Flows of Information in Election Campaigns: Who Influences Whom?

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of social media's use in politics, few studies demonstrate the extent to which social media sets the news agenda during electoral campaigns. The traditional media—both broadcast and print—is still thought to hold a privileged positions among the public and amongst political parties in terms of determining important issues during a campaign. However, theories and methods for understanding issue agenda setting must be extended to reflect the prominence of social media in modern campaigns and to incorporate messaging by the public and parties on social media and potential biases among news outlets. The question has generally be framed as which parties are more successful in driving coverage in news media as an aggregate. We expand the research to investigate agenda setting capturing the diversity of news sources, public opinion and public and party messaging on social media. Our research demonstrates a new approach to understanding these often dynamic and reciprocal relationships. Using an information theoretic framework, we model the flows of information from traditional to social media using data collected around the time of the 2015 British General Election. Specifically, we assess whether social media has altered the gate-keeping role of traditional media and whether the flow of information is dependent on the issue. Our findings suggest that while social media allows the public and parties to share information without the need for traditional media, it is traditional media that mediates this relationship and remain in the gate-keeping position.