Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

ABSTRACT

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• mass media
• election campaigns
• normalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Van Aelst is a professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Belgium. [email: [email protected]].

Patrick van Erkel is PhD-student at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Belgium. [email: [email protected]].

Evelien D’heer is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Communications Department (iMinds - MICT), Ghent University, Belgium. [email: [email protected]].

Raymond A. Harder is PhD-student at the Communications Department, University of Antwerp, Belgium. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. yourTwapperkeeper (Available at: http://github.com/jobrieniii/yourTwapperKeeper) is based on the Twitter streaming API, through which keywords can be ‘tracked’. Aside the ‘track’ parameter (which captures activity to a particular user), we also included the ‘follow’ parameter to get Twitter activity from that particular user (for more information: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/parameters#follow).

2. These newspapers are the broadsheets De Morgen, De Standaard, and De Tijd, the popular papers Het Laatste Nieuws and Het Nieuwsblad, and the more regional oriented papers Het Belang van Limburg, de krant van West-Vlaanderen and De Gazet van Antwerpen.

3. In the 2014 campaign, only 7% of the candidates appeared at least once in one of the major television news broadcasts during the campaign. Therefore, we decided to focus on newspaper data only.

4. According to the Flemish Newsmonitor, the Flemish nationalists (N-VA) accounted for 36% of all mentions of parties and candidates in both newspapers and television news broadcasts

5. For instance, Kristof Calvo, a young MP of the Green party, was able to score the third place on the Twitter Popularity index without being very present in the traditional media. Another relative young politician, Alexander De Croo, Minister for the liberal party, stated in an interview that his steep political career was pushed by his success on twitter. De Croo has by far the most followers of all Belgian politicians.

6. iMinds-iLab.o (2013) Digimeter Report 6. Adoption and usage of Media & ICT in Flanders. Ghent: iMinds-iLab.o.