Over the last five years, widespread concern about the effects of social media on democracy has led to an explosion in research from different disciplines and corners of academia. This book is the ...first of its kind to take stock of this emerging multi-disciplinary field by synthesizing what we know, identifying what we do not know and obstacles to future research, and charting a course for the future inquiry. Chapters by leading scholars cover major topics – from disinformation to hate speech to political advertising – and situate recent developments in the context of key policy questions. In addition, the book canvasses existing reform proposals in order to address widely perceived threats that social media poses to democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by ...vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.
Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes ...by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call “moral contagion.” Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.
Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but ...conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.
A major point of debate in the study of the Internet and politics is the extent to which social media platforms encourage citizens to inhabit online “bubbles” or “echo chambers,” exposed primarily to ...ideologically congenial political information. To investigate this question, we link a representative survey of Americans with data from respondents’ public Twitter accounts (N = 1,496). We then quantify the ideological distributions of users’ online political and media environments by merging validated estimates of user ideology with the full set of accounts followed by our survey respondents (N = 642,345) and the available tweets posted by those accounts (N ~ 1.2 billion). We study the extent to which liberals and conservatives encounter counter-attitudinal messages in two distinct ways: (a) by the accounts they follow and (b) by the tweets they receive from those accounts, either directly or indirectly (via retweets). More than a third of respondents do not follow any media sources, but among those who do, we find a substantial amount of overlap (51%) in the ideological distributions of accounts followed by users on opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the same time, however, we find asymmetries in individuals’ willingness to venture into cross-cutting spaces, with conservatives more likely to follow media and political accounts classified as left-leaning than the reverse. Finally, we argue that such choices are likely tempered by online news watching behavior.
There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence ...campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.
In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime,
attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are
likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances ...of success in
any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to
challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action
problem. When a regime commits electoral fraud, however, an
individual's calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest
against the regime can be changed significantly. This argument yields
important implications for how we interpret the wave of “colored
revolutions” that swept through Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and
Kyrgyzstan in the first half of this decade. Applying the collective
action framework to the colored revolutions also yields a parsimonious
contribution to the political science literature on social protest:
electoral fraud can be a remarkably useful tool for solving the collective
action problems faced by citizens in countries where governments are not,
to use Barry Weingast's language, appropriately restrained by the
populace. While modest, such an observation actually can speak to a
wide-ranging number of questions in the literature, including why people
choose to protest when they do, how protests at one place and time can
affect the likelihood for future protests, and new aspects of the
relationship between elections and protest.Joshua A. Tucker is Associate Professor of Politics at New
York University (joshua.tucker@nyu.edu). He would like to thank
participants in the First and Second Danyliw Research Seminars in
Contemporary Ukrainian Studies hosted by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at
the University of Ottawa and the Kennan Institute Workshop on Ukrainian
Civil Society for many helpful comments and suggestions on developing the
arguments contained in this article. He would also like to thank Dominique
Arel, Jessica Allina-Pisano, Mark Beissinger, Valerie Bunce, Paul
D'Anieri, Jerry Hough, Jason Lyall, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Lucan Way,
and William Zimmerman for their time in commenting on earlier drafts of
the paper, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Perspective on
Politics. Marc Berenson and Matthew Berner provided excellent
research assistance.
It is often claimed that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is the ...case, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media usage offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects associated with large‐scale collective action and social movements. In this article, we summarize evidence from studies of protest movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine demonstrating that: (1) Social media platforms facilitate the exchange of information that is vital to the coordination of protest activities, such as news about transportation, turnout, police presence, violence, medical services, and legal support; (2) in addition, social media platforms facilitate the exchange of emotional and motivational contents in support of and opposition to protest activity, including messages emphasizing anger, social identification, group efficacy, and concerns about fairness, justice, and deprivation as well as explicitly ideological themes; and (3) structural characteristics of online social networks, which may differ as a function of political ideology, have important implications for information exposure and the success or failure of organizational efforts. Next, we issue a brief call for future research on a topic that is understudied but fundamental to appreciating the role of social media in facilitating political participation, namely friendship. In closing, we liken the situation confronted by researchers who are harvesting vast quantities of social media data to that of systems biologists in the early days of genome sequencing.
Scholars and commentators have debated whether lower‐threshold forms of political engagement on social media should be treated as being conducive to higher‐threshold modes of political participation ...or a diversion from them. Drawing on an original survey of a representative sample of Italians who discussed the 2013 election on Twitter, we demonstrate that the more respondents acquire political information via social media and express themselves politically on these platforms, the more they are likely to contact politicians via e‐mail, campaign for parties and candidates using social media, and attend offline events to which they were invited online. These results suggest that lower‐threshold forms of political engagement on social media do not distract from higher‐threshold activities, but are strongly associated with them.
Abstract
Objective
The study sought to evaluate early lessons from a remote patient monitoring engagement and education technology solution for patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) ...symptoms.
Materials and Methods
A COVID-19–specific remote patient monitoring solution (GetWell Loop) was offered to patients with COVID-19 symptoms. The program engaged patients and provided educational materials and the opportunity to share concerns. Alerts were resolved through a virtual care workforce of providers and medical students.
Results
Between March 18 and April 20, 2020, 2255 of 3701 (60.93%) patients with COVID-19 symptoms enrolled, resulting in over 2303 alerts, 4613 messages, 13 hospital admissions, and 91 emergency room visits. A satisfaction survey was given to 300 patient respondents, 74% of whom would be extremely likely to recommend their doctor.
Discussion
This program provided a safe and satisfying experience for patients while minimizing COVID-19 exposure and in-person healthcare utilization.
Conclusions
Remote patient monitoring appears to be an effective approach for managing COVID-19 symptoms at home.
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