Brute force effects of mass media presence and social media activity on electoral outcome

ABSTRACT

In this study, we analyze whether the mere volume of presence in mass media and the mere volume of activity on social media convey advantages to candidates in parliamentary elections. Based on the theoretical model of bounded rationality, we call these potential effects brute force effects. During the last month of the election campaign of the Swiss federal election of 2015, we tracked the presence of all 873 candidates in the canton of Zurich, the most populous canton, in a broad sample of mass media. Additionally, we tracked those candidates’ activity on Facebook and Twitter. The results of our multilevel Bayesian estimates show that mass media presence has a consistent nontrivial impact on different aspects of electoral outcome. Furthermore, social media activity also has a nontrivial impact, but only in terms of resonance (reactions to candidates’ social media activity). Overall, our results suggest that brute force effects of of mass media presence and social media activity can have substantial impact on voting behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavioral economics
• brute force effects
• election
• Facebook
• mass media
• media effects
• parliament
• social media
• Switzerland
• Twitter

Notes

1. The number of signatures required for a candidacy varies according to the cantonal population sizes, but does not exceed the relatively low amount of 400.

2. In four of these small cantons, any one Swiss citizen from the respective canton is eligible to be elected into the lower house, even without prior official registration of the candidacy.

3. In the six small cantons with only one seat per canton, the election, naturally, defaults to a majority vote.

4. Most of those voting lists correspond to a political party. However, a few voting lists did not directly represent political parties, but different types of political groups, some of them only semi-serious, such as the “Anti PowerPoint Party.” Any one individual can form a voting list and become a candidate in the canton of Zurich if they manage to collect 400 signatures from Swiss citizens living in the canton of Zurich.

5. TalkTäglich and SonnTalk.

6. Züri-News.

7. We had access to the official database of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. For each segment in the news, the mentioned and quoted politicians are listed in the database. For newspapers, we automatically extracted all politicians. For common names and all politicians with more than ten mentions, we checked manually for false positives and subtracted them. The newspaper articles were downloaded from the comprehensive Swiss Media Database (Schweizerische Mediendatenbank).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marko Kovic

Marko Kovic (PhD, University of Zurich) is co-founder and president of the Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research. His research interests include decision-making, ethics, political theory, and existential risks.

Adrian Rauchfleisch

Adrian Rauchfleisch (PhD, University of Zurich) is co-founder of the Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research and a postdoc at the University of Zurich. His research interests include political communication, online communication, and public sphere theory.

Julia Metag

Julia Metag (PhD, University of Muenster) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg. Her research interests include political communication, science communication, and media effects.

Christian Caspar

Christian Caspar is PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich and a board member of ZIPAR. His research interests are in democracy, public sphere, and power.

Julian Szenogrady

Julian Szenogrady is a graduate in media and communication science at the University of Zurich. His research interests include social media, science communication, and marketing.