Word on the street: politicians, mediatized street protest, and responsiveness on social media

ABSTRACT

Communicative responsiveness of politicians to public opinion signals has become increasingly important for politicians’ electoral fate and citizens’ sense of feeling represented. Although politicians can communicate directly with the public via social media, little is known about the extent, conditions, and favorability of politicians’ responsiveness on social media to public opinion cues. This paper scrutinizes politicians’ responsiveness to one particular public opinion signal: street protest. Do politicians respond to street protest on social media? And if so, when, and how do they react? We address these questions by means of two datasets: (1) a protest event dataset of all protests staged in Brussels (Belgium) between July 2017 and June 2019 (N = 124); and (2) a social media dataset containing all Facebook messages (N = 36.323) and tweets (N = 142.596) by Belgian politicians (N = 236) in the days surrounding each protest. Results show that politicians do respond to protest and its issue; the lion’s share of social media messages supporting protesters. Protest that is large, (inter)nationally coordinated, and organized on socio-cultural issues is more frequently discussed by politicians; left-wing, opposition, and issue-owning politicians are more responsive as well. Whereas especially left-wing politicians endorse protests, right-wing politicians are more prone to discredit it. Responsiveness is thus asymmetric across the political spectrum. Our findings have implications for democratic representation and its challenges in hybrid media systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• social movements
• responsiveness
• party competition
• issue-ownership
• protest

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hooghe, Marks, and colleagues refer to the GAL-TAN cleavage, standing for green, alternative and libertarian versus traditionalist, authoritarian, and nativist. Kriesi and colleagues refer to the integration-demarcation cleavage.

2 Note that such an issue-link is how all agenda-setting studies link protest to attention of politicians.

3 Based on voting data from the federal elections in Belgium in 2014, 69.7% (N = 62) of people who voted for PVDA-PTB, 59.3% (N =178) of people who voted for Groen, and 59.7% (N =197) of people who voted for SP. A positioned themselves left or extreme left on a left-right scale (10pt-Likert scale).

4 This is the total amount of Facebook posts and tweets by politicians in our sample, across all (days surrounding each) protests, thus including posts and tweets that do not deal with the protest or it’s issue.

5 The favorability score is calculated as positive tweets minus negative tweets per politician-protest dyad, recoding values lower than −2 (N =157 tweets; 6.2%) and higher than +2 (N =344; 13.7%) to −2 and +2, respectively.

6 A log transformed continuous turnout variable – given a negative skew in the turnout distribution – yields similar significant results. Categorical operationalizations of the turnout variable shows 5000 participants to be a key threshold. Turnout thus matters for responsiveness, but not so in a linear way across all “turnout steps” –it seems that it is a matter of being perceived as large or not, which in our dataset hovers around 5000. Additional analyses show the effect of turnout on responsiveness to be partially mediated by news item duration: larger demonstrations are associated with longer news items, which are more likely to be referred to by politicians.

7 While opposition status and left-right orientation could not be introduced in the same model due to multicollinearity, running separate models for left- and right-wing politicians shows that opposition status within right-wing parties matters significantly.

8 See https://www.nieuwsarchief.be/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Foundation Flanders [grant number PROVOKE].

Notes on contributors

Ruud Wouters

Ruud Wouters is a post-doctoral researcher in the M²P research group at the University of Antwerp. He studies the impact and mobilization of social movements and protest.

Luna Staes

Luna Staes is a phd-student in the M²P research group at the University of Antwerp. She studies protest in the hybrid media arena.

Peter Van Aelst

Peter Van Aelst is professor in the M²P research group at the University of Antwerp. He studies political communication.