The study investigates the extent to which political parties, the mass media, and citizens follow qualitative principles demanded by the public sphere concept in political campaign communications. ...Using the index of a quality of understanding (IQU), it analyses the press releases and Facebook posts of political parties, newspaper articles, and responses by citizens in the form of comments in newspaper forums and on parties’ Facebook pages (N=7,525) during the 2013 Austrian national election. Considering that the quality of understanding of public discourse is measured on a 100-point scale, which serves as a benchmark representing perfect understanding, observed real-world values are often rather low. Austrian political parties scored the highest IQU of 28.35 points, and hence can be described as most closely following the principles of an ideal communication orientation. The quality of understanding is the lowest in everyday political discussion on Facebook, where political parties’ posts have an IQU of 17.97 points. The difference of 10.38 points to the highest achieved value of 28.35 reveals different deliberative communication practices between well-considered and strategically formulated communication in press releases as well as newspaper articles and everyday communication including citizens’ comments on Facebook and newspaper articles, which take different configurations.
This article explores Swedish parties’ activities on Instagram during the 2014 elections. Understanding party campaign communication as highly strategic, that is, communication to persuade and ...mobilize voters in order to win the elections, we ask whether Instagram was used to (1) broadcast campaign messages, (2) mobilize supporters, (3) manage the party’s image, and (4) amplify and complement other campaign material (i.e., hybrid campaign use). With this study, we follow previous studies on the use of digital communication platforms in the hands of campaigning political actors, but we direct our attention to a new platform. We conducted a content analysis of 220 party postings on Instagram, collected during the hot phase of the campaign. The result shows that the platform was mainly used for broadcasting rather than for mobilization. The image the parties were presenting leaned toward personalization with a strong presence of top candidates in their postings. Top candidates were primarily displayed in a political/professional context. Finally, half of the analyzed postings showed signs of hybridized campaign practices. The presented findings give a first glimpse on how political parties use and perform on Instagram.
This thematic issue of Media and Communication focuses attention on the shift towards visual images on social media as well as the transformation of visual communication which has occurred within the ...online ecology of social media platforms. The sharing of images is becoming an integral part of the social media experience today, and given that social media platforms are the prime locus for sociability—at least among young people in the West—this shift towards visuals arguably transforms how we relate to each other and the world around us, as well as how we perceive and construct our sense of self. For researchers, this raises conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges. This thematic issue presents six articles as well as a book review on visual communication in social media focusing on developing a conceptual apparatus and precise definitions of objects and practices of study as well as contributions that address and discuss the methodological challenges as well as their potential solutions. The idea was to synergize research from a wide variety of communication-related disciplines on this rather new topic.
For a few years now, members of the government in Austria have been using Facebook to reach out to the public as well as to the mass media. Following normative guidelines and regulations, tax-funded ...government communication should be neutral, informative and autonomous of party politics. Using a multi-method approach, combining a structural analysis of formal criteria of Facebook accounts and an automated quantitative content analysis of Facebook postings, we investigated to what extent the official Facebook accounts of members of the last two Austrian governments were an exclusive tool for digital government communication. We found that not all representatives made use of Facebook. Moreover, tax-funded digital government communication on Facebook was not all neutral and autonomous of party politics. Based on our findings, we conclude that there is a lack of regulatory framework in Austria to govern tax-funded use of social media.
Along with the recent boom in support of populist movements in Europe, social media seems to be the ideal place for their interaction with the public. While Facebook has been thoroughly explored for ...populist campaigning, there is still scarce research on visual aspects of their communication. Analysing the 2019 European Parliament campaign, this study seeks to determine the distinct characteristics of a populist visual communication style and its differences in relation to the non-populist parties. Applying quantitative content analysis to the images (N = 997) posted on Facebook by political parties from 28 countries enabled us to show that there is a predominance of similarities in both communication styles. Although populists demonstrated a higher propensity to depict their leader and use national symbols, these were exceptions to the overwhelming evidence of uniformity in campaigning methods. Hence, we argue that despite evidence of textual visibility, populist communication does not explicitly manifest through images.
With the rise of social media platforms based on the sharing of pictures and videos, the question of how such platforms should be studied arises. Previous research on social media (content) has ...mainly focused on text (written words) and the rather text-based social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Drawing on research in the fields of visual, political, and business communication, we introduce a methodological framework to study the fast-growing image-sharing service Instagram. This methodological framework was developed to study political parties' Instagram accounts and tested by means of a study of Swedish political parties during the 2014 election campaign. In this article, we adapt the framework to also study other types of organizations active on Instagram by focusing on the following main questions: Do organizations only use Instagram to share one-way information, focusing on disseminating information and self-presentation? Or is Instagram used for two-way communication to establish and cultivate organization-public relationships? We introduce and discuss the coding of variables with respect to four clusters: the perception of the posting, image management, integration, and interactivity.
In the recent past, social media has become a central channel and means for political and societal mobilization. Mobilization refers to the process by which political parties, politicians, social ...movements, activists, and other political and social actors induce citizens to participate in politics in order to win elections, convince others of their own positions, influence policies, and modify rulings. While not sufficient on its own for facilitating participation, mobilization is necessary for participation to occur, which justifies examining mobilization specifically to understand how people can be involved in politics. This thematic issue of Media and Communication presents various perspectives on the role of social media in mobilization, embracing both its recruitment side (traditional and non-established political actors, social and protest movements) and its network side (the ways citizens respond to mobilization appeals). Taken together, the thematic issue highlights the multifaceted nature and scholarly fruitfulness of mobilization as an independent concept.
Digitalization has affected working practices in the field of public relations over the past two decades. Consequently, the skills and competences that are expected from public relations ...professionals are theorized to have undergone stark changes, with obvious implications for educators, role perceptions, and the professionals themselves. Job postings provide information about these changes by describing the skills employers expect and desire from applicants. To date, only a few studies have used this source of information, and these mostly concern the U.S. market using small samples of job postings. The purpose of this study is to enrich our understanding of how digitalization has impacted the skillsets required of public relations practitioners through the longitudinal automated semantic analysis of 62,391 public relations job postings published in Austria and Germany between 2015 and 2020. The analysis shows an increase in the number of hard skills demanded in PR in this region over the past five years. This change is particularly pronounced with respect to digital skills, thus underlining the importance of digitalization in public relations. The detailed and up-to-date findings describing what the job market is currently looking for and how it is changing will be useful for educators in developing and aligning PR curricula and advanced training programmes.
•Investigates skills and competences PR practitioners need.•Longitudinal automated semantic analysis of 62,391 public relations job postings.•Hard skills are at the heart of PR job postings.•Digital skills are increasingly requested in PR jobs postings.•Country similarities are greater than country differences.
In today’s hybrid media system, communication professions are connected to media convergence, and this leads to a blurring of boundaries between journalism, public relations (PR), and marketing. Our ...study demonstrates the blurring boundaries of the communication professions through a longitudinal automated semantic analysis of 336,629 job postings in the fields of journalism, PR, and marketing published between 2015 and 2020 in Austria and Germany. Similarities in skills demanded in job postings in journalism, PR, and marketing in Austria and Germany are greater than differences, but the three job fields are still distinguishable from each other.
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