YouTube Usage in Low-Visibility Political Campaigns

ABSTRACT

Social networking platforms and video-sharing sites like YouTube generate hopes for a more participatory politics and stronger connections between citizens and representatives, particularly at the local level. This article examines these trajectories by analyzing the YouTube presence of candidates in municipal election campaigns, as well as public involvement in these campaigns.

Keywords:

• Campaigning
• Internet
• political communication
• social media
• user-generated content
• video
• Web 2.0
• YouTube

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Eliya David, Shilat Edri, Chen Sabag, and Keren Sereno for their assistance in data collection and in preparing the manuscript for publication, and for the useful comments of the reviewers.

Notes

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

2. The site was ranked third in Alexa when data for this study were collected. See also Madden (2009), and YouTube's own fact sheet at http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet.

3. Gulati and Williams (2010) found that incumbents have uploaded more YouTube videos than new candidates in the U.S. senate elections. However, in the elections they studied, unlike the elections studied here, candidates invest considerable sums of money, and also there are considerable quantities of filmed materials collected during the incumbent's term in office. Since municipal candidates do not have substantial budgets or massive film archives, we do not expect to see a similar phenomenon here.

4. Data about socio-economic status, age median, education (percentage of students among residents in the age group 20–29, percentage of high school graduates among residents ages 17–18), and income (average income, percentage of residents earning minimum wage, percentage of residents earning twice or more than the average wage) are based on Israeli CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) data published in March 2008 on the Web site of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, http://www.moin.gov.il/Apps/PubWebSite/publications.nsf/All/5FCD19CFBECFBC18C2257427002FF5DC/$FILE/Publications.pdf?OpenElement. The district, and the percentages of residents ages 20–29 and 30–44 in the population, were taken from the CBS Website, http://www1.cbs.gov.il/publications/local_authorities2006/excel/p_libud.xls. Data about how peripheral the authority was were also taken from the CBS Web site, http://www.cbs.gov.il/hodaot2008n/24_08_160b.pdf. The numbers of eligible voters were taken from messages posted by the elections supervisor in the Israeli Ministry of Interior Affairs. Details of incumbents were downloaded from the Web site of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, and from the site of the center of the local authorities in Israel, http://www.iula.org.il. Unfortunately, data on other parameters that can be of relevance, such as Internet connectivity rates and population religiosity in different locations across the country, are not available.

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAZ0jos3dyg

6. The socio-economic index ranges from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest).

7. The peripherality index was constructed by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), and takes into account the distance of the municipality from Tel-Aviv district, which is the economic and business center of Israel; and the potential accessibility index, which uses the distance between the municipality and other municipalities, as well as the size of population, and functions as a proxy to a variety of economic parameters.