Preaching to the converted and attacking opponents
New publication in EPA @PolicyStudies
What effect does the
communication of politicians on Twitter have? Is it reinforcing existent
ideologies because users get messages of politicians mostly from their own
ideological cluster? Or is Twitter exposing the users to cross ideological
content as well? We argue that both is the case. We show that politicians use
the different communication channels Twitter provides to distinguish between
communication within their own
ideological cluster in order to organize support and across these clusters to argue against their opponents.
Considering German general elections as case study, we present empirical tests
that politicians – more than other politically interested users – use Twitter
mostly to provide information but with significant differences between parties.
We furthermore show that politicians use the whole spectrum of communication
channels provided by Twitter. Finally, there is empirical evidence of different
qualities of the communicated content: Measured by sentiment analysis the
communication with members of the same party is less harsh than the
communication with political rivals. This particular usage of communication on
Twitter might lead to stronger
polarization in political discourses.
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| Distributions of Sociability Measurement |
The article is freely available in Policy Studies Organization #openAcess journal European Policy Analysis (EPA).
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