547 / 658
545
Saturday, November 12
1 6 : 0 0 – 1 7 : 3 0
PP 656
Inter-Media Agenda-Setting in the Social Media Age: How Twitter Influences the Media Agenda in Election Times
R. Harder
1
, P. Van Aelst
2
, J. Sevenans
2
, S. Paulussen
1
1
University of Antwerp, Department of Communication Sciences, Antwerpen, Belgium
2
University of Antwerp, Department of Political Sciences, Antwerpen, Belgium
Over the last decades, journalism has undergone vast changes as a result of digitalization. These technological innovations are beginning to challenge
the very fundaments of established theories and concepts, such as inter-media agenda setting theory (Atwater, Fico, & Pizante, 1987). In particular, two
assumptions that underpin its measurement and applicability can be questioned. One, the 24/7 news production cycle with its increased speed and contin‑
uous output (Hermida, 2013; Papacharissi, 2014) means that the use of time lags is less suitable to capture how news is disseminated across media outlets.
Two, news is no longer the exclusive domain of traditional mass media, as web 2.0 (especially social media) enables non-journalist actors to co-shape
the content, tone, and distribution of news coverage (Bruns, 2008; Chadwick, 2013; Papacharissi, 2014). This means that these ‘new’ media cannot be
analysed like homogeneous entities, as‘regular’media usually are in this strand of research. In turn, it becomes questionable whether defining the‘agenda’
of media as an aggregate of themes present in their coverage is an appropriate operationalisation for the contemporary news ecology. In this paper, we
propose a news story level approach (Thesen, 2013) as one possible methodology to counter these issues. To demonstrate its usefulness, we apply it to
the coverage of the 2014 election campaign in Belgium, for which a large set of news items (n=9,749) was collected, drawn from newspapers, television
newscasts and current affairs programmes, radio newscasts, news websites, and Twitter. Combining conventional time series analysis (Meraz, 2011) with
more in-depth case studies, we prove that despite aforementioned theoretical difficulties, inter-media agenda setting processes can be studied in the social
media age. Our study shows how a new medium like Twitter is integrated in the contemporary news ecology and affects the agenda of traditional media
in different ways. References Atwater, T., Fico, F., & Pizante, G. (1987). Reporting on the State Legislature: A Case Study of Inter-media Agenda-Setting.
Newspaper Research Journal, 8(2), 53–61. Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and Beyond: from production to produsage New York, NY: Peter
Lang. Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hermida, A. (2013). #Journalism. Digital
Journalism, 1(3), 295–313. doi:10.1080/21670811.2013.808456 Meraz, S. (2011). Using Time Series Analysis to Measure Intermedia Agenda-Setting Influ‑
ence in Traditional Media and Political Blog Networks. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(1), 176–194. doi:10.1177/107769901108800110
Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Toward New Journalism(s). Journalism Studies, 16(1), 27–40. doi:10.1080/1461670x.2014.890328 Thesen, G. (2013). When good
news is scarce and bad news is good: Government responsibilities and opposition possibilities in political agenda-setting. European Journal of Political
Research, 52(3), 364–389. doi:10.1111/j.1475–6765.2012.02075.x
PP 657
Politics of Tweeting, Tweeting of Politics: The Uses of Social Media by State Parliamentarians in Germany and Australia
J. Schwanholz
1
, A. Bruns
2
, B. Moon
2
, F. Muench
2
1
University of Goettingen, Department of Political Science, Goettingen, Germany
2
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Research into the uses of social media by politicians continues to focus especially on exceptional contexts such as election campaigns and political crises, and
on major political leaders and candidates, while the more quotidian, routine utilisation of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by ordinary parliamen‑
tarians is comparatively absent from the literature. This is perhaps unsurprising, but it largely overlooks how social media have also become embedded into
the everyday work of professional politicians even - and perhaps particularly - when they are not subject to constant and intense scrutiny by mainstream
media. Indeed, for the comparatively less visible majority of elected representatives on the backbenches of parliament, their social media accounts may
now be an important channel for connecting directly with their constituents. This paper reports on a comparative study of routine social media uses by par‑
liamentarians in two state assemblies in Germany and Australia. Taking a mixed-methods approach, it draws on in-depth interviews with representatives,
as well as on detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the activities of and user responses to the politicians’Twitter accounts, in order to both elicit
the parliamentarians’ own attitudes towards and strategies for using social media, and compare these with the observable reality of their activities. For
this study we selected Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), the lower house of the parliament of Victoria, Australia, and Mitglieder des Landtags
(MdLs), the single chamber of the parliament of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Germany. Within their respective national contexts, both are populous
states of considerable demographic diversity that represent a significant geographic region; during the time of our data gathering in 2015 and 2016, both
were also at mid-point in their respective electoral cycles, ensuring that our data were not significantly skewed by recent or impending election campaigns.
We tracked the public communicative activities around all MLAs’and MdLs’Twitter accounts that could be identified, and for each state conducted some 20
interviews with parliamentarians from across the political spectrum represented in parliament. The findings from our study point to considerable variation
in the interest in and level of social media use across the two case studies. The Australian state politicians were considerably more active on Twitter than
their German counterparts, and were also the subject of significantly more engagement from other users on the platform; this is likely to reflect the stronger
uptake of the platform - in general and especially for political purposes - in Australia. Further, interviews revealed that MPs’attitudes on howmuch personal
information they are content to share with the public varies remarkably. Moreover, we found indicators of the MPs’ views about the changing concept
of representative democracy. The study makes an important contribution to research into the emerging political uses of social media by shifting the focus
of such research towards the less glamorous world of the working state parliamentarian, whose social media activities may never become as visible as those
of national and international leaders, but are likely to be of relevance to the domestic electorate.