DODGING THE GATEKEEPERS?

Abstract

Although politicians, scholars and campaigners claim that social media such as Facebook and Twitter profoundly change election campaigns, still little is known about the place of social media in the overall campaign mix and its use compared to traditional campaigning channels like the mass media. Cluster analysis of a representative survey among the candidates in the 2011 parliamentary election in Denmark shows that the candidates can be divided into three groups with different campaign mixes: a group which mainly communicates through the traditional mass media, a group which emphasizes social media, and a group which puts low emphasis on media in their campaign. The place of social media in the campaign mix of Danish candidates can be explained by access to the mainstream media and incentives for individual candidates. Traditional media remain the most important communication channel in the Danish campaign, but primarily for candidates who are newsworthy due to their experience and incumbency status. These candidates use social media to generate coverage in the traditional mass media. Challengers and less experienced candidates are more likely to use social media to compensate for lack of attention from the mainstream media, in particular when they are involved in intra-party competition. It is concluded that social media are integrated into Danish campaign mix according to the incentive structure of the electoral system and the media logic which characterizes modern campaigns.

Keywords:

• social media
• election
• campaigning
• Facebook
• Twitter
• politicians

Notes

https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0710.aspx?id=131197&exp=1.

Data from the Danish national election study 2007, available at: SurveyBanken under the heading ‘valgundersøgelser’ (http://bank1.surveybank.aau.dk/webview/).

See data from Danish national election study 2007 (note 2).

The data collection in Denmark was headed by Christian Elmelund-Præstekær, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark.

Not all respondents answered the battery of questions which is central to our further analysis. This means that the analysis will be based on 278 respondents.

The Socialist People's Party is the only other party to use this way of organizing the list – and this is only in 3 out of 10 constituencies.

A logistic regression including the candidates from the traditional media group and the new media group with membership of the new media group as the dependent variable allowed us to enter control variables. This shows that the perceived likelihood of winning a seat in parliament and being a challenger are significant when controlling for party affiliation, age and gender. This means that these differences between the two groups are not caused by party, age and gender.