Chapter 9
Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2016 Austrian presidential
campaign
This paper explores the Twitter use by the candidates of the
2016 Austrian presidential campaign which lasted for almost one year and required
three ballots in sequence. The data corpus consists of all Twitter messages the
candidates posted during the campaign. Drawing on theoretical considerations
regarding politicians’ and political parties’ use of internet communication
technologies (esp. the innovation vs. the normalization hypotheses), the paper
explores the content level, the use of rhetorical actions, and selected aspects of
the interpersonal level of the data. Results show that the candidates’ communication
strategies cannot fully be explained by either of the two hypotheses and hence that
none of them can predict electoral success in this specific political campaign. It
is concluded that the two proposed hypotheses concerning the use of internet
communication technologies in the field of politics are too broad and that they have
to be modified to account for contextual aspects of specific political communication
situations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The use of ICTs in political communication
- 3.Methodological approach
- 4.The 2016 Austrian presidential campaign: Details and data
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
References
Ausserhofer, Julian, and Axel Maireder
2013 “
National
Politics on Twitter.”
Information, Communication
&
Society 16(3): 291–314.
Bruns, Axel, and Tim Highfield
2013 “
Political
Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State
Election.”
Information, Communication &
Society 16(5): 667–691.
Danesi, Marcel
2017 The
Semiotic of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the
Internet. London: Bloomsbury.
Draucker, Fawn, and Lauren B. Collister
2015 “
Managing
Participation through Modal Affordances on
Twitter.”
Open Library of
Humanities 1(1): 1–35.
Dynel, Marta
2014a “
On
the Part of Ratified Participants: Ratified Listeners in Multi-Party
Interactions.”
Brno Studies in
English 40(1): 27–44.
Dynel, Marta
2014b “
Participation
Framework Underlying YouTube
Interaction.”
Journal of
Pragmatics 73: 37–52.
Goffman, Erving
1959 The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books.
Graham, Todd, Marcel Broersma, Karin Hazelhoff, and Guido van ’t Haar
2013 “
Between
Broadcasting Political Messages and Interacting with Voters: The Use of Twitter
during the 2010 UK General Election
Campaign.”
Information, Communication &
Society 16(5): 692–716.
Gruber, Helmut
2018 “
Genres
of Political Communication in Web
2.0.” In
Handbook of
Political Communication, ed.
by
Ruth Wodak, and
Bernhard Forchner, 412–425. Abingdon: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K.
1994 An
Introduction to Functional
Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Hermans, Liesbeth, and Maurice Vergeer
2013 “
Personalization
in E-Campaigning: A Cross-National Comparison of Personalization Strategies Used
on Candidate Websites of 17 Countries in EP Elections
2009.”
New Media &
Society 15(1): 72–92.
Jackson, Nigel A., and Darren G. Lilleker
2009 “
Building
an Architecture of Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in
Britain.”
Journal of Information Technology &
Politics 6(3–4): 232–250.
John, Nicholas A.
2013 “
Sharing
and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword.”
New
Media &
Society 15(2): 167–182.
Jungherr, Andreas
2014 “
Twitter
in Politics: A Comprehensive Literature Review.”
[URL] (accessed 7 April
2016).
Koc-Michalska, Karolina, Darren G. Lilleker, Alison Smith, and Daniel Weissmann
2016 “
The
Normalization of Online Campaigning in the Web.2.0
Era.”
European Journal of
Communication 31(3): 331–350.
Larsson, Anders Olof
2013 “
‘Rejected
Bits of Program Code’: Why Notions of ‘Politics 2.0’ Remain (Mostly)
Unfulfilled.”
Journal of Information Technology
&
Politics 10(1): 72–85.
Larsson, Anders Olof, and Øyvind Ihlen
2015 “
Birds
of a Feather Flock Together? Party Leaders on Twitter during the 2013 Norwegian
Elections.”
European Journal of
Communication 30(6): 666–681.
Larsson, Anders Olof, and Bente Kalsnes
2014 “
‘Of
Course We Are on Facebook’: Use and Non-Use of Social Media among Swedish and
Norwegian Politicians.”
European Journal of
Communication 29(6): 653–667.
Lockhart, Michele
(ed.) 2018 President
Donald Trump and His Political Discourse: Ramifications of Rhetoric via
Twitter. New York: Routledge.
Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White
2007 Language
of Evaluation: Appraisal in
English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd
2011 “
To
See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on
Twitter.”
Convergence: The International Journal
of Research into New Media
Technologies 17(2): 139–158.
Ott, Brian L.
2017 “
The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of
Debasement.”
Critical Studies in Media
Communication 34(1): 59–68.
Riboni, Giorgia
2015 “
Enhancing
Citizen Engagement: Political Weblogs and Participatory
Democracy.” In
Participation
in Public and Social Media Interactions, ed.
by
Marta Dynel, and
Jan Chovanec, 259–280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sbisà, Marina
2009 “
Uptake
and Conventionality in Illocution.”
Lodz Papers
in
Pragmatics 5(1): 33–52.
Schweitzer, Eva Johanna
2008 “
Innovation
or Normalization in E-Campaigning?: A Longitudinal Content and Structural
Analysis of German Party Websites in the 2002 and 2005 National
Elections.”
European Journal of
Communication 23(4): 449–470.
Thompson, Geoff
1996 Introducing
Functional
Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Vergeer, Maurice, Liesbeth Hermans, and Steven Sams
2013 “
Online
Social Networks and Micro-Blogging in Political Campaigning: The Exploration of
a New Campaign Tool and a New Campaign
Style.”
Party
Politics 19(3): 477–501.
Verschueren, Jef
1999 Understanding
Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold.
Vitak, Jessica
2012 “
The
Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site
Disclosures.”
Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic
Media 56(4): 451–470.
Yaqub, Ussama, Soon Ae Chun, Vijayalakshmi Atluri, and Jaideep Vaidya
2017 “
Analysis
of Political Discourse on Twitter in the Context of the 2016 US Presidential
Elections.”
Government Information
Quarterly 34(4): 613–626.
Zappavigna, Michele
2011 “
Ambient
Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on
Twitter.”
New Media &
Society 13(5): 788–806.
Zappavigna, Michele
2017 “
Twitter.” In
Pragmatics
of Social Media, ed. by
Christian Hoffmann, and
Wolfram Bublitz, 201–224. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Shukrun-Nagar, Pnina & Galia Hirsch
2023.
What kind of laughter?.
Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.