign. This dataset was analysed using an automatic classification system. The results highlighted a predominance of policy issues during both the pre-campaign and campaign, except for the two televised debates, during which campaign issues were the most prevalent. On the election night, users commented much more on political issues. Finally, the kind of issue most likely to be retweeted was policy issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Political communication
• mediatisation
• Twitter
• electoral campaign
• computer-assisted content detection

Acknowledgements

This work has been possible thanks to the help given by Emilio Giner in extracting the corpus and by José Gámir in manually coding the tweets. We would also like to thank Maite Giménez, Paolo Rosso and Francisco Rangel from the PRHLT Research Center at the Polytechnic University of Valencia for co-organising the COSET evaluation task and setting up the corpus annotating system. Without their time, this article would not have been possible. We have benefitted from Guillermo López-García’s comments on the literature review about mediatisation, and from Joaquín Aldás-Manzano’s suggestions regarding the multivariate analysis. Finally, we are aware of how the original manuscript has improved thanks to the indications received from the two anonymous reviewers, and we are very grateful for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tomás Baviera is an adjunct professor of Marketing at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He holds an MSc in Telecommunication Engineering from the same university, as well as a PhD in Journalism from the University of Valencia. He is affiliated with the research group Mediaflows, University of Valencia. His research interests include digital communication, social media, and online marketing. He ran the Alameda Hall of Residence in Valencia for 13 years, where he promoted a wide-range liberal arts training.

Dafne Calvo is Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Valladolid. She has research stays in Uruguay (University of the Republic) and Mexico (Benemérita Autónoma University of Puebla). She was a member of the working team on different research projects at Complutense University of Madrid, University of Valencia, Ramon Llull University and University of Valladolid. She combines her academic activity with her collaboration in various journalistic productions, meetings, and events for the dissemination of digital communication.

Germán Llorca-Abad is a Tenured Professor of Communication Theory, Public Relations and Advertising at the University of Valencia. His research interests include social media, digital communication, television and transmedia. He gained a Masters degree in 2000 and his PhD in 2007. He has been an Invited Lecturer at the Universität des Saarlandes, in Germany; Universidade Paulista, in Brasil, and Universidad Austral, in Chile. He recently has been a recipient of a ‘José Castillejo’ research scholarship at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Germany.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Polytechnic University of Valencia repository RiuNet at https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/117194, reference number https://doi.org/10.4995/Dataset/10251/117194.

ORCID

Tomás Baviera http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2331-6628

Dafne Calvo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0659-6792

Germán Llorca-Abad http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0934-8420

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, with Grants CSO2013-43960-R (Los flujos de comunicación en los procesos de movilización política: medios, blogs y líderes de opinión) and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R (Estrategias, agendas y discursos en las cibercampañas electorales: medios de comunicación y ciudadanos).