Coalition and opposition MPs on facebook

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Social Media platforms are today the main spheres in which politicians make political and personal statements, confront other public figures and interact with the public. In the current study, the Facebook pages of all Israeli MPs were scraped and analyzed for the entire period of the 19th Israeli parliament service (between 2013-2015), in order to find similarities and differences between the posting behavior and acceptance of coalition and opposition members. We found that popular posts published by members of coalition and opposition differ in terms of scope of publication, scope of user engagement (posts by coalition members were more engaged-with), content and format (posts by members of opposition more varied in format, more mobilizing, critical, opinionative and negative, less formal but also less personal). The implications for the character of Facebook as a key parliamentary discursive arena are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
Subtitle of host publicationGovernance in the Data Age, DG.O 2018
EditorsCharles C. Hinnant, Anneke Zuiderwijk
ISBN (Electronic)9781450365260
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 May 2018
Event19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age, DG.O 2018 - Delf, Netherlands
Duration: 30 May 20181 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age, DG.O 2018
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityDelf
Period30/05/181/06/18

Keywords

  • Big data analysis
  • Content analysis
  • E-campaigning
  • E-parliament
  • Facebook
  • Political communication
  • Political discourse
  • Social media
  • Virality

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Cite this