"Gone by lunchtime" : social policy, breakfast radio and the 2005 New Zealand election campaign : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Public Policy at Massey University

New Zealand's 2005 election was fought largely on ideological and social policy differences between the country's two largest political parties. The campaign was closely fought with opinion polls putting either the New Zealand Labour Party or the New Zealand National Party ahead at various times. Election campaigns are an important opportunity for policy debate as public interest in politics and the direction of policy is usually much higher than at other times. Parties attempt to convince voters that their policy programmes are sound and that their leaders are both capable and responsible. The media play an important role in allowing politicians to communicate their policies and personalities to the voter. In addition to direct political communication the media play an important role in debating politics and policy which becomes all the more important during an election campaign. Auckland has a saturated radio market with a large number of heterogeneous stations attempting to service niche demographics. Almost all of these have some news content. Using data collected from four Auckland breakfast radio shows this thesis attempts to explain the policy detail, ideology and personality-based appeals made by politicians on social policy in their attempt to sell their policy programme to the voter, while also exploring how this debate was covered by the breakfast radio shows. Both Labour and National Party politicians concentrated on policy detail and ideologically-based appeals when debating social policies. For both major parties those ideological appeals were, to some extent, contradictory to the targeting of their policies to middle-income voters. Meanwhile the analysis of this debate differed greatly from station to station, but on all stations examining social policies came second to reporting on the contest between to two parties to gain the Treasury Benches

Islamophobes are not all the same! A study of far right actors on Twitter

Far-right actors are often purveyors of Islamophobic hate speech online, using social media to spread divisive and prejudiced messages which can stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Hateful content can inflict harm on targeted victims, create a sense of fear amongst communities and stir up intergroup tensions and conflict. Accordingly, there is a pressing need to better understand at a granular level how Islamophobia manifests online and who produces it. We investigate the dynamics of Islamophobia amongst followers of a prominent UK far right political party on Twitter, the British National Party. Analysing a new data set of five million tweets, collected over a period of one year, using a machine learning classifier and latent Markov modelling, we identify seven types of Islamophobic far right actors, capturing qualitative, quantitative and temporal differences in their behaviour. Notably, we show that a small number of users are responsible for most of the Islamophobia that we observe. We then discuss the policy implications of this typology in the context of social media regulation

New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns

Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines

Between anger and love: A multi-level study on the impact of policy issues on user reactions in national election campaigns on Facebook in Germany, Hungary, and Norway

Eliciting user reactions is an important tactic for political actors using social media like Facebook to seek attention for campaign messages on policy issues. Still, little is known about policy issues’ effect on user reactions and how structural factors play into this relationship. Applying a standardized manual content analysis on Facebook posts from political parties and their top candidates during the German, Hungarian, and Norwegian national election campaigns in 2021/2022 (N = 4988), we investigate the relationship between policy issues and two of Facebook’s “emotional reactions” (“angry” and “love”). We find that posts addressing the economy, energy policy, and foreign policy drive more “angry” reactions, while environmental posts drive more “love” reactions. While effects are largely uniform across different party types, there are more variations between countries. Our analyses suggest that differences between individual parties and candidates and situational factors are vital to understanding the relationship between policy issues and user reactions.publishedVersio

Appraisal of Ethical Issues in the Media Framing of the Conflict in Peoples' Democratic Party

The core aim of this study is to provide media outfit, journalists and would-be journalists with higher education for peace with the aim of promoting among all journalists and politicians a spirit of understanding, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence, to stimulate cooperation among people, and to help lessen obstacles and threats to our internal democracy. Therefore, the study estimate the value of how newspapers in Nigeria, particularly Daily Trust, The Nation and Punch newspapers are setting agenda of conflict/peace journalism in reporting crisis ridden opposition party in their sustainability effort towards solidifying internal democracy; especially the issue of intra-party democracy which is vital to the development of the nation. In specific terms, the study focus on the recent crisis in Peoples’ Democratic Party by raising three objectives based on Johan Galtung classification of conflict/peace journalism. Empirical literatures were reviewed in line with the objectives of the study. A selected random sampling of 180 editions of selected newspapers published between August, 2016 to March, 2017 was reviewed using content analysis and discourse analysis research method. Results shows that conflict journalistic frame was the dominant frame adopted by the selected newspapers and stories that employ elite/government sources were prevalent and thereby contributed in escalating the tension between the two warring factions by focusing on groups differences and reaction to early stories. The framing and the social identity theories were also used to explain the study and it was discovered that the way the media have set the agenda and frame the conflict in Peoples’ Democratic Party has gone in a long way in determining party members’ drive for positive change and identity, self-esteem and social comparisons they make, this to large extent contributed to defection of members to other parties seeking an avenue to protect their political interest and office. Both the quantitative and qualitative data were clearly presented and analysed which helped in answering the research questions. Keywords: Conflict Sensitivism, Ethics, Framing, Internal Democracy, Intra-Party Conflict, PDP

Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets

In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter. Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i) tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii) COVID-19 related tweets in German from followers of the leaders of the five major Austrian political parties. Our research is based on recent work that introduces an unsupervised approach to extract framing bias and intensity in news using a dictionary of moral virtues and vices. In this paper, we use a more extensive dictionary and adapt it to German-language tweets. Overall, in both datasets, we observe a moral framing that is congruent with the public perception of the political parties. In the US dataset, democrats have a tendency to frame tweets in terms of care, while loyalty is a characteristic frame for republicans. In the Austrian dataset, we find that the followers of the governing conservative party emphasize care, which is a key message and moral frame in the party's COVID-19 campaign slogan. Our work complements existing studies on moral framing in social media. Also, our empirical findings provide novel insights into moral-based framing on COVID-19 in Austria.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICWSM-2021 - link to published version will be adde

Facebook as an instrument of election campaigning and voters’ engagement: comparing Czechia and Poland

Adding to the growing scholarship on the use and role of social media in election campaigning, this article examines and compares the character and determinants of Internet users’ engagement with political party communication in 2013 and 2015 Parliamentary election campaigns in Czechia and Poland. Apart from the relationship between the thematic focus of party-produced content and the level of users’ interactivity, the study also explores the way the tonality of users’ comments is influenced by different types of party communication, as well as by users’ gender. The results suggest that the level of support for a party status is largely independent of the content of the message in both countries. The type of content has, however, an effect on the intensity of criticism by the users, with policy-related subjects generating more negativity than mobilization- or campaign-oriented statuses. Finally, the study points to both gender gaps and gender as a strong predictor of user negativity, as female users – while constituting a minority of participants in both countries – tend to be significantly less negative in their comments towards the home party. Overall, the comparative study reveals both similarities and differences in the way Czech and Polish parties utilize Facebook as campaign platform, as well as in their respective Internet users’ engagement with parties messages

The Polyphonic Sounds of Europe: Users’ Engagement With Parties’ European-Focused Facebook Posts

It is an old concern in public and academic debates that people are not interested in European‐level issues, and even European Parliamentary election campaigns, which are the main democratic tools of the European Union (EU) to involve ordinary people into political decision‐making, are mostly about national‐level political topics. Moreover, even when European issues emerge, the context of its discussion is often harmful to European integration and strengthens the perceived importance of domestic politics. In the age of social media, however, users’ content preferences may significantly affect the presence of different political levels in political campaigns, but these preferences are still largely uncovered in academic literature. To fill this gap, we investigate the direct and moderated effects of European‐focused Facebook posts on user engagement drawing upon a content analysis dataset including 9,688 posts of 68 parties from 12 EU countries. In line with the well‐known second‐order election hypothesis (Reif & Schmitt, 1980) we hypothesize a negative direct main effect. However, we also assume that this effect is moderated by several content‐, and party‐level factors, and when people engage with European‐level contents they do it with those ones that are posted by populist parties, focused on a few divisive hot topics, and are framed with a negative tone. Moreover, we expect cross‐country differences. We find that on the whole, user engagement with national‐level political content prevails over the European‐level, but in some countries there are no remarkable differences in user engagement patterns of the two levels. While our findings mostly confirm the second‐order election hypothesis, they also demonstrate that European politics can spread within social media platforms in a less divisive and negative way than we expected. European‐focused posts do not perform better when they are posted by populist parties, focused selectively on the salient issues of immigration or environment, or framed in a negative way

Facing up to Facebook: politicians, publics and the social media(ted) turn in New Zealand

Social media have an increasingly important place in the lives of citizens, and their potential to expand the reach of communication messages beyond individual networks is attractive to those looking to maximise message efficiency. The influence of Facebook in Obama’s 2008 campaign success galvanised many politicians into taking it seriously as a campaign tool. Our study explored the Facebook wall posts (1148 in total) of New Zealand Members of Parliament (MPs) leading up to the 2011 general election to determine posting behaviours and differences. Among other things, we found that women posted more frequently than men and that Labour MPs posted more than their National counterparts. Additionally, most politicians do not invite dialogue with readers of their posts, rarely get involved in comment threads and mostly take a monologic approach, using Facebook as a way of broadcasting information rather than as a medium enabling two-way flow. In other words, same old, same old

Two patterns of opposition: Party Group Interaction in the Bavarian State Parliament

Most research on parliamentary opposition focuses on constitutional and institutional aspects. This article argues that these approaches are limited in explaining differences between opposition parties. A case study of the Bavarian State Parliament, shows that there is support for the assumption that complex patterns of a number of factors, such as individual party groups’ ideology, history, their members’ socio-demographic background, and their informal rules of engagement, influence the way opposition parties behave. The study shows distinctive differences between the appearance and the strategies employed to influence the majority’s decision-making. The Social Democrats, a traditional mass party with over 40 years in opposition, focused on a strategy of professional, subject-oriented co-operation within parliament. The Greens chose confrontational power policies that had their main effect outside parliament. This stands in line with the party’s origin in grassroots movements and its culture of conflict resolution. Those findings raise the question of how party identities and policies coincide with the preference of one opposition strategy over another and they contribute to the discussion of how parliamentary behaviour and representative roles are interwoven