ECREA16-Abstract

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Thursday, November 10

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Facebook and Twitter, and the more Facebook and Twitter were perceived as influencing other political PR practitioners, the more often the respondents

used social media in the manner described. On the contrary, the presumed reach of Facebook and Twitter among politicians, journalists, and citizens, as

well as their presumed political influence on these groups, had no significant influence on the respondents’social media activities. The findings show that

political PR practitioners use social media largely because of a social co-orientation towards their colleagues. However, this co-orientation towards col‑

leagues is a form of professionalization, which is also seen in other vocational fields. Altogether, the results indicate that subjective perceptions contribute

to explaining the professional online communication activities of PR practitioners.

PP 072

Porting the Successful Campaign?! An Empirical Comparison of Canvassing in the U.S. and Germany Using the Example of the 2014

Thuringian and 2016 Rhineland-Palatinate Federal State Elections

S. Kruschinski

Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Department of Communications, Mainz, Germany

Despite the manifold opportunities presented by online campaign tools and multimedia channels nowadays, political parties in the U.S. and Europe seem

to have built an resurgent interest in an originally“premodern”(Norris, 1997) campaign technique to mobilize voters and ultimately generate votes: door-

to-door canvassing. Mainly, research on canvassing has been focusing on field experiments indicating positive effects of face-to-face communication strat‑

egies on voter mobilization and has been carried out in the U.S. so far. This means that the variation in the institutional frameworks, social and legislative

conditions is limited to the one-country case. Based on the theory of campaign proliferation of Plasser and Plasser (2002) this paper addresses this research

gap and draws on a political actor´s perspective, to show how campaign techniques´ perceptions and institutional, social and legislative settings affect its

implementation, conduct and the strategic choices of political actors. Therefore, the paper´s aim is to give an overview on the role and impact of canvassing

in two different countries and shed light on the following questions: 1) How well do our theories and assumptions about the impact of canvassing travel to

other countries? 2) How do political actors‘translate’campaign instruments like canvassing successfully from one country to another? 3)What role does‘big

data’play for the success of canvassing in each country? To address these questions, the paper will present findings from studies of the 2014 Thuringian and

2016 Rhineland-Palatinate federal state elections in Germany and contrast them to the comprehensive U.S. research literature. In a first step, twelve guided

face-to-face interviews with the campaign coordinators of the six strongest parliamentary parties in both states were held prior to both of the elections.

Based on their respective insights, two questionnaires for a quantitative online survey of campaigners were developed and distributed via the parties´

mailing list in 2014 and 2016. About one-quarter (N=130) of the 550 Thuringian campaigners who received the invitation to participate in the survey

completed the questionnaire. The analysis of Rhineland-Palatinate´s canvassers is still ongoing but will be completed until the conference´s beginning.

Equally to their U.S. counterparts, the interviewed German campaign coordinators characterize the “Ground War”as essential for the success of their cam‑

paigns and also state the same aims of mobilizing partisans, conveying the campaign´s message and collecting voter data. Unlike the comprehensive and

hypermodern gathering and analysis of voter´s personal data in past U.S. elections, strategic organization and conduct of German canvassing draws mainly

on“voter-potential-analysis”based on past election results and household data offered by Deutsche Post. According to most of the surveyed campaigners,

contacted voters were predominantly partisans and familiar with the canvassers, which showed both statistically significant effects for the canvasser´s

success at the door and coincide with findings of U.S. studies. Summing up, canvassing seems to be an efficient instrument for voter mobilization in Ger‑

many although it has to be adapted in different degrees to the country´s environment, social and legal terrain as well as election and media system to be

conducted successfully within a campaign.

PP 073

Communication Strategies in the Russian Liberal Oppositional Discourse: The Murder of Boris Nemtsov Case

D. Gavra

, E. Bykova

St-Petersburg State University, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, St-Petersburg, Russia

St-Petersburg State University, Journalism & Mass Communication, St-Petersburg, Russia

Keywords: Russian political opposition, content analysis, discourse, media, communication strategies, speech means. Abstract On February 27, 2015 shortly

before midnight in Moscow a politician Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the Russian liberal opposition, was shot at the Big Moskvoretsky Bridge.

Information about the murder appeared instantly on social networks, further on the news lines of the agencies, and finally in the early morning, hit

the television news. Official statements and comments appeared at noon of the next day – February, 28. By that time Russian language social networks

both inside the country and abroad, including Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte already had more than five thousands posts, tweets and retweets dedicated

to this incident (counted by the authors). Versions of the murder, suspicions of actors involved, charges and countercharges, accusations were presented.

Different political forces began using a tragic episode for their own purposes. The event have produced the set of the information waves spreading in

the communicative space according to the consistent patterns of the digital media flows when politically polarized discourse is firstly produced by the social

media later followed by the traditional media and only than reshaped by the official statements of the authorities. And this time gap between digital media

and social networks flows, mainstream TV flows and official governmental position have produced the complex discursive configuration with controversial

interpretations of what have happened and who is responsible. By the morning February 28, when the federal TV channels informed the TV audience

about the incident social networks have already formed the basic axes of yesterday's murder discourses. These discourses, as well as their narratives, were

a reflection of the political values confrontation having been existed in Russian public space in early 2015. One side of this confrontation was formed by

Western-style liberal values. Murdered Boris Nemtsov was the brightest representative of this side of Russian political spectrum. On the opposite side there

were several groups of anti-liberal or conservative values. Special attention in the empirical data analysis is paid to representation of the liberal discourse.

We’ve fixed the communicative strategies of the Russian liberal opposition connected with the Nemtsov’s murder. Having become one on the headline news