Recognizing Campaign Effects on Social Media: A Computerized Text Analysis of the 2015 Canadian General Election on Facebook
Date
2019-09-13
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Abstract
Previous research demonstrates that traditional campaign strategies such as door-to-door canvassing and advertisement have minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political attitudes and vote choice while simultaneously demonstrating strong activation effects on voters’ existing preferences. From this literature, numerous theoretical perspectives on campaign contact have emerged. The most predominant is the minimal effects thesis, which posits that campaigns have minimal effect influencing voters’ political attitudes, vote choice, and consequently, election outcomes. In contrast, the activation effects thesis posits that campaigns are consequential to election outcomes because campaign contact activates voters’ existing political preferences and mobilizes the electorate to vote. This thesis proposes to reconcile the two theoretical perspectives by demonstrating that the same type of campaign contact may have both minimal persuasive effects on voters’ political preferences and strong activation effects on voters’ emotions. The thesis hypothesizes then that campaign contact evokes emotional responses that encourage rather than discourage voting. To this end, the thesis examines campaign effects online from a unique dataset queried from Facebook consisting of federal party leaders’ campaign messages (N = 1,711) and the responses to those messages from everyday Facebook users (n = 92,813) during the 2015 Canadian general election campaign. Computational social science methods are employed to directly measure campaign contact’s persuasive and activation effects on partisan and nonpartisan Facebook users. The results demonstrate that campaign contact online has a minimal persuasive effect on Facebook users’ self-expressed political preferences as well as strong activation effects on those preferences. Activation effects manifest as emotional responses that are most pronounced when individuals react to attitude-divergent rather than attitude-consistent campaign messaging. Exposure to attitude-divergent contact evokes Facebook users to experience discrete negative emotions such as anger, which previous research has shown to increase the electorate’s propensity to vote. The efficacy of negative emotions, however, may incentivize political parties to adopt strategies that demonize political opponents and which may, therefore, contribute to negative partisanship online.
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Keywords
social media, political parties, campaign effects, emotions, persuasion, activation, Facebook
Citation
Czarnecki, L. (2019). Recognizing Campaign Effects on Social Media: A Computerized Text Analysis of the 2015 Canadian General Election on Facebook (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.