NATIONAL POLITICS ON TWITTER

Abstract

The increasing use of Twitter by politicians, journalists, political strategists and citizens has made it an important part of the networked sphere in which political issues are publicly negotiated. The growing number of studies investigating the relationship between Twitter and politics supports this claim. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first study that examines the interrelation of individuals on the basis of their professions, their topics and their connection to mass media. Taking the example of Austria, they developed a user-centred method that overcomes the limitations inherent to other approaches in this field. The different types of data they gathered – Twitter user data, 1,375 newspaper articles and manually coded 145,356 tweets – allowed them to perform several analyses which provided insights into the structure and topics of a national public Twittersphere. Their results show that the network formed by Austria's most relevant political Twitter users is dominated by an elite of political professionals but open to outside participation. The topic analysis reveals the emergence of niche authorities and the periodic divergence of the political discourse on Twitter with that of mass media. The article concludes with a summary of how these phenomena relate to political participation.

Keywords:

• Twitter networks
• social media
• mass media
• politics
• journalism
• participation

Acknowledgements

We thank Axel Kittenberger, who has been an important part of our team. Without his technical expertise, we would not have been able to conduct the research presented here. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and the Vienna-based advertising agency Super-Fi for the financial support.

Notes

The self-built Twitter tracker is available as open source: https://github.com/axkibe/twaaaj.

Calculation of the authors based on the database on Austrian MPs provided by the Austrian parliament at http://www.parlamanet.gv.at.