Social Media Politics: Parties and Leaders Across Europe

• In Event: Leadership, Media, Politics, and Pandemics: The Italian Case

Abstract

Social media have re-shaped political communication. In particular, how political actors and parties address their constituency is going through a continuous and rapid adaptation to a new environment. Indeed, social media have redefined the kind of logic underpinning communication strategies and dynamics by emphasizing personalization and disintermediation. Precisely, social media allow for direct interaction with supporters, with no mediation by mainstream media or other actors. In this respect, users can interact with leaders and parties through diverse reactions entailing diverse (cognitively and emotionally) engagement, e. g. likes, sharing of contents, or even direct comments. This paper focuses precisely on the users’ reactions and engagement to social media messages published by parties and political actors. By focusing on Facebook – which represents the most common social media in Europe with a penetration of about 47% among the internet users – we have developed an original dataset covering the Facebook activity of the official public pages of 120+ parties and leaders in Europe along a time span of 12 months. Precisely, for each of the 28 EU countries, we included in the dataset the 5 main parties and their leaders. Per each post, we collected data about engagement in terms of likes, shares, and comments. A multivariate analysis – including all countries - will investigate the main factors impacting on the degree of the engagement. Precisely, statistical models will test a set of independent variables focusing on dimensions related to a) social media features – fanbase, kind of contents published, length of messages; b) political features – party size, government vs. opposition role, populist vs. mainstream, ideological positioning (according to CHES data). Given its peculiarities, the Italian case will be addressed in comparative perspective emphasizing the magnitude of political actors Fb activity, their engagement and the features of their social media communication.

Authors

• Moreno Mancosu, Collegio Carlo Alberto

• Giuliano Bobba

• ANTONELLA SEDDONE, University of Turin

• Frederico Vegetti, University of Mannheim, MZES