Birds Of A Feather Flock Together?Party Leaders On Twitter During The 2013 Norwegian Elections"Presentation for the Strategic Communication Campaigns in a Contemporary, Digital and Networked Society preconference, ICA 2014!

Anders Olof Larsson a.o.larsson@media.uioandersoloflarsson.se!@a_larsson!Øyvind Ihlen oyvind.ihlen@media.uio.nooyvindihlen.wordpress.com!

http://www.firsttimeorangecounty.com/images/famous-debate-with-kennedy.jpg

http://mashable.com/2010/01/18/obamas-first-real-tweet/

@replies Retweets

Undirected

Broadcasting or Communicating?

•  ”Infomercials” (Stromer-Galley, 2000), ”electronic brochures” (Druckman et. al., 2007)

•  Influx of social media has again raised the hopes for more communicative practices

•  Engagement with voters on the Internet leads to positive evaluations of politicians (Grant et. al., 2010; Utz, 2009)

•  Political Public Relations – foster good relationships with key constituents (Strömbäck and Kiousis, 2011)

•  Politicians have mainly employed Twitter for broadcasting purposes –  self-promotion (Golbeck, Grimes and Rogers, 2010) –  impression management (Jackson and Lilleker, 2011) –  information dissemination (Small, 2011, Sæbø, 2011) –  party mobilization (Dang-Xuan, Stieglitz, Wladarsch and Neuberger, 2013)

-  Norway -  Party-centered

democracy -  4.9 million inhabitants

-  2011 Regional Elections -  Study by Enli and

Skogerbø -  44 % @replies by the

sampled politicians

How do Norwegian party leaders utilize Twitter in their election campaigns?

Which publics do the politicians prioritize to

engage with?"

Method •  Data Collection

–  Focus on Twitter accounts of the seven main party leaders; N of @replies sent

–  Archive traffic to and from these accounts during ’the short campaign’ using YourTwapperKeeper

–  Process resulted in a sample of 846 @replies sent from the party leaders to a total of 518 users

•  Data analysis

–  Excel, SPSS, Gephi –  Coding of identified users

•  Citizen; Media Professional; Organizational Representative; Politician

–  Inter-coder reliability testing: 10 % sample, resulting in Krippendorff’s α = .69

- Results -

Concluding Remarks

•  One-way online rationales replaced by two-way? –  As in 2011, plenty of @replies sent in comparison to other elections

•  However, this communicative behaviour is limited in scope –  Nodes in network chart rather small = few messages received

•  Enough to decrease the ”psychological distance” (Vergeer et. al., 2011) between voter and politician?

•  In total, a somewhat surprising amount of @replies sent to citizens:

–  Citizens: 46 % of all @replies –  Media Professionals: 18 % –  Organizational Representatives: 18 % –  Politicians: 18 %

•  Sweden 2014 – similar tendencies?

Thank you for your attention."

Anders Olof Larsson a.o.larsson@media.uioandersoloflarsson.se!Øyvind Ihlen oyvind.ihlen@media.uio.nooyvindihlen.wordpress.com!