A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 398 pp. $59.95 hbk. $21.95 pbk. The main finding of Pippa Norris's study is that exposure to the news media is positively related to citizens' levels of political knowledge, trust, and participation, even after controlling for demographics, attitudinal factors, and cultural differences. Although various positive contributions of exposure to news media already have been documented in other research, never was the amount of evidence as monumental as in this book. Norris analyzed European Community, Eurobarometer, European Election and Post-election, British Campaign Panel, U.S. National Election, and Pew Center for the People and the Press surveys, providing individual and aggregate level, over-time and cross-sectional evidence supporting her virtuous media thesis. The book is set up as a challenge to "conventional wisdom" or "unquestioned orthodoxy" of media malaise theories that argue that "exposure to the news media discourages learning about politics, erodes trust in political leaders and government institutions, and dampens political mobilization." The problem is that there is a huge gap between the abundance of glib charges and the scarcity of empirical evidence of negative effects of news media. Consequently, Norris mostly relies on Michael Robinson's long ago retracted videomalaise claim and strays away from her main line of theorizing by reviewing studies that deal with the issues well outside the scope of her own study, such as effects of framing news stories, political advertising, and television entertainment. Findings of negative media effects in contexts other than elections and those tapping more specific types of media content and their particular features remain unchallenged by the Norris study. Norris acknowledges that "we need to compare the effects of variance in the media messages so that we can see whether people who consistently use one distinctive source (such as crime-focused local TV news) differ from those who use others (such as rightwing talk radio)" and that "our measures of media habits are often diffuse and imprecise," but she is still restricted in her research to measures of frequency of general newspaper and television news use. Nevertheless, Norris urges us to stopblaming the news media for political problems and instead to direct our attention to "the problems themselves." This call, without showing that media in many of their specific content characteristics or structures are not a part of problems that extend beyond voting and political campaigning, seems premature at best. However, Norris's study makes a significant contribution to communication research by most convincingly showing that the news media may be an important part of solutions to some of the social ills. …

A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies

Twitter has become a pervasive tool in election campaigns. Candidates, parties, journalists, and a steadily increasing share of the public are using Twitter to comment on, interact around, and research public reactions to politics. These uses have met with growing scholarly attention. As of now, this research is fragmented, lacks a common body of evidence, and shared approaches to data collection and selection. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review of 127 studies addressing the use of Twitter in election campaigns. In this systematic review, I will discuss the available research with regard to findings on the use of Twitter by parties, candidates, and publics during election campaigns and during mediated campaign events. Also, I will address prominent research designs and approaches to data collection and selection.

Twitter use in election campaigns: A systematic literature review

How to write and publish a scientific paper

https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa43737/Download/0043737-09092018131040.pdf

Polarization and acculturation in US Election 2016 outcomes – Can twitter analytics predict changes in voting preferences

This article explores dynamics of online image management and its impact on leadership in a context of digital permanent campaigning and celebrity politics in Canada. Recent studies have shown that...

The Power of Political Image: Justin Trudeau, Instagram, and Celebrity Politics:

In Canada, Twitter still played a mostly peripheral role in political communication, mobilization, and organizing in 2010. This study provides a snapshot in time of how Twitter was redefining local political campaigns before social media become ubiquitous in electioneering. Focusing on the 2010 municipal elections in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (the nation’s capital), this study considers how and to what extent social networking platforms help shape the dynamics of local electioneering; it maps the ways in which Twitter was used by the Ottawa-Carleton district school board, the Ottawa catholic school board, the Eastern Ontario French-language public school board, and ward and mayoral candidates for voter outreach; it also identifies what were then novel ways in which voters creatively used Twitter to participate independently in the electoral process and to attempt to influence its outcome. Finally, it discusses how traditional news organizations experimented with social media in covering elections and engagi...

Tweet, Click, Vote: Twitter and the 2010 Ottawa Municipal Election

Social media have been playing a growingly important role in grassroots protest over the last five years. While many scholars have explored dynamics of political cyberprotest (e.g., the ongoing tra...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1301522

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

Recent years have been marked by the emergence of a new breed of social media-fuelled grassroots protest phenomena that have challenged the dominance of political elites in several advanced liberal democracies Whether it is the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the #idlenomore movement in Canada or the student-led demonstrations in Chile, they have quickly mobilized narrow segments of the public and have ultimately succeeded in forcing formal political actors to acknowledge their presence In some cases, they have compelled them into taking their demands into account in their decision-making

Political Protest 2.0: Social Media and the 2012 Student Strike in the Province of Quebec, Canada

Recent years have been marked by the emergence of a new breed of grassroots-intensive protest phenomena that have challenged the dominance of political elites in several advanced liberal democracies. Whether it is the transnational Occupy movement, the Idle No More movement in Canada or the student-led demonstrations in Chile, these social-media-fuelled mobilization initiatives have quickly mobilized narrow segments of the public and have succeeded in forcing formal political actors to acknowledge their presence. In some cases, they have encouraged them to take some of their demands into account in their decision making. This trend is demonstrative of a growing political engagement disconnect between formal political players (for example: government agencies, political parties) and members of the citizenry. Although most of the former are still relying heavily on politicking strategies tailored for citizens adhering to the dutiful citizenship model, a growing portion of the latter are turning to informal forms of political action better suited to their personal preferences, interests and goals. Specifically, citizens’ involvement in politics is increasingly driven by short- or mid-term priorities or considerations linked to their private lives and progressively less by their adherence to a broader ideology, their party allegiances or their concern for the greater societal good. This article examines one of these protest movements: the 2012 student movement against university tuition hikes in the province of Quebec, Canada, also known as ‘Maple Spring’. Although some facets of this political mobilization phenomenon have been studied in recent years, little is known about its internal dynamic and, more importantly, social media’s role in its overall functioning. This article offers an in-depth look at the #ggi tweeting dynamic between 22 April 2012 and 31 July 2012. Specifically, a hybrid quantitative and qualitative content analysis approach is used to determine in what way, to what extent, and for what reasons different Quebec political players were involved in this protest movement. Moreover, this article explores the links between traditional media and citizens’ discourse on Twitter. The findings suggest that the former informed the latter as protesters frequently used news reports or commentary to support their positions. From a broader perspective, the findings provide a new look at political tweeting as few scholars have conducted a qualitative analysis of political tweets.

Vincent Raynauld

Papers

The Power of Political Image: Justin Trudeau, Instagram, and Celebrity Politics:

Tweet, Click, Vote: Twitter and the 2010 Ottawa Municipal Election

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

Political Protest 2.0: Social Media and the 2012 Student Strike in the Province of Quebec, Canada

Political protest 2.0: Social media and the 2012 student strike in the province of Quebec, Canada