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Journalism Publications Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication

6-1-2018

Social Media in Political Campaigning Around the

World: Theoretical and Methodological
Challenges
Daniela V. Dimitrova
Iowa State University, danielad@iastate.edu

Jörg Matthes
University of Vienna

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Social Media in Political Campaigning Around the World: Theoretical and
Methodological Challenges
Disciplines
Communication Technology and New Media | International and Intercultural Communication | Social
Influence and Political Communication | Social Media

Comments
This is a manuscript of an article published as Dimitrova, Daniela V., and Jörg Matthes. "Social Media in
Political Campaigning Around the World: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges." Journalism and Mass
Communication Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2018): 333-342. DOI: 10.1177/1077699018770437. Posted with
permission.

This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/jlmc_pubs/9

 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(2), 333–342

© 2018 AEJMC

DOI: 10.1177/1077699018770437

Social Media in Political Campaigning Around the World: Theoretical and Methodological

Challenges

Daniela V. Dimitrova1 and Jörg Matthes2

1
Iowa State University
2
University of Vienna

Daniela V. Dimitrova

Professor & Director of Graduate Education

Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication

Iowa State University

danielad@iastate.edu

Jörg Matthes

Professor and Department Chair

Department of Communication,

University of Vienna

Währinger Straße 29

A-1090 Vienna, Austria

joerg.matthes@univie.ac.at
 The impact of social media in political campaigning around the world is undeniable.

Latest statistics show that close to ¾ of US adults use social networking sites such as Facebook

and Twitter, with social network use becoming almost ubiquitous among young adults, according

to recent data from the Pew Research Center (2018). Globally, an estimated 2.62 billion people

use social networks on a daily basis in 2018, with that number projected to reach 2.77 billion by

2019 (Statista, 2018). With their tremendous growth, social media have become an indispensable

part of modern political campaigning, both in the United States and internationally. Platforms

such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit have changed how political campaigns are run, how

politicians and the public access and share political information, the way we learn about politics,

form opinions and attitudes, and ultimately engage in or disengage from the political process.

While social media has clearly affected our understanding of political communication

and its effects on the public, it is difficult to see clear monolithic effects. A 2009 meta-analysis

showed that Internet use in general had positive, although relatively small, effects on different

aspects of political engagement (Boulianne, 2009). Similarly, a 2015 meta-analysis demonstrated

only limited effects of digital media use on political participation, showing that only half of 170

reported effects from 36 selected studies were statistically significant (Boulianne, 2015). Yet

another meta-analysis found generally positive effects of social media on three different

dimensions of engagement, namely social capital, civic engagement, and political participation,

when surveying 116 relationships/effects reported in 22 different studies (Skoric et al., 2016).

These comprehensive aggregate studies offer evidence that the effects of social media

consumption and use are hardly uniform across different contexts and groups. For example,

studies with random samples of youth are more likely to identify a significant effect, compared

1
to general population samples (Boulianne, 2015). Also, studies that rely on panel data are twice

less likely to find positive and statistically significant relationships between social media use and

political participation (Boulianne, 2015). Studies have also noted that the relationship between

Internet use and political engagement varies depending on type of use. For example, findings by

Gil de Zuniga et al. (2013) suggest that only expressive uses of social media predict online as

well offline political participation, including voting, while consumptive uses do not. Similarly,

Dimitrova and Bystrom (2017) demonstrate that active social media use positively affect caucus

participation while passive use has a negative effect. Yet other studies have shown strongest

effects when online resources are used for informational purposes (Boulianne, 2009).

Findings such as these suggest that social media effects may depend on multiple factors,

including what kind of channels are examined (for example, Twitter versus Instagram versus

Snapchat), the specific audience characteristics and predispositions (antecedents such age,

political interest, campaign involvement and other psychological factors) and user motivations

(e.g., relationship maintenance vs. political engagement vs. self-promotion), what type of social

media use is captured (informational, expressive, or relational use) and the political campaign

context overall.

Summary of Special Issue

This special issue includes eight manuscripts that span the wide range of questions and

methodologies represented in research on social media and political campaigning. They all

address the complexities of social media content, use and effects in innovative ways and use data

from the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Bosseta’s study tracks the use of social media during the 2016

U.S. Presidential primaries and compares cross-platform content on Facebook, Instagram, and

Snapchat through observational data. Hale and Grabe zoom into the use of visuals in Clinton and

2
Trump Subreddits during the 2016 U.S. Campaign and connect that to news values and gender

leadership qualities. Extending social media research outside the U.S. context, Bruns examines

the role of Twitter in Australian federal elections, comparing its use between the 2013 and 2016

campaigns. Another important aspect of the political conversation on social media revolves

around fake news, which Brummette and colleagues show has become highly politicized on

Twitter, forming network clusters along party lines.

Moving beyond the content and use of social media, four contributions in this special

issue address important theoretical questions about the effects of social media on various

outcomes. These pieces clearly demonstrate that social media “effects” are not uniform. From a

normative standpoint, they can be alarming and encouraging at the same time. Cacciatore and

colleagues focus on how social media affect learning and demonstrate empirically that use of

Facebook for news consumption and news sharing purposes is negatively related to political

knowledge, pointing to potential detrimental effects in terms of deliberative democracy. Chan

examines social media use among voters in Hong Kong and observes contingent effects of

political ambivalence and political disagreement on the relationships between partisan strength

and social media use. Moving to the Hungarian context, Marton investigates the link between

Facebook performance and electoral success during the Hungarian general election, finding

empirical support for the two-step flow model: it is not the political candidates but their

followers whose sharing of information on social media has an impact on their friends and

acquaintances. Finally, Lee et al. examine how politicians’ personal disclosures on social media

affect vote intention, suggesting that publicizing politicians’ private information may make them

appear less competent under certain conditions. Thus, social media can have positive effects in

terms of persuasion and turnout, but also may make politicians appear less competent.

3
 Key Challenges and Directions for Future Research

Based on these multifaceted insights, we outline some key challenges and share some

suggestions for future research on social media and political campaigning in the following

sections. Despite the progress made, we believe there are three particularly thorny questions that

researchers in this area have to grapple with: How to measure the use and content of social

media, how to capture the context of social media use and application, and how to advance

theory building in our field.

Social Media Use and Content

When looking at audience studies on social media and politics, the lion’s share of

research uses survey methodology, mostly cross-sectional surveys with self-reported measures of

social media. Cross-sectional surveys are useful for many reasons, the rapid pace of data

collection being one of them. However, as has often been noted (see Hopmann et al., 2015),

cross-sectional surveys raise concerns about spuriousness and reverse causal order (Boulianne,

2015; Skoric et al., 2016). If social media use, for instance, predicts participation controlling for

all kinds of variables, we can equally assume the opposite effect: Those who tend to participate

are also more likely to turn to social media. No matter the direction of an effect, in such models,

an unmeasured third variable can cause spurious relationships, potentially leading to erroneous

conclusions.

Although the limitations of such designs are well known and more panel studies have

been published in recent years (e.g., Dimitrova et al., 2014; Theocharis & Quintelier, 2016),

cross-sectional studies continue to dominate research on social media and political campaigning.

Even more importantly, the recent surge of interest in conditional process models has accelerated

the use of cross-sectional data, further obscuring the limited usefulness of such designs

4
(Hopmann et al., 2015). Conditional process models, applied to cross-sectional data, are purely

correlational in nature and thus unable to test causal claims.

In addition, cross-sectional studies cannot inform us about the dynamics of social media

use and its effects over time. This, however, is a prerequisite to understanding how social media

can exert their influence given the dramatic changes in audience structures over the last decades.

When exposure to traditional news sources (i.e., newspapers, television news) is in decline and

exposure to news on social media is on the rise, we need to be able to test whether social media

leads to a real increase in participation and media effects, controlling for a decreasing importance

of traditional journalistic news. In a longitudinal perspective, if those cohorts who relied on

traditional news sources before now turn to social media, it comes as no surprise that social

media has substantial effects on the audience. Thus, the effects we observe may be, to some

extent, “old wine in a new bottle.” As individual-level media repertoires change in response to

rapid technological developments, influential new channels are likely to emerge at the cost of

traditional ones. If this is the case, we would basically observe the same effect, just for a

different channel. The question therefore is whether social media facilitate political engagement

of those who used to tune out in the world of traditional media, or alternatively, if those who are

politically engaged simply add social media to their repertoire at the expense of traditional

channels. Of course, there are many arguments against this zero-sum line of reasoning, such as

the networked character of social media as well as its expressive nature, both of which may drive

the effects we observe in research on social media and political campaigning. Yet it seems safe

to say that longitudinal studies with a large time span or multiple-cohort sequential designs are in

order to convincingly clarify this conundrum (see Farrington, 1991).

5
 The second thorny issue that future scholarship needs to address involves the ways in

which we conceptualize and measure exposure in social media research. Almost the entire body

of research relies on self-reports asking respondents to estimate the time or amount of exposure

to social media. There are two issues with this strategy. First, making judgments about social

media exposure is a demanding task because exposure events are fragmented and scattered

across situations, devices, and platforms, posing a critical challenge for the accuracy of self-

reports (Araujo et al., 2017; de Vreese & Neijens, 2016, Scharkow, 2016). Social media are often

used while performing other media- or non-media related tasks simultaneously, which arguably

decreases attention and thus the ability to accurately report exposure to political information

(Segijn, Voorveld, Vandeberg, & Smit, 2017). In fact, recent studies using tracking data as a

"gold standard" clearly indicate that respondents are not really good at providing accurate

estimates of their online use behaviors (Scharkow, 2016). Together with the finding that

measures of turnout and political participation are prone to over reporting by respondents (Karp

& Brockington, 2005; Persson & Solevid, 2014), at least some caution is in order when

correlating social media use measures with participatory responses.

Second, self-report data about exposure remain uninformative about the actual content

that respondents were exposed to. As de Vreese et al. (2017) have put it, “While theoretically

interesting and innovative, such designs say little about the actual impact of the media content

and can thus be dubbed “mere exposure studies”, i.e., they show a plausible correlation between

media usage and an outcome variable” (p. 222). However, understanding the political content

that social media users are exposed to is crucial for theory building in the area. For instance, as

Eveland, Morey, and Hutchens (2011) have argued, we need a better understanding of how the

notion of “political” is actually understood by survey respondents, especially in a social media

6
context where the lines between political and non-political information become increasingly

blurred. By the same token, asking respondents about their perceived amount of exposure

completely ignores the important role of visuals. The growth of image-based social networks like

Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat, has changed the ways in which parties and politicians

are leading their campaigns (Page & Duffy, 2017). Visuals are key to our understanding of the

persuasive power of social media. Experimental designs may be one solution to this as they

provide us with complete control over the content that respondents are exposed to, including

visuals. However, most if not all experimental studies on social media and political campaigning

have used forced exposure (for instance, Heiss & Matthes, 2016) which is a clear limitation

given the abundance of choices in the social media news environment.

Some strategies to alleviate these two problems have been suggested in the literature

(Araujo et al., 2017; de Vreese & Neijens, 2016; Moy & Murphy, 2016), such as particular

question types for media exposure, the use of anchors, Smartphone and app-based

measurements, eye-tracking data, and, most importantly, combining survey data with tracking

data or content analytic data. The combination of content analytic and survey data in particular

remains a blind spot when charting future research on social media and political campaigning.

The challenge is, of course, that social media content is so diverse and multifaceted that it can

hardly be sampled with traditional sampling techniques. Yet social media research in the age of

“big data” opens up new avenues for social scientists. Using mixed-method research designs in

examining the role of social media is highly recommended. For example, researchers should

strive to combine computational analyses of social media content with survey data about social

media use as well as real-world indicators on political and civic engagement. Companies such as

Facebook and Twitter collect troves of granular-level data, such as user engagement, that can be

7
accessed through their APIs. The beauty -- and the challenge -- of social media is that it presents

scholars with large amounts of data. These big data sets require use of new analytical tools such

social networking analysis and topic modeling that, combined with better measures of social

media exposure, can open up entirely new avenues for research.

The Context of Social Media

The papers in this issue demonstrate that the uses and effects of social media can only be

understood by taking the specific context into account. Countries and regions differ in their party

system, their media system, the characteristics of their voters, the content, scope and polarized

nature of the political campaigns, the degree of selective exposure based on political preferences

and even the structural nature of social media environments (see Van Aelst et al., 2017).

However, the majority of research on social media and political campaigning is based on data

from the U.S. which clearly cannot be generalized to other countries and contexts.

Even more importantly, most research is based on single-country studies, and truly

comparative research is rare if not almost non-existent (but see Mosca & Quaranta, 2016; Xenos,

Vromen, & Loader, 2014). This is troubling because single country studies are bound by the

idiosyncrasies of the specific context (see Hopmann, Matthes, & Nir, 2015), and as a result, we

lack knowledge about the contextual and cultural factors that drive the content and effects of

social media in the political world. Therefore, we need to study social media content, use and

effects in a comparative context. A recent meta-analysis reached the same conclusion, stating

that future research has to be cross-national (Boulianne, 2015, p. 535). Findings by Boulianne

(2017) suggest that the effects of informational uses of social media on participation are smaller

in countries with a free and independent press, such as the U.S.. While a large number of

important and insightful studies have been conducted in the United States, it is imperative for

8
future researchers to move beyond US-centric questions and study the phenomenon in a

comparative manner, taking into account national context and the local political environment to

provide a truly international perspective, ideally applying multi-level models. Existing evidence

suggests that, indeed, national context and dominant political system (e.g., established

democracies versus other) make a difference (Boulianne, 2015, 2017). Therefore, moving

beyond single-country studies is critical to determine the role of social media for political

campaigns.

But it is not only the national context that matters. The specific context in which political

social media messages and visuals are embedded in a typical newsfeed needs to be taken into

account as well (Knoll, Matthes, & Heiss, 2018). Studies frequently overlook the fact that social

media are heavily used for entertainment and relational purposes and to a much lesser extent for

political information, especially so among the youth (but see Theocharis & Quintelier, 2016).

There is a risk in overlooking the non-political uses, which may lead to overestimating the

positive influences of social media since inhibiting uses of social media may be neglected.

Furthermore, political and non-political uses cannot be fully separated on social media because

political content as well as entertainment-oriented content are simultaneously present. A typical

newsfeed completely mixes both. Thus, when investigating the effects of political content, its

non-political context needs to be taken into account as well. There is a long line of research on

context effects suggesting that the surrounding content of a message can have substantial

consequences for how the message is perceived and interpreted (e.g., Baumgartner & Wirth,

2012). A theoretical explanation can be found in affective priming (Kühne, Schemer, Matthes &

Wirth, 2011). Exposure to entertainment will foster positive emotions or meta-emotions. This, in

turn, decreasing the likelihood of negative cognitions in citizens information processing thus

9
dampening the perceived severity of political issues (Kühne et al., 2011). Hence, when looking at

political social media content, exposure, and effects, we argue that the entertainment-oriented

context should be taken into account as well.

Theory Building

Last but not least, social media and politics research, just like any good research, needs to

be based on strong theoretical models and contribute to theory building. Rather than solely

relying on describing the use of social media tools in political campaigning, future research

should develop more nuanced models helping our understanding of why and how such tools are

being used. Also, when it comes the use and effects of social media at the level of citizens, we

need full-fledged theoretical models, especially regarding direct and indirect effects on political

and civic engagement. Social media, as a comparatively new phenomenon to our field, should be

approached in theoretical terms first, leading to theories, models, and concepts that can then be

tested in a second step.

It may be tempting to skip the first step and rush ahead to the second step, leading to an

abundance of studies, most of them correlational, on the antecedents and consequences of social

media use in a rather short amount of time. We are not calling for a unified theory of all social

media uses and effects. Yet we believe that at the moment, our field lacks overarching theoretical

frameworks or models, ideally competing ones, which can guide our selection of concepts and

help to contextualize our findings. Just to give one example, there are several explanations for

why social media use may impact political participation. Some scholars argue that social

networks may activate in-group identity, thus fostering participatory behavior (Valenzuela,

2013). Others have suggested the mediating role played by interpersonal communication (Shah,

Cho, Eveland, & Kwak, 2005), news exposure (Chan, 2016), network size (Neo, 2015),

10
expression, or efficacy (Chan, 2016; Knoll et al., 2016) among others. The majority of studies

have tested isolated theoretical ideas, mostly boundary conditions and the differences that occur

for several alterations of dependent and independent variables. The problem with this approach is

that several explanations are suggested and tested without controlling or explicitly testing

alternative or parallel ones. Thus, even if several studies support different notions, we cannot

simply add them up together to one body of knowledge. This type of research strategy has

hampered our ability to fully understand the role that social media plays in political campaigning

around the world.

We also call for more research shedding light on the underlying psychological

mechanisms of social media effects, necessitating more experimental work and media

psychological theory building. As one recent example, the Social Media Political Participation

Model (Knoll et al., 2018) attempts to explain the psychological processes and boundary

conditions for social media to affect participation. Using a goal psychological approach, it

explicates how citizens form, activate, and implement participatory goals before and during a

behavioral situation. In a nutshell, the key idea is that citizens engage in several appraisal

processes, which mark a chain of contingencies that must be met in order for social media to

foster engagement. Depending on their motivational state, citizens must first expose themselves,

either intentionally or incidentally, to political information they regard as relevant (relevance

appraisal). Then, they must conclude that there is a gap between a present state and an

undesired/desired future state (discrepancy appraisal), and they must regard a future state as

attainable (attainability appraisal), which in turn leads to a formation of an explicit participatory

goal that must be activated against other goals in a real behavioral situation (dominant goal

appraisal). At each step, a potential impact of social media can be impeded, as for instance,

11
when people come to believe that there is a discrepancy between a present state and an undesired

state, but they feel one can't do anything about it or they simply activate more important

alternative goals in a behavioral situation. Even this model, however, is unable to incorporate the

full array of theoretical explanations for why social media matter in campaigns. We therefore

urge scholars to suggest new theories or theoretical models, understood as a network of

intertwined and testable assumptions, rather than isolating the effects of single independent

variables on various outcomes.

Conclusion

In closing, we believe that—building on the articles published in this special issue—

research on social media and political campaigning needs to address many challenges. We hope

that scholars across the world will use this special issue as a springboard for theory building and

an inspiration to design theoretically and methodologically demanding studies. There can be no

doubt that the future of political campaigning is closely tied to the content, uses, and effects of

social media, and therefore, our discipline will be measured on how we tackle these challenges in

our future work.

12
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