Tweetocracy Switzerland: exploring the representativeness, structuration and content of swiss party politics on twitter

This contribution puts forward an explorative account of the Swiss political parties' presence on Twitter. Social media in general, and the Twitter microblogging service more in particular, have recently received a lot of attention by scholars who try to harvest the new data source for the social sciences. However, the validity of these data sources is heavily disputed. Therefore, this contribution takes one step back and tries to establish the usefulness of political communication on Twitter for the political sciences in Switzerland, a context which is not well studied so far. More precisely, this study serves two main purposes. First, a descriptive overview over the geographical distribution, network structure and basic dynamic trends of Swiss Twitter accounts which are related to one of the political parties in Switzerland is presented. Subsequently, social network and text analyses are applied to provide evidence on the following questions. In terms of its representativeness, it can be shown that the Swiss partisan Twitter sphere is systematically biases towards the political left and urban areas. As for the structuration of the Twitter sphere, it is revealed that users are separated into a handful of highly networked actors and many peripheral ones. Furthermore, there are clear signs of political homophily among users of the same party. In terms of the Tweets communicated, left and small center parties show a more conversational style than right parties

Time dependency in topic models of media attention

Topic models are powerful methods to track the latent semantic structure in large collections of unstructured text. Recently, Roberts et al. (2014) introduced the structural topic model (STM), which makes these models interesting for a broad application in the social sciences. In an improvement to standard topic models, STM promises to control for different sources of bias in the text data as well as to allow experimentation and inferential analyses. One of the most important sources of bias in text collections are time dependencies. In most text collections, serial correlation possibly undermines the dynamic estimation of time-independent concepts such as media attention to policies or issues. In STM, time series can be modelled by using time trends or fixed effects. In this study, it is tested whether this is sufficient to measure the dynamic of media attention on simulated data sets as well as a large corpus of newspaper reports related to smoking bans in the US from 1996 until 2013

Varieties of Capitalist debates? National peculiarities in the debate on market liberalization in Britain, France and Germany

To the same extent as the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach has become widely renowned it has provoked criticism. Among the points of contention the VoC approach faces is its neglect of political conflict. Due to the selective focus on labor market interactions and institutions, the approach does not pay enough attention to the context of national economic networks, that is the role of the broad public debate and the public opinion. In this paper I will move beyond the simple bifurcation between liberal and coordinated market economies that most VoC literature assumes. Using the concept of public debates, I will study the supply and demand side of political conflict in Britain, France and Germany. More generally, I assume that the different types of capitalism lead to distinct camps of actors, variations in the relationships between economic and political actors, and distinct pat-terns in the public opinion. The analysis mainly relies on novel relational data from an extensive content analysis of newspapers from 2004 to 2006. Additionally, secondary data from surveys is used to study the role of the socio-structural base of conflict. The analysis confirms the distinct nature of different capitalist models and show how the patterns of political conflict on economic policies can be extended beyond the expectations derived from the VoC approach

Selective attention and the information environment: citizens’ perceptions of political problems in the 2015 swiss federal election campaign

In the course of election campaigns, voters pay only selectively attention to particular aspects of political problems. Such selective attention is necessary because the costs of becoming competent on many political problems are great. Normatively, however, such selective attention is not desirable because it lowers the chance that voters will reach well‐balanced and competent decisions. This contribution establishes the aspects of the four most salient problems from the 2015 Swiss federal election campaign: immigration, welfare, the economy and European integration. It further reveals that selective attention is higher among those who are interested in politics and who learn problem‐specific information on salient problems, and lower among those who are well‐educated, who engage in personal discussions, who use traditional media, and who learn problem‐specific information on less salient problems. Finally, it concludes that selective attention should be avoided in order to strengthen the citizens’ level of information on political problems

Newspaper coverage of female candidates during election cam paigns: evidence from a structural topic model

This paper studies how female candidates are covered by newspapers during election campaigns. Previous studies have generally found that the media portray men and women quite similarly, but they have tended to use relatively selective sources and to focus on the amount of coverage and its tone, but not on on its content. We aim to gain a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon by focusing on the Swiss national elections 2015, relying on an almost comprehensive sample of news items covering most of the duration of the campaign. Our dataset includes about 205,000 documents from 70 sources, covering over 3,900 male and female politicians. We analyze these texts first with a focus on the amount of coverage and second using structural topic models, a natural language processing technique that allows us to identify inductively the themes (topics) of newspaper coverage and, importantly, how the candidates’ gender is linked to both the topics and the language used to discuss them. Results reveal a gender bias in media attention only for non-incumbent candidates. Moreover, some topics, such as the one referring to the election campaign, is discussed more frequently in connection with female candidates, while others, such as topics focusing on personality and political profiles, are more prevalent in articles mentioning men. We uncover no major gender bias in the language used for these topics

Rebels without a clue: Internet exposure and political behavior in Switzerland

This contribution gauges the implication of the Internet's development from a niche to a mass communication technology for political behavior in Switzerland. Our theoretical framework allows to understand the conflicting effects of Internet exposure on polarization, political knowledge, trust in government, and interest in politics found by previous studies. Drawing on data from the Voxit surveys of popular votes from 2000 to 2010 as well as the Swiss Household Panel from 2000 to 2009, we show that the net effect of Internet exposure means increasing political polarization, less individual trust in government, more motivation for politics, and invariant political sophistication. This evidence leads to an overall ambivalent assessment regarding the role of the Internet for the disengagement or mobilization among Swiss citizens. The results are more robust compared to extant studies, since selection models and panel analysis are applied to control for sample bias and to isolate causal effects. Furthermore, only Internet exposure which directly relates to politics is considered, exposure to other potentially influential media is controlled for and an extensive time period is studied

Media malaise or mobilization: How do mass media affect electoral participation in established democracies

In modern democracies, elections are considered the central mechanism for people to control their elected representatives. They allow voters who are dissatisfied with those in power to periodically punish and replace them. However, this requires that political decision-making is transparent and that alternative party options are actually evident in the electoral contest. Accordingly, in line with mobilization theory, we assume that well-balanced and critical media coverage leads to a higher turnout. So far, only few studies exist which test these assumptions in a large comparative setting. To provide more empirical evidence on the relationship between media coverage and political participation, we combine data about press systems and from newspaper content analyses with opinion surveys and perform multi-level analyses. Contrary to our assumptions, we find that an ideological balance within the press system does not motivate citizens to take part in elections. In addition, newspapers reports about official misconduct tend to keep voters away from the ballot boxes. These findings rather lend support to media malaise theory