Introduction to Special Forum on the Geographies of the Presidential Election

Presidential Campaigning and Social Media: An Analysis of the 2012 Campaign. Edited by John Allen Hendricks and Dan Schill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 320 pp. The 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was not the first U.S. presidential in which social media played a role. In 2008, political activists blogged about the presidential race while the candidates, particularly Obama, reached out to potential young voters via Facebook and YouTube. By 2012, however, social media's reach had exploded with the emergence of sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. Social media moved to center stage as the candidates, the news media, and the public used these digital communication platforms to strategize, share information, and express opinions. In Presidential Campaigning and Social Media, John Allen Hendricks and Dan Schill set out to empirically examine, describe, and analyze the role of social media in the 2012 campaign (p. 3). Their edited volume contains 17 chapters grouped into five sections: political communication, political knowledge, the presidential primary elections, the general election, and voter/media engagement. The empirical research in those chapters features a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, leaning heavily toward the latter. Nonacademic audiences might find the book intimidating, but academics will appreciate its methodological rigor. Hendricks and Schill have assembled an impressive lineup of 35 contributors. Equally impressive is the scope of the volume. Rather than focusing on a single candidate, a single campaign, or a single form of social media, the editors have compiled a comprehensive overview of the role of various social media in both the Republican primaries and in the general election. Individual chapters draw upon communication theories, such as uses and gratifications and the spiral of silence, to investigate how social media were used by the political campaigns and by citizens as well as the platforms' effects on political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. The research orientation is a welcome break from popular accounts that rely on anecdotal evidence or make inflated claims about the impact of social media. Presidential Campaigning and Social Media cuts through the hype and avoids sweeping generalizations about whether social media are good or bad. Indeed, many of the findings are decidedly mixed. For example, Paul Haridakis, Gary Hanson, Mei-Chen Lin, and Jennifer L. McCullough find that television and the Internet, not social media, were the leading sources of information about the 2012 campaign, even among young people. Other studies conclude that social media usage does not necessarily lead to greater political knowledge or participation. Daniela V. Dimitrova finds that using social media did not make Iowans more likely to take part in that state's Republican caucuses. Meanwhile, Jody C. Baumgartner, David S. Morris, and Jonathan S. Morris discover that young adults who use social networking sites as their primary news source are less knowledgeable about politics than those who use other media as a primary source. …

The Social Media President: Barack Obama and the Politics of Digital Engagement. By James E. Katz, Michael Barris, and Anshul Jain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 215 pp. The Social Media President takes readers on a technological journey into President Barack Obama's administration. While the book treads briefly into Obama's presidential campaign, the authors primarily use case studies to investigate his administration's use of social media outside of the elections. The authors question whether the administration has successfully used social media tools to give the public influence over policy as well as whether those tools have enhanced participatory democracy. Throughout the book, they utilize interviews with key people involved with the social media campaigns. Ultimately, the book arrives at the conclusion that, while Obama might have used the tools to solicit public input, they have given the public little, if any, influence over policy as a whole. The authors select key social media case studies for their critique. They generally examine cases that are relevant to the presidency or to White House operations. This criterion means that social media that are relevant to the government as a whole are left out of the book. Several of the president's social media programs and targeted uses are critiqued, such as the Citizen's Briefing Book, the Online Town Hall, the Grand Challenges program, and the Supreme Court vacancies. While it is not a primary focus of the book, the authors provide a brief history of social media use in presidential campaigns and in presidential politics in general. They use this discussion to illustrate that, while Obama is considered the social media president, he is not the first president to utilize social media. The book contends that the president uses three methods to interact with citizens through social media tools. Those three methods frame the overall analysis. The first technique is collecting public opinions or other data from citizens for the government. The president might collect this information by soliciting public sentiment or by merely analyzing the data left behind by people who visit Web sites. The second method is sharing information with citizens. The purpose here might be to educate the public or it could be to enhance the president's agenda in some way, such as asking citizens to support projects. The third method is gathering public opinions in order to provide citizens an opportunity to influence policy. The primary focus of the authors is this third modality, as they argue that it has the potential to transform the democratic process. …

Review: <i>Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia</i>, by Karen Strassler

Social media has an undeniable role in presidential campaigns. Starting with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, on one hand, scholars and practitioners have embraced the potential and importance of these platforms. The 2016 presidential elections, on the other hand, raised concerns about social media’s role in democratic processes as debates about how the platforms can sow misinformation have become mainstream. I argue that there has been a positive outcome of such debates: new data sources. Understanding their role—and their probable potential to do “harm”—social media platforms have worked toward increasing transparency in the political advertisements they carry. From Snapchat to Facebook, transparency reports share detailed information on how political groups, including presidential nominees, have utilized their platforms, targeted audiences, and disseminated calls-to-action. In this article, I argue that these transparency attempts will be invaluable data resources for political communication scholars to better explain how voter choice and candidate positioning work within digital media ecology. I answer four sample research questions about 2020 Presidential Elections in the United States to demonstrate the potential of these data sets in shedding light on how issues, identities, and time-relevant variables change political advertising in presidential campaigns.

According to lifestyle politics theory, social media platforms introduce new ways for people to engage in civic life. Based on the communication mediation model, prior scholarship laid out theoretical and empirical foundations for how media exposure to the news positively influences people’s political participatory behavior through supplemental communicative processes. Building on this line of research, we rely on a two-wave panel survey of U.S. adults to examine how the different online and social media communicative patterns among U.S. citizens, such as news use, political expression, and discussion, predict political consumerism behavior - the purchase decision of consumers based on political or ethical reasons. Advancing diverse causal order structural equation models, this study highlights a positive influence of news consumption, social media political expression, and political discussion in explaining political consumerism (i.e., boycotting and buycotting). Specifically, results underscore the importance of political expression and discussion mediating the relationship between online, social media and WhatsApp news use and political consumerism. Implications for future research and limitations to the study are provided in the manuscript.

Social media in recent times has proven to be extremely persuasive in influencing the public’s opinion on political affairs. Since 2007, election campaigns have actively utilized several social media platforms in Kenya for communicating with, mobilizing, and organizing supporters. Politicians and political activists along with their parties make maximum use of it to interact and provide civic education to the public. However, few written materials are available on how Kenyan youth, particularly those who live in Kiambu County, use social media for political engagement. The objective of this research is therefore to explore patterns as well as practices characterizing social media use by young people in Kiambu County and how this affects their political involvement and discourse. This research is guided by Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere, which asserts that public political discourse that is free from government interference is important for creating functional democracies. Social media, which acts as a public sphere, can allow the youth to engage in political discussions and other civic activities. The research employs a descriptive research design, utilizing an online survey as the primary tool for data collection, administered via Survey Monkey. The research’s target population includes young people enrolled in institutions of higher learning in Kiambu County who use social media for communication. The sample size was determined based on the number of university students in Kiambu County. It utilized stratified random sampling on a target population of 115,330 to draw a sample of 380 youths using a Survey Monkey online sample calculator with a 95% confidence level and 5% margin of error. Initially, a pilot study was conducted on 10% of the sample, which is 38 respondents, to ascertain the reliability of the research instruments, eventually, from the 342 surveys sent out, 224 were completed and returned. For data analysis, Microsoft Excel was utilized in coding and organizing the data to create tables and graphs. The findings showed that X was the respondents' most used platform for political discourse. Most respondents were aware of and engaged in political discussions on social media, and believed that social media influenced their political attitudes and beliefs. Although most viewed social media as a source of civic education, they were skeptical about its reliability due to misinformation. The study concludes that many youths in Kiambu County are actively participating in political discussions online and therefore it recommends that better education should be provided to help the youth discern credible information from misinformation. Additionally, interventions should be established to curb digital crimes like cyberbullying and online fraud.

Social media platforms have been widely perceived as centers of political discourse, and have been shown to facilitate political participation among young adults (18-26 years). However, as the effects of online political discourse and behaviors have become pervasive offline, significantly affecting global political processes such as deterring women from public political office and influencing election outcomes, it raises questions regarding how young adult users engage in these online political spaces of discourse. In this paper, we focus on the perceptions and forms of engagement of Gen Z social media users, specifically those of Gen Z young adult women. In this paper we broadly ask, how do voting-age Generation (Gen) Z young adult women perceive spaces of political discourse on social media, and do these perceptions affect how they choose to engage in them? To explore this question, we conducted 17 interviews with voting-age Gen Z women across the United States. We found that our participants were largely critical of social media as spaces of political discourse. They were skeptical of the credibility of the political information shared on social media, questioned the usefulness of sharing political information through social media, and felt that social media was not conducive to having productive political discussions. We find that participant perceptions of social media political discourse led to them limiting their online engagement or disengaging entirely from online public political spaces, but expanding their offline private political engagement through in-person discussion. Our findings indicate that our participants were not politically disinterested, but rather did not partake in public forms of social media political engagement, leading us to question and reconsider widespread interpretations of 'political participation' that center and emphasize public forms of action and expression. Drawing on our findings, we propose that the practice of 'disengagement' from public spaces of online political discourse should be considered a dimension of political engagement and not separate from it. In proposing this, we also broadly question the efficacy of social media as a forum to promote and facilitate political discourse.

The campaign period in the 2024 presidential election was crucial for the three presidential candidate pairs (Anies-Muhaimin, Prabowo-Gibran, and Ganjar-Mahfud) to develop and implement their political communication strategies. Branding was a key aspect of political communication that needed to be considered. One of the more interesting aspects was the branding of Prabowo as a candidate participating in the presidential election for the fourth time, now showcasing a different character. This research was conducted to analyze Prabowo's political branding through social media during the 2024 presidential election campaign. The focus of the research was to describe Prabowo's political branding by categorizing it into three parts: house brands, platform brands, and product brands, in accordance with the brand hierarchy theory from Cosgrove. The method used for the research was qualitative content analysis. Data and information were obtained through an analysis of the content on Prabowo's Instagram account and interviews with three sources related to the research topic. The results of the study showed that the house brand of Prabowo's political branding through social media during the 2024 presidential election campaign was "Prabowo Subianto 2024." Five brand platforms were identified: Humanism, Continuity, Bersama Indonesia Maju (Together with Onward Indonesia), Militarism, and Free Lunch. Furthermore, the product brand identified was Aksi Gemoy, which was part of Humanism.

Social media play an increasingly important role in political communication. Various studies investigated how individuals adopt social media for political discussion, to share their views about politics and policy, or to mobilize and protest against social issues. Yet, little attention has been devoted to the main actors of political discussions: the politicians. In this paper, we explore the topics of discussion of U.S. President Obama and the 50 U.S. State Governors using Twitter data and agenda-setting theory as a tool to describe the patterns of daily political discussion, uncovering the main topics of attention and interest of these actors. We examine over one hundred thousand tweets produced by these politicians and identify seven macro-topics of conversation, finding that Twitter represents a particularly appealing vehicle of conversation for American opposition politicians. We highlight the main motifs of political conversation of the two parties, discovering that Republican and Democrat Governors are more or less similarly active on Twitter but exhibit different styles of communication. Finally, by reconstructing the networks of occurrences of Governors’ hashtags and keywords related to political issues, we observe that Republicans and Democrats form two tight yet polarized cores, with a strongly different shared agenda on many issues of discussion.

Political memes colored the 2019 Indonesian presidential election campaign on social media. Political memes have become one of the propaganda strategies to influence public opinion to gain political support from the public before the presidential election. This study aims to analyze and understand political memes as a medium of political propaganda in the 2019 Indonesian presidential election. This study uses critical discourse analysis to uncover the meaning behind the text. The data collection technique uses documentation in the form of political memes of the two presidential candidates, both in images and political symbols scattered on social media in the January – March 2019 period. Furthermore, the data will be analyzed using Fairclough's critical discourse analysis model to find out the meaning of the text. This study indicates that social media plays an essential role in political communication in the 2019 presidential election campaign. Social media is a cheap and fast means of spreading political memes that reach potential voters widely and massively. Through political memes, Joko Widodo often talks about having links with the Indonesian Communist Party. Meanwhile, Prabowo Subianto is often spoken of by his political opponents as a supporter of the caliphate in Indonesia. These political memes are used as political propaganda to construct or deconstruct political presidential candidates' discourse and build or damage the reputation of presidential candidates to influence public opinion.

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

The aim is to examine the influence of social media communication on the formation of ideological and political discourse among Chinese youth. The study sample comprised 716 college students from China. The research utilized the Critical Thinking Test by L. Stark, a Media Literacy Assessment Test, and a Personal Values Orientation Test. The initial hypothesis that social media communication practices do not affect critical thinking, beliefs, and value orientations among college students was refuted. The results demonstrate the positive influence of ideological and political discourse on social media in shaping value orientations (correlation coefficient > 0.7), as well as media literacy skills (8.87 ± 0.38 points) and critical thinking (17.58 ± 0.41 points) among students. The activity of Chinese students in social media and their participation in ideological and political discourse is confirmed by the high level of orientation towards communication (30.78 ± 0.75 points) and socio-political activity (27.80 ± 0.28 points). The results of the study can be used to improve the effectiveness of communication practices in social media in the context of ideological and political discourse, promoting the development of critical thinking, value orientations, and patriotic beliefs among Chinese college students. These results are of interest not only at the local level but also in the global context of a multicultural educational environment, contributing to the creation of a positive image of the Chinese state. Future research is planned to focus on examining the characteristics of college students’ participation in ideological and political discourse depending on their chosen professions.

The essay sets off by arguing that since the 1950s, there has been a growing enthusiasm in political advertising discourse. This was because political advertising became prominent as an effective communicative and publicity tool in the 1952 U.S. presidential election campaign when Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed its instruments to win the most prestigious and highest political post in the U.S. (Reece 2003). Since that time, several rhetorical strategies have been adopted by politicians all over the world to cast and communicate political messages to their various audiences. Most previous research efforts appear to be in the monolingual or L1 settings (e.g. Chilton and Schäffner 1997; Obeng 1997).In this study, we examine how Nigerian politicians demonstrate their bilingual creativity in an innovative manner, employing linguistic facilities to publicise and sell their political programmes, especially in the use of media multilingualism, a novel persuasive strategy that has come to characterise political campaign texts. Specifically, we consider this recent phenomenon in Nigerian political discourse in which political candidates ‘marry’ and exploit the resources of both the exogenous (English) and indigenous languages (and sometimes along with pidgin) in the same campaign texts in order to woo voters. So the term ‘media multilingualism’ here is taken to be the variety of code-mixing and codeswitching in written political texts. The paper thus examines inter/intrasententially code-mixed facts found in the written campaign texts and discusses their functional implications especially as part of the discourse strategies deployed by the politicians to elicit support and woo voters to support their candidatures.Relevant literature on codeswitching and theories (e.g. Speech Accommodation Theory) that provide theoretical underpinning for the study are reviewed. An attempt is also made to demonstrate that codeswitching in political discourse is an interpersonal strategy that can be used to create, strengthen or destroy interpersonal boundaries, and thus it functions as a discourse strategy for pragmatic and strategic purposes (Wei 2003). The framework for analysis follows the insights provided in Rational Choice Models (RC) as seen in the works of Myers-Scotton (1993), Myers-Scotton and Agnes Bolonyai (2001) and Wei (2003). The essay concludes by presenting a summary of some important analytical observations that arose from the study. It also suggests that a similar pattern is bound to occur in political discourse found in other L2 contexts.The data set for this work came from selected political texts produced during the 2003 governorship and presidential elections campaigns in Nigeria and sourced from selected Nigerian national newspapers.

A significant share of political discourse occurs online on social media platforms. Policymakers and researchers try to understand the role of social media design in shaping the quality of political discourse around the globe. In the past decades, scholarship on political discourse theory has produced distinct characteristics of different types of prominent political rhetoric such as deliberative, civic, or demagogic discourse. This study investigates the relationship between social media reaction mechanisms (i.e., upvotes, downvotes) and political rhetoric in user discussions by engaging in an in-depth conceptual analysis of political discourse theory. First, we analyze 155 million user comments in 55 political subforums on Reddit between 2010 and 2018 to explore whether users’ style of political discussion aligns with the essential components of deliberative, civic, and demagogic discourse. Second, we perform a quantitative study that combines confirmatory factor analysis with difference in differences models to explore whether different reaction mechanism schemes (e.g., upvotes only, upvotes and downvotes, no reaction mechanisms) correspond with political user discussion that is more or less characteristic of deliberative, civic, or demagogic discourse. We produce three main takeaways. First, despite being “ideal constructs of political rhetoric,” we find that political discourse theories describe political discussions on Reddit to a large extent. Second, we find that discussions in subforums with only upvotes, or both up- and downvotes are associated with user discourse that is more deliberate and civic. Third, and perhaps most strikingly, social media discussions are most demagogic in subreddits with no reaction mechanisms at all. These findings offer valuable contributions for ongoing policy discussions on the relationship between social media interface design and respectful political discussion among users.1

This paper analyses the role played by social media in shaping political debate during the UK election campaign of May 2010, with a focus on local application within two constituencies in Hampshire. Barack Obama's presidential campaign was such a digital triumph that it propelled social media onto the radar of marketers within commercial organisations worldwide. Literature in the field of political marketing has recommended the development of relationship marketing strategies in politics (e.g., Henneberg and O'Shaughnessy 2009) but more research is needed to focus on the role of social technologies and to bring theory up to speed with practice (Harris and Lock 2010). Our paper concludes that the UK general election was far being from an “Internet election.” There was little evidence of the methodical and integrated approach to online and offline engagement demonstrated by the Obama campaign. Our contribution asserts that, as in the business world, social media communications can add significant value at the local level when implemented as part of a systematic and long-term online and offline relationship-building strategy but are not well suited to short-term applications intended to influence the outcome of particular campaigns.