Facebook affordances and citizen engagement during elections: European political parties and their benefit from online strategies?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Facebook is used by political parties during elections to extend or accelerate their reach within the electorate and how successful these efforts are. Specifically, we compare the content and style of parties’ Facebook posts during the 2014 European parliament elections, and how this affects followers’ responses in terms of liking, sharing and commenting on the posts. Our findings reveal while that the timing and visual content of posts are important in increasing voters’ attention, interactivity matters most. Responsive party posts on Facebooks are significantly more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on by users. Given that follower reactions, particularly sharing, helps to increase the visibility of party communication through indirect or two-step flow communication (online and offline), these findings are important in advancing our understanding of how and why social media campaigns are able to influence voters and thus affect election outcomes. For parties themselves the results provide some useful insights into what makes for an ‘effective’ Facebook campaign in terms of how they can accelerate the reach of their communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• Facebook
• social media
• political communication
• electoral campaign
• interactivity

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. We partially control for this by collecting the data on the daily basis and producing a final archive of data the day after the election.

2. Sotrender.com is an academic-led company running the application analyzing social media. For the purpose of the project the data delivered is a real time archive of the posts and reactions to them by the public. The data were archived just after the election, thus any changes made after the campaign are not taken into account (e.g. additional likes clicked after the campaign). Sotrender does not control for the possible bots or so called ‘likes farms’ but makes a scan of official party profiles as they are visible to the follower.

3. As a robustness check of the time slots we also propose to look at a measure that counts the number of posts by the party within a 1 hour window (measured backward and forward in time). The variable is again logged and squared. See Appendix Table A1 for the full results.

4. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections-2014/en/in-the-member-states (accessed 06.05.2015)

5. Among the ten longest posts, five originated from the non-parliamentary German party BüSo.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Audencia Foundation research grant Innovation and stability [Innovation and stability].

Notes on contributors

Karolina Koc-Michalska

Karolina Koc-Michalska is Associate Professor at Audencia Business School and Associated Researcher at CEVIPOF Sciences-Po Paris, France. Her research focuses on the strategies of political actors in the online environment and citizens’ political engagement. She employs comparative approach focusing on US and European countries.

Darren G. Lilleker

Darren G. Lilleker is Professor of Political Communication in the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, UK. His research focuses on the nexus between political campaigns and voter engagement, trust and self-efficacy as conceptualized in his work Political Communication and Cognition (Palgrave, 2014).

Tomasz Michalski

Tomasz Michalski is an economist, and obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2006 and joined HEC Paris that year. He conducts research in International Economics and Finance and Economic Geography. He published his work inter alia in leading journals such as Journal of International Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of Financial Studies or Journal of International Money and Finance.

Rachel Gibson

Rachel Gibson is Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on how digital technologies are changing the way in which election campaigns are fought and won. She is interested in comparative research and has a particular focus on developments in the UK, the US, Australia, and France.

Jan M. Zajac

Jan M. Zajac Entrepreneur, researcher & social psychologist. Founder and CEO of Sotrender (www.sotrender.com), a research company specializing in social media and developing social media analytics software. Assistant at Chair of Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw.