FACULDADE DE CIENCIAS SOCIAIS E HUMANAS

CURSO DE LICENCIATURA EM CIÊNCIA POLÍTICA E RELAÇÕES

INTERNACIONAIS

Trabalho de Campo da Cadeira de: Inglês

Tema: The use of media has a great influence during election campaigns this days

Hermenegildo Narciso Carlos

Código do Estudante: 21230478

Tutor: Celestino Amaro Mucavele Jó

Nampula, Maio de 2023

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Índice
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3
Election campaigning on social media .......................................................................................... 4
Yes it Influences ............................................................................................................................ 4
Strategic Election Campaigning On Social Media ........................................................................ 4
Social Media as Part of Multifunctional Online Campaigns ......................................................... 5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................... 8
References ..................................................................................................................................... 9

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Introduction
The present work focus on election campaigning on social media, the media play an
indispensable role in the proper functioning of a democracy. Discussion of the media's
functions within electoral contexts, often focuses on their "watchdog" role: by unfettered
scrutiny and discussion of the successes and failures of candidates, governments, and
electoral management bodies, the media can inform the public of how effectively they
have performed and help to hold them to account.

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Election campaigning on social media

Yes it Influences
Election campaigning on social media has been studied extensively, as researchers
examined how election campaigns unfold, how candidates are embedded in
communication networks, and how they interact among themselves and with the public
(cf. Boulianne, Citation2016; Jungherr, Citation2016b). Still, in terms of cross-media
research, this literature is limited in several regards: first, most studies focused on one
isolated platform, overwhelmingly Twitter and—less often—Facebook. Second, only a
fraction of this work concentrated on the actual contents of communication going beyond
meta data (i.e., digital traces left by communication artifacts like @-messages, retweets,
likes, or hashtags). While several studies coded contents of social media posts by U.S.
politicians (Bronstein, Citation2013; Gainous & Wagner, Citation2014; Golbeck,
Grimes, & Rogers, Citation2010), these efforts mostly consisted of smaller samples
and/or did not specifically categorize the topics politicians talk about. Third, most
research is confined to the boundaries of election campaigning on a given social media
platform. The few cross-platform analyses either restricted themselves to main accounts
of party organizations (Larsson, Citation2015; Rossi & Orefice, Citation2016) or metrics
of attention like the number of views or followers on multiple platforms (Nielsen &
Vaccari, Citation2013). In recent advances, Karlsen and Enjolras (Citation2016) linked a
candidate survey with Twitter data to uncover candidates’ strategies and determinants of
Twitter success. Bode and colleagues (Citation2016) compared television advertisements
with Twitter data and identified deviations indicating that the two media represent distinct
modes of campaigning. Building on that, a comparison between multiple social media
platforms might reveal even more fine-grained affordances of different media. Such
platform-specific mediation effects urgently need to be taken into account in models of
political communication (Jungherr et al., Citation2016).

Strategic Election Campaigning On Social Media

Politicians seeking election need to be responsive to the political preferences of their
constituencies (Downs, Citation1957). However, it is an open question if politicians tailor
their online messages to the topic priorities of a mass audience or particular social media
audiences. In contrast to Druckman and colleagues (Citation2010), who revealed rather
traditional strategies on campaign websites, we argue that social media poses a yet again
different communication constellation: politicians are embedded in an interactive context
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that skews their messages to the topic preferences of their immediate communication
network (see also Bode et al., Citation2016). This might be due to strategic reasoning in
order to increase the success of messages or an unwitting outcome of the uses and
gratifications of politicians themselves.

Social Media as Part of Multifunctional Online Campaigns

When theorizing on the topics of politicians’ campaign messages, at least three arguments
indicate that social media indeed pose campaign environments distinct from mass
communication arenas. First, we have to consider that social media are not only used to
address political topics important to a mass audience, but perform several other functions
in election campaigns. Kobayashi and Ichifuji (Citation2015), for instance, identified
three functions: promoting issue positions, demonstrating beneficial personality traits,
and improving name recognition. Jungherr (Citation2016a) proposed a fourfold typology
distinguishing among organizational uses, active campaigning in information spaces,
resource collection and allocation, as well as symbolic purposes.

Second, the demographic composition as well as the political preferences and interests of
social media audiences are much different from a representative sample of citizens (Diaz
et al., Citation2016; Schoen et al., Citation2013). Campaigns should tailor their messages
to specific audiences and successful marketing strategies on social media.

Third, candidates themselves have different uses and gratifications of online media
(Hoffmann & Suphan, Citation2017; Marcinkowski & Metag, Citation2014). One of the
central features of the Internet is its coalescence of private and public functions
(McQuail, Citation2010, p. 41), and many German politicians indeed operate their
Twitter accounts personally (Spiegel Online, Citation2015). Studying individual-level
predictors of online campaigning, Marcinkowski and Metag (Citation2014) revealed that
German state-level candidates with a more positive attitude toward the Internet use its
applications more intensively. Hoffmann and Suphan (Citation2017) reported that
although the motives self-promotion and information dissemination are dominant among
Swiss politicians, which is consistent with traditional modes of campaigning, they also
use social media for more personal uses like information seeking and entertainment. The
authors conclude that “specific motives—possibly based on varying levels of
understanding of and experience with new media—can lead to more or less avid and
strategic ICT adoption” (Hoffmann & Suphan, Citation2017, p. 251).

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Given the multiple functions of campaigns as well as an engagement with specific
audiences by a considerable share of candidates, it can be assumed that the topics salient
in politicians’ social media messages do not necessarily reflect the topic priorities of a
mass audience.

The media play an indispensable role in the proper functioning of a

democracy. Discussion of the media's functions within electoral contexts, often focuses
on their "watchdog" role: by unfettered scrutiny and discussion of the successes and
failures of candidates, governments, and electoral management bodies, the media can
inform the public of how effectively they have performed and help to hold them to
account. Yet the media also have other roles in enabling full public participation in
elections:

▪ by educating voters on how to exercise their democratic rights;

▪ by reporting on the development of an election campaign;

▪ by providing a platform for the political parties and candidates to communicate

their message to the electorate;

▪ by providing a platform for the public to communicate their concerns, opinions,

and needs, to the parties/candidates, the EMB, the government, and to other
voters, and to interact on these issues;

▪ by allowing the parties and candidates to debate with each other;

▪ by reporting results and monitoring vote counting;

▪ by scrutinizing the electoral process itself, including electoral management, in

order to evaluate the fairness of the process, its efficiency, and its probity;

▪ by providing information that, as far as possible, avoids inflammatory language,

helping to prevent election-related violence.

The media are not the sole source of information for voters, but in a world dominated by
mass communications, it is increasingly the media that determine the political agenda,
even in less technologically developed countries. A report by the Cairo Institute for
Human Rights Studies put it this way:

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The media plays a major role in keeping the citizenry abreast of current events and raising
awareness of various issues in any society. It also has an extremely significant impact on
the public’s views and way of thinking. The media is the primary means through which
public opinion is shaped and at times manipulated. If this is the media’s role then in
normal course of events, it becomes even more vital in exceptional periods, one of which
is electoral junctures, when the media becomes a primary player. Elections constitute a
basic challenge to the media, putting its impartiality and objectivity to the test. The task
of the media, especially national media outlets, is not and should not be to function as a
mouthpiece for any government body or particular candidate. Its basic role is to enlighten
and educate the public and act as a neutral, objective platform for the free debate of all
points of view.

It is for this reason that election observation teams, for example, routinely comment upon
media access and coverage of elections as a criterion for judging whether elections are
fair. Monitoring the media during election periods has become an increasingly common
practice, using a combination of statistical analysis and the techniques of media studies
and discourse analysis to measure media’s role in an election.

The numerous ways in which media ensure democratic electoral processes generally fall
into one of the following categories:

▪ Media as transparency/watchdog

▪ Media as a campaign platform

▪ Media as open forum for debate and discussion/public voice

▪ Media as public educator

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Conclusion
New media have both expanded and undercut the traditional roles of the press in a
democratic society. On the positive side, they have vastly increased the potential for
political information to reach even the most disinterested citizens. They enable the
creation of digital public squares where opinions can be openly shared. They have created
new avenues for engagement that allow the public to connect in new ways with
government, and to contribute to the flow of political information.

At the same time, the coalescence of the rise of new media and post-truth society has
made for a precarious situation that subverts their beneficial aspects. Presently, it appears
as if there are few effective checks on the rising tide of false information. Substituting
scandal coverage for serious investigative journalism has weakened the press’ watchdog
role. The ambiguous position of the media as a mouthpiece for politicians renders
journalists complicit in the proliferation of bad information and faulty facts. It is
important to recognize that American journalism has never experienced a “golden age”
where facts always prevailed and responsible reporting was absolute. However, the
current era may mark a new low for the democratic imperative of a free press.

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