Doing politics on Twitter: cohesion and
fragmentation during electoral
campaigns
Jennifer Veldman MA thesis
New Media and Digital Culture Department: Media studies University of Amsterdam 03-07-2014
Supervisor: dhr. Erik Borra, MSc. Second reader: dhr. prof. dr. R.A. Richard Rogers
2
Inhoudsopgave
1. Abstract ... 4
2. Introduction ... 4
3. Theoretical framework ... 6
3.1 From static web-campaigning in Web 1.0 to personal social media campaigning in Web 2.0 .... 6
3.2 New media digital research ... 10
3.3 Twitter ... 10
3.4 Social capital ... 14
4. Background to the field of study ... 17
4.1 Dutch government ... 18
4.1.1 House of Representatives and Senate ... 18
4.2 Selecting parties ... 18
4.3 Short history of education politics in the Netherlands. ... 19
5. Statement of the problem and hypothesis ... 20
5.1 Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning ... 23
6. Methodology ... 27 6.1 Data collection ... 27 6.2 Measurements ... 28 6.3 DMI-TCAT ... 29 6.4 Queries education ... 30 7. Results ... 32 7.1 Activity ... 32 7.2 Retweets ... 35 7.3 Mentions ... 38 7.4 Retweets education ... 40 8. Discussion ... 42
9. Summary and conclusion ... 44
10. Acknowledgements ... 45
11. References ... 45
11.1 Academic references ... 45
11.2 Websites and other references ... 46
12. Appendices ... 49
3
12.2 List of Twitter accounts ... 51 12.3 Appendix 3: Categorization mentions. ... 52
4
1. Abstract
On 29 March 2014 the municipal elections took place in the Netherlands. While there is much research on Twitter activity during electoral campaigning there is little to be found on whether it used for cohesive campaigning. This thesis will study the retweeting and mentioning behavior of the politician that are a member of the top six parties at the Dutch House of Representatives. With this it will provide a content analysis of small data samples on the issue of education to create a context of the shared tweets. The question of the thesis asks whether Dutch candidates of the House of Representatives use Twitter as a tool to make electoral campaigning more coherent within a single party by actively engaging with the tweets of colleague candidates. With the results of this study this answer can be positively answered as party affiliation seems to play a role in the retweeting and mentioning behavior. The content analysis also gives a hint of a strong tendency of engaging tweeting behavior that is related to the elections.
2. Introduction
On 29 March 2014 the municipal elections took place in the Netherlands. As a result of these elections one of the two top parties seated in the House of Representatives (PvdA) lost a lot of popularity during these elections while one of the smaller ones (CDA) gained popularity and has won a victory. Local parties turned out to be most popular during these elections. Changes within popularity of parties and election results is a given. From a political and social science perspective these changes could be explained by changes in politics as well as changes in society. In order to win votes, parties will be campaigning during the months and weeks upcoming to the elections. Special strategies are made to make these elections most beneficial for the party. The use of social media in campaigning has become more popular. Supporters argue that the use of the Web helps avoid traditional media and journalists and gives the possibility for direct communication with the potential voter. The use of individual profiles on platforms such as Twitter however, does brings up the question whether autonomous and individual campaigning does the party harm or not (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). By studying Twitter behavior of the politicians of the top six parties at the Dutch House of Representatives during the campaign of the municipal elections 2014, the cohesiveness of the strategy will be determined in this research. Although using individual accounts for campaigning could result in a more fragmented campaign on Twitter they could also be used to make it more cohesive. If politicians will be working together in support of their party. To study the cohesion between these politicians the following research question will be the focus of this research: Do Dutch candidates of the House of Representatives use Twitter as a tool to make the electoral campaigns coherent within a single party by actively engaging with the posts of colleagues candidates?
5
By using the Twitter capture and analysis tool DMI-TCAT retweeting and mention behavior will be studied as the form of engagement on the social media platform. Although this type of behavior does show that there could be engagement between the parties, it does not say what the nature of the engagement entails. Therefore a small sample content analysis will be done to study whether the shared messages can be related to the context and support of electoral campaigning. With this research the thesis will contribute to the field of digital methods by using a relatively new tool DMI-TCAT and arguing that, in order to support a question of social behavior on Twitter, content analysis is an important method to create context to quantitative data.
This thesis will start with a theoretical framework (chapter 2) with first a short history of online campaigning moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in chapter 2.1. In this section the theory of creating equal chances for small and big parties by going online is rejected by studies that shows that online relations are a reflection of offline relations (Vergeer, Hermans and Cunha 2013, 132). The struggles of adjusting campaigning strategies to the use of internet will be discussed here as well. After arguing the difference between the ‘digitized’ and ‘natively digital’ (Rogers 2009, 5) (section 2.2) section 2.3 a short history of Twitter and former research on the platform is covered. The history of Twitter will provide a background to the symbols that are used as applications on the platform. And how these symbols subsequently became a foundation for Twitter research. The last part of chapter 2 deals with the reasons and challenges for politicians to use Twitter for campaigning. Bridging social capital is found more often in the political field because it is a trigger for political participation (Hofer and Aubert 2013).
Chapter 3 provides a background to the field of study. In this chapter a short explanation of the workings of the Dutch government and House of Representatives is given in order to help the reader better understand Dutch elections. Hereafter there will be a short explanation of the parties that have been selected for this research as well as the choice for the issue of education for the content analysis.
Following the background to the field of study, chapter 4 will cover the statement of the problem, the studies of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) and Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014) which will form the inspiration for this research. At the same time these studies are presented the research question and the hypotheses will be formulated in section 4.1. Methodology of the research will be explained and justified in chapter 5. Data collection, measurements and queries will be set out in different sections within this chapter. Section 5.3 also gives an explanation of the tool DMI-TCAT that is used for capturing data as well for data analysis. With this tool, amongst others, retweeting and mention behavior is analyzed.
Chapter 6 will be an overview of the results per measurement. These results will be discussed and compared to the researches of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) and Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer
6
(2014) as well as to theories that have been discussed in the theoretical framework. It is found that, possibly due to the growing establishment of Twitter, analysis of micro-blogging activity, or tweeting behavior gives different results in the research of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) and the one presented here. There is also a different result around mention behavior when comparing the research of Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014) with this research. Although party affiliation seems to play a big role in retweeting behavior Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014) argue that it is less with mentioning behavior while the study presented here shows party affiliation in mentioning behavior as well. The thesis will end with a summary and conclusion.
3. Theoretical framework
3.1 From static web-campaigning in Web 1.0 to personal social media
campaigning in Web 2.0
Every new media has brought changes to the control of political campaigning, moving from party to politician every time a step further (Foot and Schneider 2006, 7). The introduction of the World Wide Web provided political parties with a way to present themselves in an unfiltered way to the public even more than previous media. By posting messages directly online without the interference of traditional media and journalists the parties do not have to worry about an opinionated (other than their own) reports. Traditional media such as television and radio and journalists that present the articles form a mediator between the party and the audience that will present a bias following standard lengths of messages and views for which the media itself stands. For parties in a democratic state or country with a dual party system the interference of traditional media and journalism forms less of a problem to political campaigning than countries with a multiparty system (Vergeer, Hermans and Cunha 2013, 132). It is likely that both sides of the two parties in a dual party system will be presented as opposing views, thus covering both parties. In a multiparty system the difference between some of the parties will be more nuanced than others and the chance that all parties are represented in a similar amount of words and time will decrease with the increase of the number of competing parties. For a long time there was a common believe among politicians that these smaller and/or less popular parties could make themselves visible by using the Internet and thus not be overshadowed by the bigger and/or more popular parties (Vergeer, Hermans and Cunha 2013, 132). Leaving more equal opportunities for campaigning and visibility to both new and smaller parties against the big and popular parties. However recent research illustrates that offline (power or popularity) relations are mirrored in the online web sphere and that the patterns of small
7
parties being overshadowed by bigger parties hardly change when they turn to online political campaigning (Lilleker 2011, 197).
Cormode and Krishnamurthy (2008) discuss the shift in structure of the World Wide Web from ‘Web 1.0’ to ‘Web 2.0’. In the year 2004 the term ‘Web 2.0’ was introduced indicating that there was a change in the setting of the World Wide Web and automatically naming the previous setting as ‘Web 1.0’. The differences in the Web settings can be found in technological factors when we look at the scripts and presentational technologies, structural considering the purpose of the websites and sociological where Web 2.0 has a focus on networks of friends. The most important difference in the change of Web structure is that where the content of Web 1.0 was created by the manager of the website on Web 2.0 websites or platforms are a setting where content is created by use and users (Cormode and Krishnamurthy 2008).
First with the rise of the Internet the campaigning strategy had to be adjusted in order to be able to use the Internet for promotional benefit. Foot and Schneider define web campaigning as: ‘…those activities with political objectives that are manifested in, inscribed on, and enabled through the World Wide Web.’ (Foot and Schneider 2006, 4). Even though what we then called the ‘World Wide Web’ has now become a lot more complicated than the Web 1.0 with websites and email platforms. In this thesis a line will be drawn from this definition of web-campaigning on Web 1.0 towards web-campaigning on Web 2.0, which is formed out of social media platforms and other applications. The execution of the ‘activities with political objectives’ may have changed from the maintenance of a website to the continual sending of short messages with the extension of the Web with social media platforms, the description still applies to the new execution of activities. The same could be said for the part of being ‘manifested in, inscribed on, and enabled through the World Wide Web’ when it is considered that the Web 2.0 is more fragmented by social media and other online applications as the World Wide Web.
Foot and Schneider (2006) argue that campaigning strategies changed with the increase of new technologies. The use of telephones, radio and television pushed campaigning towards sociotechnical networks (7), a term that they define in a citation of Lamb, Sawyer, and Kling 2000 as ‘an interrelated and interdependent milieu of people, their social and work practices, the norms of use, hardware and software, the support systems that aid users, and the maintenance systems that keep their ICTs operating’ (15). This term is used to emphasize interconnection instead of separation between social and technological systems of human behavior in communication and organization (15). To understand practices and discourse within e-campaigning we do not only have to consider social behavior but bear in mind that implementation of technological systems is part of a change in discourse. A shift from party oriented campaigning towards a candidate based campaigning strategy is partly influenced by the change in social systems as well as a change in technological systems. The rise of the Internet provided politicians with tools to communicate
8
directly with the voter in an entire country without the necessity to going out on the streets and led to a change in campaigning strategies. Online campaigning, however, is based on, and cannot do without, a corresponding offline campaigning strategy in order to be efficient. The online strategies are formed out of the electoral structures that have been built up, evaluated and adjusted over time. On top of that, in order to get potential voters to engage on a website or on other platforms, the online space has to be promoted offline because offline engagement will not be achieved by solely being active online (Castells 2009, Foot and Schneider 2006).
The first online campaigns can be traced back to Usenet in 1979 with an intensive increase in use of email, bulletin boards and other Internet applications within seven years (Foot and Schneider 2006, 8). With the more extensive use of Internet applications, online campaigning moved towards a strategy that is designed towards more personal campaigning by, amongst others, the use of personal websites. From the beginning of implementing the Web into campaigning strategies, the risk of fragmentation of the campaign started to appear. The websites that were created during campaigns were both for a party as well as personal platforms for individual political candidates. Although these websites were seen by the candidates as a new instrument to communicate directly with potential voters (Druckman 2010) the first websites were merely informational, copying without editing information of offline material such as flyers (Foot and Schneider 2006). This lead to a critique on the early websites for being static, too informational without actual communication, and no persuasion of the voter but instead one way directed communication on a website (Gibson 2004, Lilleker 2011). Perhaps the staticity was due to the fact that for the first attempts for online campaigning, rather than having an online campaign strategy, just being on the web was seen as online campaigning (Foot and Schneider 2006). The being present on the Web was seen as more important than having an actual strategy. The lack of a good online campaign strategy with the first attempts to web campaigning could be explained by the fact that, even though politicians did see the necessity of their online presence, they had no clue of how to use the web in their own promotional benefit (Gibson 2004). The parties with the most informative websites turned out to be the parties that were coherently the most active in the offline election campaigning (Lilleker 2011, 206). The struggle of how to effectively use the Web has moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in a struggle of how to use the new applications such as the overload of social media platforms effectively.
Even though the struggle continues, Web 2.0 has created a revival in the use of the Web as a medium for political promotion, changing the Web as a mass information medium to a networked community medium (Vergeer, Hermans and Cunha 2013, 10). Instead of being seen as a mass medium, social media platforms are spaces that are empty until users generate content on it (Vergeer, Hermans and Cunha 2013). In the networked community it is possible that the party itself no longer plays the most significant part in communication but instead the politicians themselves have the possibility to step up and engage
9
more personally in the conversation with the potential voter. What could be a consequence of this is that politicians will use the platforms for promotion that serves the party as well as their own promotional benefit, making party campaigning more fragmented. On the other hand, in Ireland the use of individual politician websites did appear to lead to more votes for the specific politicians (Sudulich and Wall 2010). Researching the most effective factor of predicting outcome and popularity incumbency is seen as an accessible basis of vote choice (Druckman 2010, 90) or the popularity of a website (Gibson 2004). Popularity of a politician has the clearest results when we look at the numbers of the election outcomes. Although it should be noted that these numbers are under influence of so many factors that to the authors knowledge there has not yet been a model created to calculate the factors that influence the outcomes properly.
Online campaigning is increasingly seen as an important factor in the political process. In 2003-4 Howard Dean designed a presidential campaign for Barack Obama that focused more on the online sphere than ever before. The success of this campaign proved that the generation that grew up with the internet was now of age and internet had become a mainstream medium of communication (Castells 2009, 389). Followed by the success of this new strategy internet, within particular social media platforms have become more a part of electoral campaigning over the years. In the Dutch political system over eighty percent of the politicians of the bigger parties in the House of Representatives have used Twitter as a tool within the municipal campaigns (see the section 6.1 ‘result’ activity). Foot and Schneider (2006) present four forms of strategies for using online media during electoral campaigns. They start with the goal of informing the potential voter so that the voter will start involving himself to establish interaction with the party. Subsequently the party will try to expand his public by connecting. Via the voter that is already involved the party will try to build a bridge to the network of the involved voter and mobilizing involved participants in order to activate them to become active themselves in recruiting more voters (Foot and Schneider 2006, 22-3).
The internet has provided many changes in online campaigning that appeared to be both challenging and helpful for new strategies of political electoral campaigning. Even though opinionated journalism could be avoided online Web design had to be tested and restructured. The change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 created opportunities for more personal campaigning through the use of social media platforms. The problems of static and one-way communication website which were critiqued during the campaigning on the Web 1.0 will not disappear but rather increase and evolve with the shift towards Web 2.0 or further evolvements. Political strategists have to keep track of the changes on the internet while adjusting campaign strategies to the developments online.
10
3.2 New media digital research
The possibility of communicating online does not only have advantages for the politician or other actors. It benefits academic studies as well. In regard of online communication, discourse and the availability of new tools for methodology, an entire new field of research has emerged called mediastudies. This is the study to which this thesis will contribute. Within new media studies it is important to make a distinction between what Richard Rogers (2009) calls the ‘digitized’ and the ‘natively digital’ (5). The definitions set out the different origins of the objects, content, devices and environments that stem from the new medium and those that have been integrated to them (Rogers 2009, 5). Within this line of thought new media studies do not simply provide research that is done by using more traditional offline methodology for online research. Instead digital methods, used for mediastudies, studies computing techniques and how these can be used for research (Rogers 2009, 6-7, Niederer 2014). Internet itself becomes a source of research next to being a studied object (Rogers 2009, 7). Drawing this towards the research in this thesis research on the platform of Twitter can be done by using the available natively digital objects provided by the platform such as tracking hashtags, mentions or retweets.
3.3 Twitter
The internet makes finding like-minded people easy. Social media platforms can function as place where people can connect and communicate with one another. These groups or networks evolve originally around interest rather than friendship, family or even business related ties. In politics these groups with common interests can be targeted by politicians in their campaigning. In the long and expanding list of social media platforms Twitter can call itself the largest micro-blogging platform and one of the four largest social media platforms (next to Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn) in the western and English speaking part of the World Wide Web (Park 2013, NOS 19-04-2014). Because of the popularity of this platform, and the use of symbols that connect messages to each other (this will be expanded later in this section) Twitter provides data that is relatively easy to be used for research.
As described in the preceding paragraph at the end of new media and digital research the use of symbols such as hashtags, mentions and retweets make a good foundation for methodology in digital studies. Although these symbols are natively digital they were not part of the social media platform from its beginning. They implemented when users started to use them to link messages. A short history of the founding of Twitter will give insights into the original purpose of the platform and how users have changed the discourse on the platform. This will also tell how the symbols are used and create an understanding of how the technologies of the platform can be used as a methodology for study.
Twitter was founded in 2006. Although Jack Dorsey is clearly named as the initiator of Twitter several texts about the history and foundation of Twitter mention four other names as co-founders not
11
synchronously. These men are named Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass (Bellis n.d., McArthur n.d., Sarno 2009) and all seem to play a part in the foundation of the platform but are not all mentioned in every description of the history of Twitter. Of these four people only Jack Dorsey is still active in the board of directors or executive team (About Twitter 2014).
Initially the platform was set up in order to keep friends updated of each other doings with short messages. The name of the platform directly suggests the intention of the founders with the use of the platform. The name ‘Twttr’ and later Twitter was initiated by Noah Glass and derived from a dictionary description of ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’ (Bellis n.d., McArthur n.d., Sarno 2009). Twitter was supposed to be a platform for ‘inconsequential information’ that was send out in ‘short bursts’. Within this stems the maximum length of the messages. Based on the maximum length of 160 characters in single SMS-texts Twitter messages have the content of maximum 140 characters plus a maximum of 20 characters that can be used for a username.
The idea of keeping each other updated lead to a message server where was able to read all the messages that are posted. Today there is also the possibility to set privacy settings thus so one can block his posts to everybody except ones followers. There is also the possibility to follow someone without being followed by that person. Other than platforms such as Facebook ‘friendship’ does not have to be reciprocated. Twitter users are as such part of an undirected social network. The step to following someone, or being followed is smaller because it is not required (although perhaps appreciated) to return the favor.
Uses within the Twitter platform today are those of replies, retweets, and linking messages by using hashtags. The use of these will be explained later. Although this now seems normal discourse on Twitter these applications were implemented by Twitter only when the users started to use hashtags and mentions to be able to link messages to each other by using corresponding symbols (McArthur n.d.). The symbols or codes are expressed within the reply, retweet or mentioning of a person or subject by using the hashtag (#), the @mention (@) or the code for retweeting (RT). Hashtags are used to group similar tweets and searching for it on Twitter will bring up all recent tweets that include the hashtag (McFedries 2013). The linking is done by using the symbol # that precedes a keyword or abbreviations which make it possible to follow all the tweets with the same hashtag and as such follow a discussion (Bruns and Stieglitz 2013). Replying is discuss a tweet (message) that was posted by another user. To link the reply to the original message the twitter-user can click on the reply button beneath the original message, which will create a direct link between the original tweet and the reply. Another way of replying to a tweet, or profile is by mentioning the profile by using the @ followed by the username of that profile. This is also called an @mention. The reply or mention is used to engage in a conversation on Twitter (Sousa, Sarmento and Rodrigues 2010, 63). Retweeting on Twitter is the equivalent of sharing on Facebook or mail forwarding.
12
Boyd, Golder and Lotan (2010) argue that retweeting can be used for multiple reasons. Two examples are that one can bring people in a particular thread of conversation without actively participating or when being retweeted a feeling of shared conversational context takes place (Boyd, Golder and Lotan 2010, 1). In the broader sense it could be seen as a means for copying and broadcasting information. These retweets can be copied either as the original message, or embedded within a new message. Normally the tweet will display the original tweet, however because the character limit holds, the last few characters could be replaced by three dots when the character limit of the retweet would be exceeded. Retweeted messages are recognized by the symbol [RT: ] but the act of forwarding a tweet can also be done by clicking on the retweeting button.
The maximum length of a tweet makes Twitter a medium that can be used to bring specific news to attention without elaborating on details on the platform. Twitter becomes a ‘menu’ for followers to choose on which subject they want to learn or receive more information. For parties and politicians Twitter can be used the same way. They present a menu of opinions and newsflashes, presenting the recipes in the most attractive way for the potential voter, which will give the voter the choice of whether or not to try them. The undirected friendship model of Twitter makes these menus more accessible to the voter. Because there is no reciprocity in followers or ‘friendships’ it is easier for users to follow one another, or to be followed (Hofer and Aubert, 2013, 2136). The absence of the acceptance of the follower (or ‘friendship’) requests makes Twitter profiles more accessible than platforms where users have to wait to be accepted as a ‘friend’.
Former research focused on the possibility to predict elections looking at the Twitter or other online activity during the elections (Foot and Schneider 2006, Paßmann, Boeschoten, and Schäfer 2014, Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). Foot and Schneider (2006) focused their research on campaigning on websites. They studied how the use of the Web reflects on the campaigning process (5). Analyzing various websites during the elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004 in the United States (5) they conclude that the Web has changed power structure and organization culture within campaigns (195). Of these changes Foot and Schneider find the mind setting of the importance of being present on the Web perhaps the most fundamental change in campaigning (195). Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) researched what political aspects influences the use of Twitter by politicians as a campaign tool and what is the effectiveness of activities on Twitter in gaining votes in the European elections in the Netherlands (abstract). They study this by making several divisions and putting these against each other. Further elaboration on this research can be found in the ‘statement of the problem’ section. By downloading data from Twitter’s API they analyzed the tweets mostly for activity. They concluded that the Twitter network size seemed to be a
13
limited indicator for voting outcome (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). A third Twitter research of Paßmann, Boeschoten, and Schäfer (2014) also focuses on Dutch elections and German citizens. The focus of their research is not on the prediction of election results but on how ‘[…] successful circulation of Twitter relies heavily on pervasive mutual indebtedness.’ (332). With quantitative analysis they map activity on Twitter of amongst other Dutch politicians and put this next to a qualitative analysis of how German users think Twitter communication works (333). They conclude that the circulation of Twitter communication is co-shaped by gift reciprocity and maintenance of social relationships (341). The sub-conclusion that Dutch politicians are most affiliated to their own party when it comes to retweeting (340) will be confirmed in this thesis.
Vergeer, Hermans and Sams pose very briefly the question of whether online campaigning and the use of social media benefits creates a personalization of the campaign and whether this will do the party’s strategy harm or not (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). With one line they suggest that ‘a lack of restraint’ and ‘slips of the tongue’ will probably cause more harm than good. However, a clear answer to what the introduction of social media in the strategy of electoral campaigning does for the coherence or fragmentation is not given. The answer to this question could help campaign managers adjust strategies towards that what will be the most beneficial to the party. In academic terms this is an important question to answer as well as it provides answers to the online social behavior of politicians and if and how they cooperate with each other to make their party campaign a success. For the field of digital methods the cooperation between politicians is important as well as it shows what sort of applications on Twitter are used to create a cohesive campaign. How are the applications of retweeting and replying or mentioning used and for which purposes?
Although Twitter is a relatively new platform (not yet ten years old) several Twitter research strategies have already been developed such as Twitter’s in-house research projects, data acquiring through resellers, online analytics platforms, ad hoc or project based custom capturing tools or open-source capturing software (Borra and Rieder 2014). However, these projects have the risks of high costs, relying on custom programming and/or limited in data export or analytical capabilities (264-5). The two open-source capturing software tools of 140kit and yourTwapperKeeper (yTK) seemed better solutions with control but with less need for technical skills. Both tools closed down in 2011 when Twitter changed its terms of services (265). However, all strategies and methods (including the one used in this research) are influenced by ‘[…] the various technical, legal, logistical and ethical stumbling blocks […]’ (264). Ethical and legal problems could lead to a computational science that is dominated by companies and the government. In the academic field this would lead to research that cannot be checked or reproduced (Lazer et al. 2009, 271). Opposed to social science, digital methods, such as when a good Twitter dataset
14
is available, can give insights into social communication and behavior on a large scale rather than of a few dozens of people (Lazer et al. 2009, 722).
Because the Dutch House of Representatives has only 150 members, this study will not be in the extend of the millions of people which are named in Lazer et all. (2009, 722). However, digital methods does provide a means to study larger datasets of tweets of the more than half of the politicians in the House of Representatives. Researching electoral campaigning in particular would most likely require data that provide information on the sort of messages that politicians post, to whom they address themselves, who reads and responds to these messages and whether these messages have influence on voting behavior.
The author of this thesis does not believe that Twitter as one of many factors can predict the outcomes of elections. However these studies can be used for comparison of the methodology and results of the use of Twitter by politicians during electoral campaigning. With help of the results of these studies the hypotheses and research question will be presented in the paragraph of statement of the problem.
3.4 Social capital
In a multi-party representational democracy campaigns are the main event that lead to the actual election. In order to be voted on the parties and politicians have to present themselves to potential voters and convince this group that they are the best suited to govern the country. By targeting a group of potential voters that can be convinced to vote for the particular party politicians can create social capital that could help them win votes. Hofer and Aubert (2013) distinguish two forms of social capital. Even though they recall that social capital can be obtained both offline and online, these forms of social capital are explained in the terms of Twitter relations. Twitter also forms the basis of their research. Bonding social capital is found in directed friendship models. Rather than being mere informational the messages in bonding social capital are characterized by emotional support and solidarity. In their research Hofer and Aubert associate bonding social capital with the number of followers and located it in small familiar groups. In the political environment bridging social capital is found more often. These user profiles create bridges between other users that are less likely to be like-minded and spread information and solidarity. The profiles which perceive bridging social capital are more likely to bring forth social and political participation. Instead of the number of followers, the profiles are recognized by the number of users they follow. This number of followees influences the outward looking of a user and having the feeling of being part of a large group of different users (Hofer and Aubert 2013, 2139). This is what campaigning politicians require to acquire: an outward look to understand what is occurring and listen to the people in the streets and to be part of a larger group of people to lure them to the voting booths.
15
Having gained social capital politicians on social media platforms can communicate personally with their followers through the entire country in a bottom-up approach (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). On Facebook and Twitter politicians can communicate with the voters in a direct way, for example to answer questions, explain obscurities and persuade the citizen to go vote and preferably to their party. As discussed before these social media platforms make individual campaigning on the one hand easier as there is no intervention of journalists or presenters, and on the other it is harder because the lack of boundaries force the politician to use new ways of creating identity. Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) research what political aspects influences the use of Twitter by politicians as a campaigning tool and what is the effectiveness activities on Twitter in gaining votes (abstract). The question to whether the activities are creating a coherent campaign strategy is not answered and will be the focus of this research.
Reasons for using Twitter as a tool for campaigning can be found in the possibility of direct communication with the voter. A citizen who feels personally addressed could more likely become a social and political participant than a citizen who feels ignored by the government. The close communication makes the politician able to show empathy towards the potential voter and issues that have not been mentioned by the House of Representatives but that stem from what is discussed in society. On the other hand, with instant and often spontaneous communication, campaigning is exposed to the risk of emotional messages. Because digital technology and social media are everywhere one goes at any time posts on social media are frequently spontaneous and an outburst from a primal emotion (Castells 2009). Even for a trained politician it is difficult to avoid a slip of the tongue and risking to stain the party campaign. These messages can be blown out of proportion when the audience amplifies them by for example massively retweeting a particular post.
Another issue that challenges the cohesion of coherence campaigning is that of the possibility of preferential voting in the Netherlands. This means that when a candidate politician receives more votes he will be higher in the rankings in the party, even though he was lower on the list before elections (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams). Between candidates who are on the edge of becoming part of the House of Representatives this could lead to a competition. This competition could lead to a conflict in the use of Twitter as a tool for campaigning. On the one hand the candidate would support his party while on the other hand he would try to be more successful than his colleagues in order to gain a seat in the House of Representatives. This could make one wonder if politicians would rather work together or have a more egocentric focus on social media platforms such as Twitter. This second aim would lead easier to a fragmentation of a party towards personal campaigning with a possibility of undermining electoral campaigning and results.
16
The country of subject in this thesis is the Netherlands. In this country there is little interest in the elections when it comes to other than national elections for the House of Representatives (Vergeer, Hermans, Sams 2013). This interest is even more decreasing when it comes to municipal or European elections of which the first is the type that is analyzed in this thesis. The politicians that are candidates for municipal or Europarlemental elections are not part of the Dutch House of Representatives. Rather, they are local with municipal elections and are part of the national parties when we are talking about European Representatives. However because of the lack of engagement of the citizens in other elections than the national ones, during the municipal campaigns Dutch national parties and members of parliament join the electoral campaigns. When we are looking at the results of the municipal elections one can find that even though campaigning was done nationally as well the turn-out of the voters was very low. What we see as well is that these national campaigns reflected nationally on the local parties, positive in case of the D66 and CDA who won a great victory but very negative in case of the PvdA who has lost popularity during these elections (Poort and Verschoor 2014). Because these national campaigns had such influence on the local voting these politicians will be presented as the subject of this research.
The theoretical framework started in section 2.1 with the benefits of the internet as a tool for campaigning such as the avoidance of the interference of traditional media and journalists. This section was followed by an explanation of how the development of every new medium asks for new and development of existing campaign strategies (Foot and Schneider 2006). In section 2.2 the internet as a tool for academic research was discussed. Within the so-called mediastudies it is important to make a distinction between the ‘digitized’ and the ‘natively digital’ or rather, that what has been migrated from the offline sphere to the Web and that what is ‘born’ or created digital (Rogers 2009, 5).
Section 2.3 moved towards the research of Twitter. Twitter is because of its popularity and use of symbols a platform that provides data that are relatively easy to use for research. This platform will be the subject of this study. There has been previous research that has focused on web-campaigning and Twitter as a tool for (Dutch) elections. Previous studies on the internet and Twitter in campaigning by Foot and Schneider (2006), Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) and Paßmann, Boeschoten, and Schäfer (2014) and Twitter research strategies have been discussed in this section.
In section 2.4 a campaign strategy when using social media by bonding and bridging social capital have been discussed of which bridging social capital would be found more often in the political environment. The use of Twitter however, provides both a more direct connection between the politician and the voter as a threat to coherent campaigning.
17
4. Background to the field of study
With inspiration of the articles of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) and Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014) the hypotheses for this research has been set up. Using Twitter as a tool for campaigning could lead to some challenges for the party and politicians. One of these challenges is that of preferential voting (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). This could lead to a dilemma for the politicians when they have to choose between campaigning for their party or for their place in the House of Representatives against a party colleague. Running an electoral campaign online provokes the risk of creating an incoherent party campaign. The party campaign then becomes fragmented with the risk of losing the credibility of the steadfastness of the party.
This research will point out if the embedding of social media in electoral campaigning makes the campaigning more fragmented or coherent. The research will focus on the top six parties in the House of Representatives. The exact parties and justification of the selected these parties can be found in appendix 1. Although the time frame that is covered in this research covers the municipal elections in this thesis a focus on national politicians and parties is chosen. With over four hundred municipalities (Kiesraad n.d.) where in each municipality local parties are joining the elections the scaling would be too large in the means of differing data and too small because all these local parties would be covered less on Twitter than the national parties. Furthermore research has proven that municipal elections are mostly about national instead of local occurrences and issues (Boogers, van Ostaaijen and Slagter 2010).
The last part of this research will go in depth with a content analysis. For this analysis the frame is limited to one debating issue during the campaigns. The issue of education is one of the issues that was nationally debated during the municipal campaigns. These campaigns were focused on the transmission of several governmental responsibilities to the responsibilities of the municipalities (Gemeenteraads-verkiezingen 2014 n.d., Thema Nieuwsbrief Gemeenteraads(Gemeenteraads-verkiezingen 2014 n.d). Fitting education (passend onderwijs) is one of the responsibilities that is transmitted. (Thema Nieuwsbrief Gemeenteraadsverkiezingen 2014 n.d). During these elections economy and labor, or rather unemployment, where the most fiercely debated issues because of the consequences of the financial crisis in 2008. Education as a source for increasing knowledge and skills was one of the issues that formed a base of these bigger issues. The connection to the issues of economy and labor as well as the transfer of the responsibility of fitting education from the House of Representatives to the municipals made education another much debated issue.
Before starting with methodology and hypotheses an overview of the Dutch government and a short history of politics on education will be provided. This will help explain the content of tweets as well as the cooperation between specific parties.
18
4.1 Dutch government
4.1.1 House of Representatives and Senate
Even though democratic countries are not a rarity in the world, every democracy has its own characteristics. As such Dutch parliament works as no other in the world and a short explanation of the parliament will give a better insight into the parties and how they relate to each other.
Dutch parliament is divided in the Senate (Eerste Kamer) and the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer). The Senate is chosen by provincial councils instead of directly by the Dutch citizens. Their task, apart from smaller tasks is mainly based on the adoption and decline of bills that are submitted by the House of Representatives. Even though the Senate is not allowed to amend a bill, to become a law the bill has to be adopted by the Senate (Tweede Kamer n.d.a). The House of Representatives is chosen by the Dutch citizens according to elections which are normally held every four year. Anomalies occur when a Cabinet falls before the end of its term without the prospect of the formation of a new Cabinet. This part of the parliament discusses the making of bills during committee meetings and plenary sittings (Tweede Kamer n.d.b). The influence of Dutch citizens on the making of bills and other activities within the House of Representatives is only during the elections when it is possible to vote for any accepted party as a representative. After the elections a Cabinet is formed out of the parties that together hold the majority of the seats in the House of Representatives and are willing to cooperate. Usually the largest party or parties are part of this if they are willing to cooperate within the Cabinet. The cooperation of the so-called coalition parties should make it possible that these parties together are able to pass on bills. The other parties in the House of Representatives are less eager to support the Cabinet and form the opposition parties and usually form a more critical note against the Cabinet (Tweede Kamer n.d.c).
4.2 Selecting parties
The parties that are represented in this research are selected because of their position in the House of Representatives at the time of writing this thesis. Results of the municipal elections show that over fifty percent of those who are entitled to vote evoked to this right (ANP 2014, Remie 2014). Nationally SP turned out to be most popular with CDA following. For PvdA the elections turned out to be destructive (Poort and Verschoor 2014). Even though municipal and Europarlemental elections are held in 2014, the House of Representatives of Dutch Parliament (House of Representatives) is halfway its four year reign and chosen two years before the actual time of writing. Currently the number of parties in the House of Representatives is changing because of disagreements within the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV-freedom party). Members that disagreed with the party leader have split off of the party and because they hold their seats in parliament they have separated from the PVV and started their own parties. At the moment of writing this means that there are fourteen parties represented in the House of Representatives. The
19
parties that have been selected for this research are the six best represented parties in the House of Representatives. The two best represented parties hold over 52 percent of the seats, while the third, fourth, fifth and sixth hold over 34 percent of the seats (Tweede kamer der Staten Generaal n.d.d). The parties that were not included hold less than fourteen percent of the seats, which makes the justification to make the split at the top six parties.
4.3 Short history of education politics in the Netherlands.
For the content analysis the dataset will be reduced to the issue of education. Education (onderwijs) has in the Netherlands always been an important issue in politics. Where economy and social issues are the foundation of a state, education is one of the foundation stones of these themes. During the municipal elections the issue of education was fiercely debated. A big part of this was due to the fact that part of the system is changed which means that a number of issues that were previously regulated nationally by the House of Representatives will be transferred as a responsibility of the municipals. Education, apart from constitution, is one of these issues. This covers regulation of education on the level of elementary school to universities and everything in between. It also forms the foundation of creating a stronger economy and reducing unemployment by increasing knowledge and skills. From news sources such as NRC Next and NOS.nl and national debates held on the television show called Pauw and Witteman three main themes around education during these elections were subtracted. The first was about the integration of so-called ‘black’ and ‘white’ schools. This debate involved amongst others if parents should be forced to put their children to appointed school to stimulate mixed classes of natives (white) and immigrants (black people). The second theme was about labor and economy to stimulate production, the growth of economy and workplaces. The last theme was focused on the strictness of rules on schools after national finals were illegally spread just before they should have been taken. We will how they return in the Twitter data in the results section.
The Netherlands has a history of immigrants attracted as a temporary workforce but instead staying and importing their families. In 2013 the Netherlands inhabited over 13 million native Dutch people against a little over 1.5 million non-native Dutch people of which the majority originated from Morocco, Surinam and Turkey (CBS Statline 2013). Apart from that in January 2014 there were over 1.5 thousand people that asked for Dutch asylum. The foreign culture, habits and religion these immigrants bring with them lead to discussions such as discrimination and eviction of the Netherlands. These issue are brought up in the theme of education in the means of knowledge deficiencies (such as language) when coming to
20
school and educating children not to discriminate each other. In this extend the party D66 (see below) also brings up the issue of same-sex love affairs1.
Another issue is economy and the labor market. All parties agree that education is a driving force of Dutch economy. Educating society to do a profession or academic research will improve the quality of the product and as such create a higher economical and export value. Product export does not only attract buyers but also corporations that want to invest in the process of the making of the product and innovation. However, what has always been an issue, especially with the current economic crisis, is the question in to what extend and in what way can there be financial aid. Since 2012 there has been a fierce discussion about the aid to students. Opposing parties are discussing to what extent the student aid exists of a loan and what part and at what height will be a scholarship2.
Another issue that was still mentioned during the political year is that of high school where students hacked into the system to copy and spread finals. This cheating scam became national news when the suspect students were prosecuted and the finals of all the other students of the school were declared invalid and had to be retaken. In the end the school (Ibn Ghaldoun) was closed. In Dutch media this case was extensively covered. This meant that in politics the case had to be covered as well. This lead amongst others to stricter rules about the spread of finals over high schools (NOS 01-2014).
5. Statement of the problem and hypothesis
As mentioned in the first section of this thesis former research on online elections focused on how the Web was used by parties and politicians for electoral campaigning before it was named Web 1.0. With the rise of social media platforms research on online elections moved from a single focus of Web 1.0 to a comparative study of the use of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Much recent research focuses primarily on the use of social media platforms, rather with more intensive research over one platform than broad research over several platforms. Twitter is one of the platforms that is analyzed often in research because of its relatively ease of accessing its data. Amongst the many studies there are few on online electoral campaigning in the Netherlands of which many by communication scientist Maurice Vergeer. European countries are well listed as a subject of studies of online media. Politicians in the parliament of countries such as Norway (Sæbø 2011) and Austria (Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013) have been studied regarding to Twitter behavior but also the Netherlands have been covered by amongst others Paßmann, Boeschoten, and Schäfer (2014) with a study on Dutch electoral campaigning and ‘favoriting’ (expressing approval of
1
For this see the election manifestos of D66 (D66.nl 2012 https://d66.nl/content/uploads/sites/2/2014/05/verkiezingsprogramma-d66-2012-2017).
2
For further explanation (in Dutch) see: (DUO.nl n.d. http://www.duo.nl/particulieren/student-hbo-of-universiteit/studiefinanciering/weten-hoe-het-werkt.asp)
21
a message by clicking on a star) in Germany, and Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) with a study on Dutch European campaigning. All of these countries have a similar democratic system as the Netherlands. The United States of America has been object of study on online electoral campaigning as well. Foot and Schneider (2006) did extensive research on the use of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 for electoral campaigning as well as for fundraising. Although the research in this thesis does not compare the United States with the Netherlands putting the two next to each other does help to understand why Twitter use in electoral campaigning could perhaps be of more importance for Dutch politicians.
In the USA with a dual party system both parties have but one opponent which has either opposing or similar views, in traditional media the views of these parties can be presented opposed to each other. In the Netherlands with a multi-party system the opposing of other parties turns out to be more complicated. There is no duality in views, but parties have to compete with other parties of which some are opposing but others are similar in their views. Dutch parties face the challenge to be subtler in their campaign against the other parties, making sure that they do not undermine their own points of view. Also with a multiplicity of parties traditional media will hardly ever cover all parties in the same article. Smaller parties will sooner face the risk of less media exposure.
A question that rises when studying the use of social media in campaigning is whether individual websites and individual profiles push electoral campaigning from a party oriented strategy towards fragmented strategies. Personalized campaigning strategies could benefit the party in a way that there can be more direct communication between the party(members) and the potential voter. There is a possibility that the audience will feel more taken seriously and more engaged with the party. On the other hand, the higher the number of actors involved creates a bigger risk at fragmenting the uniformity of the campaigning strategy. When more politicians within a party start their personal online campaign there is a higher possibility that the spread messages do not cohere with one another and as such fracturing the solid face of the views of the electoral party campaigns.
The question of whether campaigning through personal benefit the party’s campaigns lies out in the open. Nonetheless, there is little research that enters the field of online cooperation of politicians within a party when it comes to the use social media platforms. Studying the use of social media platforms for online elections, next to the time spent on the platforms and the direct conversation with the potential voter, the potential cooperation within the parties form a significant part of campaigning. This brings us to the question of whether there is such a cooperation or if we can better speak of fragmentized campaigning. Before we can dig into this, this thesis will turn to an overview of former research of electoral campaigns on Twitter.
22
Former research on Twitter mainly focuses on the Twitter use of politicians in the run of elections. Some of these and other researches try to make prediction models for election outcomes by Twitter use, whether this is by the politicians themselves or by their audience as well as the possibility that the use of Twitter has influence on the voter (Lamarre and Suzuki-Lambrecht 2013, Park 2013, Sæbø 2011). Because of the short existence of Twitter research methods and tools for capturing and analyzing activity on this social media platform are new and developing. In former Twitter research this is shown in the methodology and tools. Capturing tweets is mostly done by using Twitter’s REST and streaming APIs (Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013, Golbeck, Grimes and Rogers 2010). The limits of costs, capacity and ethical issues of these API’s influence the amount of tweets that could be collected. Capturing tweets is often done according to a selection of keywords or hashtags that are connected to the research topic (Bruns and Stieglitz 2013) or by retrieving samples of tweets from a specific set of users. These samples could be sub-divided in the six forms of full-size, random, topic, marker-based, graph-based and manual sampling (Rieder 2012). In this research the full-sized sampling will be used for the first hypotheses and topic sampling for the education dataset (this will be elaborated on in the methodology section of this thesis). A tool that was used often for capturing tweets based on keywords in (digital) humanities and social sciences was the open source tool yourTwapperKeeper. Unfortunately it had to close down when Twitter changed its terms of service in 2011 (Borra and Rieder 2014, 265). Although social media is claimed to be the perfect tool for personal and direct communication with the voter, politicians seem to hardly use Twitter in this way. Various studies showed that politicians use social media more for broadcasting their message rather than conversing with the voter (Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013, Golbeck, Grimes and Rogers 2010, Sæbø 2011). Also the theory that internet would help the underdog and change power relations in popularity have been proven wrong by concluding that online popularity rates are mirrored by those offline (Park 2013). Furthermore, it has been found that left-wing parties as well as opposing parties are more active on Twitter, and online media in general (Shaw and Benkler 2012, Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013, Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2013). Could this be the same during the municipal elections in 2014?
This research will investigate the cooperation on Twitter of the six best represented parties in the Dutch House of Representatives in the run towards the municipal elections held on March 19th 2014. These six parties together form a large majority in the House of Representatives. The parties that are not represented in the research had less than a third of the than the smallest of the six parties in the research. This thesis contributes to the field of digital methods by using an online methodology in the form of DMI-TCAT to study the particular part of Twitter behavior of politicians that can prove whether politicians use Twitter to support each other and the party to make a coherent electoral campaign.
23
This thesis seeks to contribute to the study of digital methods in the field of electoral campaigning on online social media platforms, by focusing on Twitter and clearing the field of politic cooperation on Twitter as a campaign strategy. It will not claim to make changes in the field of political science by making claims on campaign strategies. Instead it will focus on the question if Twitter is used for coherence within a campaign, whether this is part of the strategy or not.
Using DMI-TCAT, a tool that has been developed at the University of Amsterdam, this research will not only look at tweets quantitatively, but also qualitatively by doing a content analysis of tweets and comparing Twitter engagement among politicians from the House of Representatives. The combination of these approaches allows not only to create a list of tweets that are linked to each other by retweets, replies or mentions, but also what the content of these tweets are. By exporting all retweeted posts from the selected politicians in a dataset that has been queried on the issue of education, the content of these tweets can be manually searched for supportive or non-supportive messaging. This accumulation of methodology will complement each other and give better insights into whether shared posts are supportive within or between parties when the content shows, for example, party issues. Retweeting messages of activities of colleague politicians could also be seen as supportive. Negative messaging could mean that a message is spread on a party or politician that harms it or him. On the other hand, this could again contribute to a coherent campaign when the content is about a competing politician and forms an argument of the party of the politician that retweeted the post. A third option for content could be that it is not related to the elections, however, due to the fact that the dataset is queried for an political issue the chance for this is small.
5.1 Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning
As the research question is inspired by a single question posed by Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) the hypotheses are based on the conclusion they made as well. Therefore an overview of the research, questions, methodology and results of this article would not be misplaced. Maurice Vergeer, Liesbeth Hermans and Steven Sams researched what ‘political aspects influences [the candidates’] use of Twitter as a campaigning tool’ and ‘the effectiveness of candidates’ activities on Twitter in gaining votes’ (abstract). The question to which this thesis in particular responds is one that is articulated under the header of ‘Politicians’ use of Web 2.0’. The academics question whether allowing the candidates greater autonomy will be beneficial for the party’s strategy and suggest that without the necessary restraint it is easy to ‘cause the party more harm than good’. They concluded amongst others that the adoption rate of Twitter amongst the candidates in 2009 was small. They also suggested that the lower blogging activity of fringe parties could be due to the fact that a lack of previous campaign experience limited the adoption of
24
new campaigning tools such as Twitter (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). Twitter was in this year only three years old. Now, five years later, the platform Twitter has evolved and grown into one of world’s largest social media platforms. Adoption rates of the platform worldwide have increased, including in the Netherlands (Van Bregt 2014) which could possibly indicate a growth in adoption amongst politicians as well. Having now an adoption rate of at least eighty percent could lead to new conclusions and findings.
Another similar research that should be mentioned in this thesis is that of Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014). The first half of their article they describe their research on Twitter behavior by looking at retweeting and replying behavior of political candidates in 2012 (Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer 2014). In addition to this research this thesis will add a short content analysis on retweets within and between parties to create a context of the shared messages.
Inspired by the question of whether the allowance of greater autonomy would lead to more fragmentation and the research of Twitter behavior in replying and retweeting brought up a question of using Twitter as a tool for cooperation. Wondering if politicians use Twitter during electoral campaigning to make party’s campaigning more coherent by actively engaging with each other’s tweets lead to the following research question:
RQ: Do Dutch candidates to the House of Representatives use Twitter as a tool to make the electoral
campaigns coherent within a single party by actively engaging with the posts of colleagues candidates?
In order to answer this question five hypotheses have been set up inspired by the hypotheses and conclusions of the researches of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams and Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer. Vergeer, Hermans and Sams research their claims by comparing parties per type. Established versus fringe parties will be the division that will be used in this thesis. Although the academics do refer to the standards they used to indicate whether a party is established or fringe they do not specify which parties fall under which category. Because all parties participated in the national elections this standard of measurement will not be necessary to use here. The measurement of the age of the party was considered here to make an indication to which category the parties should be assigned to. Although most parties are relatively the same age, a division could be made of SP, PVV and CDA being fringe parties and VVD, PvdA and D66 being the established parties. The conclusion that Vergeer, Hermans and Sams made was that the established parties had more Twitter sign ups and started using the platform early. The younger parties on the other hand had later and less sign ups and less activity (Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011). The research of Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2014) focused on Twitter engagement of replying and retweeting behavior amongst Dutch politicians as a means of gift exchange (331-2). The division they
25
made is in left-wing, right-wing and center parties and between retweeting and replying (334). Conclusions show that replying is hardly affected by party affiliation while retweeting seems strongly correlated party affiliation (335). Out of the hypotheses and conclusions of these two researches the following hypotheses were created.
H1: Politicians who are a member of the SP, PVV and CDA will relatively be less active on Twitter in
both sign ups and posts than politicians who are a member of the other top parties.
This hypothesis is a question of activity on Twitter. Before answering the question if politicians use Twitter as a tool for coherent campaigning first it must be clarified whether the platform is used at all. Without an active group of politicians this study would provide little and not very representative data. When over fifty percent of the politicians would have a Twitter account and actively use the platform it would seem that Twitter is adopted by politicians as a means for communication and possibly for campaigning. This hypothesis is mostly inspired by the conclusion of Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2013) who analyzed that younger, fringe parties are less active on Twitter than the older opposing parties. Dating back no further than the 1970s SP, PVV and CDA are the youngest of the six selected parties.
All of the answers to the hypotheses, and therefore the hypotheses themselves, have to be seen in relative instead of absolute numbers. As the two largest parties each have each at least twice as many seats than the other parties separately absolute numbers would create a large bias. This means that in order to create fair results, the number of seats in the parliament for the particular party has to be split by the number of profiles that have been signed up within the same party.
One of the conclusions made by Vergeer, Hermans and Sams (2011) is that, although fringe parties have less Twitter activity they make relatively more use of their social network. Drawing a line towards this research it could be suspected that within the fringe parties there should be more engagement with other politicians opposed to the established parties. These leads to hypotheses two and three.
H2: Politicians who are a member of the SP, PVV and CDA will engage relatively more with the tweets
from members of their own party than the politicians of the other parties.
H3: Politicians who are a member of the SP, PVV and CDA will engage relatively more with the tweets
from members of other parties than politicians of the top parties.
Engagement in all hypotheses should be seen as Twitter activities that include the posts of other politicians. The act of replying or mentioning in a tweet is one of these activities. With a symbol of an @
