359 research outputs found
The early signs are that Belgium is heading for more political deadlock over who should form the next government
Belgium held federal elections in May, with negotiations currently on-going over the makeup of the next government. As Peter Van Aelst writes, a key concern is that the country could experience political deadlock of the kind which occurred after the 2010 elections, where it took 541 days of negotiations before a government could be formed. He notes that while there appears to be more urgency than there was in 2010, the linguistic cleavage between French and Dutch-speaking parties will still be exceptionally difficult to overcome
Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media
Traditionally, election campaigns are covered in the mass media with a strong focus on a limited number of top candidates. The question of this paper is whether this knowledge still holds today, when social media outlets are becoming more popular. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage
by attracting attention on Twitter? This study addresses these question by paring Twitter data with traditional media data for the 2014 Belgian elections. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed strongly related and that candidates with a prominent position in the media are generally also most successful on Twitter. This is not because more popularity on Twitter translates directly into more traditional media coverage, but mainly because largely the same political elite dominates both platforms
The same views, the same news? A 15-country study on news sharing on social media by European politicians
Social media allow politicians to circumvent the gatekeeping role of news media by providing a platform on which they can communicate directly with and to their electorates. Still, politicians share news items on their online platforms to promote themselves, criticize their opponents or to inform their following. Doing so, they signal the relevance of those news items and the outlets that published them to their online audiences, serving as secondary gatekeepers in the flow of information. In this paper, we study the ideological link between politicians and the audiences of the outlets they share on social media. Combining comparative survey data (N = 22,145) with Facebook posts (N = 21,061) by 2,142 MPs in 15 European countries, we assess whether the ideological alignment with news outletsâ audiences drives politiciansâ online news sharing. Findings confirm that the ideological alignment between a politician and a news outletâs audience predicts the politicianâs sharing of news by that outlet. Moreover, this connection is stronger for radical party politicians and in media systems that are characterized by higher levels of political parallelism. The results have important implications for partisan selective exposure to news and polarization in the digital information environment
Between centralized and decentralized personalization: the use of preferential voting in Belgium
Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media
Traditionally, election campaigns are covered in the mass media with a strong focus on a limited number of top candidates. The question of this paper is whether this knowledge still holds today, when social media outlets are becoming more popular. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage
by attracting attention on Twitter? This study addresses these question by paring Twitter data with traditional media data for the 2014 Belgian elections. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed strongly related and that candidates with a prominent position in the media are generally also most successful on Twitter. This is not because more popularity on Twitter translates directly into more traditional media coverage, but mainly because largely the same political elite dominates both platforms
High-Breakdown Robust Multivariate Methods
When applying a statistical method in practice it often occurs that some
observations deviate from the usual assumptions. However, many classical
methods are sensitive to outliers. The goal of robust statistics is to develop
methods that are robust against the possibility that one or several unannounced
outliers may occur anywhere in the data. These methods then allow to detect
outlying observations by their residuals from a robust fit. We focus on
high-breakdown methods, which can deal with a substantial fraction of outliers
in the data. We give an overview of recent high-breakdown robust methods for
multivariate settings such as covariance estimation, multiple and multivariate
regression, discriminant analysis, principal components and multivariate
calibration.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342307000000087 the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
What Politicians Look for in the News and How That Affects Their Behavior : A Uses and Gratifications Approach to Political Agenda Setting
Peer reviewe
Présidentialisation versus personnalisation? Clés de lecture à la baisse des votes préférentielles
Identifying the Drivers Behind the Dissemination of Online Misinformation: A Study on Political Attitudes and Individual Characteristics in the Context of Engaging With Misinformation on Social Media
The increasing dissemination of online misinformation in recent years has raised the question which individuals interact with this kind of information and what role attitudinal congruence plays in this context. To answer these questions, we conduct surveys in six countries (BE, CH, DE, FR, UK, and US) and investigate the drivers of the dissemination of misinformation on three noncountry specific topics (immigration, climate change, and COVID-19). Our results show that besides issue attitudes and issue salience, political orientation, personality traits, and heavy social media use increase the willingness to disseminate misinformation online. We conclude that future research should not only consider individualâs beliefs but also focus on specific user groups that are particularly susceptible to misinformation and possibly caught in social media âfringe bubbles.
The contingency of voter learning: how election debates influence votersâ ability and accuracy to position parties in the 2010 Dutch election campaign
Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about partiesâ issue positions, thereby increasing votersâ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on votersâ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on votersâ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate votersâ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas votersâ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewersâ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost votersâ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy
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