Studying Politics Across Media

Leticia Bode, Emily K. Vraga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367194536
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book highlights the diverse methods needed to study a complex media environment, and the nuance and richness of the understanding gained by doing so, by offering examples of political communication research considering multiple platforms simultaneously.

Political communication research that considers multiple media platforms is difficult and expensive to perform, and therefore relatively rare. Yet studying media platforms in isolation ignores the realities of the varied and complicated contemporary media experience, where most individuals consume information from multiple media outlets. Media platforms, from traditional outlets such as newspapers and television to newer online platforms such as social media, have proliferated in recent years. This makes the media environment itself more complex, as classic understandings of how the media function give way to a growing recognition of the hybrid media system, where divisions between content and producers are opaque, and where information is gleaned from increasingly diverse and numerous sources.

Studying political communication across platforms allows better understanding of which types of experiences and effects are universal, and which are specific to particular platforms.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Political Communication.

Studying Politics Across Media

LETICIA BODE and EMILY K. VRAGA

High quality cross-platform research is difficult and expensive to perform in political communication. Yet studying media platforms in isolation ignores the realities of the contemporary media experience. As platforms multiply, the media environment itself has become more complicated, as classic understandings of media ecology give way to a growing recognition of the hybrid media system. In studying political communication across platforms, we can better understand what types of experiences and effects are universal, and which are specific to a particular platform. This special issue highlights the diverse methods needed to study a complex media environment and the nuance and richness of understanding we gain by doing so. We urge researchers to extend their research outside of a single platform, to consider the context and affordances of multiple platforms, and to focus on a more ecological approach to the modern media environment.

Research in political communication is often very focused, examining a single platform in isolation.¹ This research is enormously useful, in that it gives us a better understanding of the use, the content, and the effects of specific media platforms. However, it is also quite limited, in that it fails to recognize the diverse, fragmented, and complex modern media environment, of which a single media platform is only a small part.

There are many reasons for this trend, centered mainly around the difficulty in performing high-quality cross-platform research. First, many corporations that operate media platforms are unwilling to provide information about their audiences to researchers. This is particularly the case with regards to algorithmic curation that increasingly drives exposure, making it difficult to determine just what types of content an individual can access (Lazer, 2015; Thorson & Wells, 2016).

Second, differences in the availability and use of privacy settings across platforms often obscure some types of behaviors (Wells & Thorson, 2016). As a result, some media platforms are easier to study than others, and research often focuses on those platforms (Ahmed, 2017; Boulianne, 2016; Lutz, in press). Moreover, the privacy landscape is constantly shifting; a platform that had previously allowed research activity may adjust its terms of service to eliminate those possibilities for future research. These differing barriers also make it difficult to triangulate a single person’s behaviors across a range of platforms.

Third, some platforms are differently unitized, making comparison across them more difficult. A tweet is 140 characters, but how does that compare to a newspaper article of 500 words? Campaign advertisements are traditionally 30 seconds, but on YouTube they can stretch much longer. These differences in content make its comparison difficult. Similarly, consumption across platforms can be difficult to compare. Classic strategies for measuring media attention (Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986; Eveland, Hutchens, & Shen, 2009)), for example, may not translate to newer platforms designed for short and frequent bursts of consumption.

Finally, the combination of these factors, as well as more general research trends, render media research increasingly expensive. This can create barriers between researchers with the technological expertise or appropriate funding to capture cross-platform behaviors and those without such resources.

As a result, only rarely do multiple media come together in a study of political communication. This Special Issue was designed to push the discipline toward doing the difficult work of studying politics across media.

Why Study Politics Across Media?

Scholars have long acknowledged that the media environment is a complicated beast. The term media ecology, coined in 1968 (according to Strate, 2004), sums up the idea that media cannot and should not be considered in isolation (Postman, 1970).

The growth of digital media, and the fragmentation in media outlets and programming that it has spurred (Tsfati, Stroud, & Chotiner, 2014), further complicates the study of media. The hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013) means that it is increasingly difficult to meaningfully understand the role of a single medium in isolation. While digital platforms abound, more than two-thirds of the research on social media focuses on a single platform, and that platform is often Facebook (Rains & Brunner, 2015). When it comes to analyzing content, Twitter is similarly dominant, given the ready availability of its data in comparison to other social media platforms (Ahmed, 2017; Lutz, in press). As Karpf (2016) puts it, we are suffering from a particular form of availability bias: “It is easy to gather data for Twitter studies. It is harder to navigate the Facebook terms of service, and even harder still to cobble together a comprehensive email dataset. As a result… we study the kinds of social media that we can access, regardless of their relative importance in political life” (p. 174).

This focus on single platforms ignores a great deal. We have long known that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964), and this continues to be true. Platforms themselves include a wealth of context in addition to their content. Newspapers have headlines that convey the importance of an issue (Tewksbury & Althaus, 2000), televised debates include crowd and candidate reactions that shape audience perceptions (Cho, Shah, Nah, & Brossard, 2009), and online ratings provide social influence cues that shape later behaviors (Messing & Westwood, 2014; Muchnik, Aral, & Taylor, 2013).

An entire literature has grown around the idea that digital platforms have different affordances—their material features and individual usage patterns (Boyd, 2010; Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017; Treem & Leonardi, 2012). These affordances vary dramatically from platform to platform (Schrock, 2015), and different affordances lead to different uses and therefore different effects (Bode et al., 2016; Ellison & Vitak, 2015; Rice et al., 2017; Vraga & Bode, in press). Still, there exists “a strong tendency among scholars of Internet politics to treat all digital media as though they share the same affordances, which are then contrasted with the affordances of older communications technologies” (Karpf, 2016, p. 62). Equally often, the affordances of platforms—including those from old media—and the effects of those affordances on content, use, and effects, are ignored entirely.

So What do We Learn When We Study Politics Across Media?

This Special Issue is only a first step in a movement within political communication toward studying politics across media. The six articles contained in the issue, employing a range of methods across international contexts, bear witness to the additional leverage, nuance, and context that can result from doing so.

From the elite perspective, Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor’s interviews with campaign professionals during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign highlight the difficulties in utilizing the wide range of social media platforms strategically and effectively. Based on their interviews, the authors propose that studies of elite use of social media platforms should incorporate five related concepts: audiences, affordances, genres, candidate personality, and campaign timing. The first three components—audiences, affordances, and genres—suited to a particular platform are only moderately fluid. An audience of a particular platform does change over time (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016), but such change is often gradual. Likewise, affordances and genres tend to develop alongside audience needs and technological changes, rather than emerging spontaneously. Yet the authors also highlight the idiosyncratic nature of cross-platform research: A successful strategy for one candidate may not be replicated for another one using the same platform with the same audiences, affordances, and genres, if it does not suit the candidate’s personality or the timing of the campaign message. As a result, this study highlights the enduring ephemeral nature of studying strategic political communication across platforms.

Even as campaigns attempt to take advantage of social media platforms, Kang, Fowler, Franz, and Ridout remind us that these new media strategies must be understood in the context of more traditional forms of campaigning. In an attention economy, candidates’ efforts to define an issue agenda for their campaigns become even more important. Within the context of the 2014 Senate campaigns, Ridout and colleagues found that campaigns tended to discuss relatively distinct issues in their e-mail communications with (presumed) supporters as compared to their television advertisements or Twitter posts, although more competitive races tended to produce more issue convergence across platforms. This raises interesting questions about the intersection between the ability to precisely microtarget audiences using some platforms (for example, e-mail), versus the more public nature of other types of campaign messages (Twitter, advertisements). Recognizing that different audiences receive different information from and about campaigns further complicates traditional notions of democratic accountability.

A third article in this Special Issue examines elite communication from politicians in Germany during the federal election campaigns in 2013 on Facebook versus Twitter. Stier, Bleier, Lietz, and Strohmaier find that while politicians use Facebook versus Twitter differently in targeting their supporters, there are greater similarities between the candidates’ issue agendas across platforms than to the concerns of a mass audience. This difference between elites and audiences in their use of social media for political communication makes it important to consider how people receive information depending on the platform or modality in which it is encountered, which is the focus of the next three articles.

While elites strategically select the types of content they share, audiences are by no means obliged to pay attention to or learn from that content. Kruikemeier, Lecheler, and Boyle use an innovative eye-tracking design to examine how the modality of news consumption shapes attention patterns and knowledge. Their findings suggest that reading news on a news website as compared to a print newspaper or tablet tended to produce more selective attention to articles of interest to an individual, producing greater learning for that topic. Conversely, consuming the news through a tablet or print version tended to produce greater overall learning of diverse topics, given the greater non-differentiated attention it creates. Selectivity that occurs online was reinforced, both from elites choosing what to post and individuals choosing what to attend to, driven in part by the ways in which information is presented and consumed in diverse spaces.

While the previous articles focused on the types of information that political elites and mainstream media organizations share across platforms, they do not examine the role that tone plays in this process. But concerns about incivility in political venues are longstanding (see Lau & Rovner, 2009, for an overview). Sydnor finds that perceptions of incivility differ depending on the format in which uncivil interactions are encountered, even when the content itself remains constant. A series of two experimental designs finds that video and audio exchanges lead to higher perceptions of incivility than textual exchanges—either as transcripts or as Twitter fights. These perceptual differences are consistent across a range of interactions, including journalistic interviews of politicians, roundtable discussions of policy, or exchanges between politicians and activists. However, uncivil Twitter fights were seen as both relatively civil and entertaining compared to the other interactions, suggesting interesting implications for the role of new media platforms in political conversations.

The final article in this issue examines participation that occurs outside of organized political structures. Examining protest behaviors among young adults in Chile in 2014, Valenzuela, Correa, and Gil de Zúñiga find that the mechanism by which social media use translates into protest participation depends on the platform being examined. For Facebook, interaction with strong ties produces participation, whereas for Twitter, it is the information from weak ties that predicts protest behavior. As such, the authors remind us that it is not just how often people use a given platform, but also the ways in which those uses are realized that matter for political outcomes. Therefore, specific uses or behaviors on one platform may have a different meaning and impact in a separate space, highlighting the need for more robust theorizing and testing.

Conclusions

The articles in this Special Issue do much to move th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Studying Politics Across Media
• 2 In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use
• 3 Issue Consistency? Comparing Television Advertising, Tweets, and E-mail in the 2014 Senate Campaigns
• 4 Election Campaigning on Social Media: Politicians, Audiences, and the Mediation of Political Communication on Facebook and Twitter
• 5 Learning From News on Different Media Platforms: An Eye-Tracking Experiment
• 6 Platforms for Incivility: Examining Perceptions Across Different Media Formats
• 7 Ties, Likes, and Tweets: Using Strong and Weak Ties to Explain Differences in Protest Participation Across Facebook and Twitter Use
• Index