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A dialogue of the deaf, or communities of debate? The use of facebook in the 2013 Czech parliamentary elections campaign

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-09, 10:38 authored by Vaclav StetkaVaclav Stetka, Lenka Vochocova
This article presents an analysis of the citizens' engagement with the 2013 Czech parliamentary elections campaign on Facebook. While many studies primarily focus on the intensity and forms of adoption of social networks by political actors in campaign communication, we attempt to explore both political parties' use of Facebook as well as the extent and ways of citizen participation on the online election campaign. The empirical base for this study consists of all communication archived over the course of three weeks (before and after the elections) on the Facebook profiles of ten most important Czech political parties. Using quantitative content analysis, we first present an overview of the dynamics and intensity of users' engagement with the campaign, illustrating that some of the small as well as populist parties have managed to mobilize significantly larger part of Facebook population than more established parties. following that descriptive part, we first turn to the analysis of the actual content of communication, examining primarily the tone of users' comments, and than we move on to a more in-depth, qualitative examination of communication on the profiles of two selected political parties which were very successful in their online mobilization. The results indicate that most party profiles have displayed a rather surprising level of heterogeneity, allowing for dissenting voices to be displayed in what is generally seen as a heavily managed communication environment.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Teorija in Praksa

Volume

51

Issue

6

Pages

1361 - 1380

Citation

STETKA, V. and VOCHOCOVA, L., 2014. A dialogue of the deaf or communities of debate? The use of Facebook in the 2013 Czech parliamentary elections campaign. Teorija in Praksa, 51 (6), pp. 1361-1380.

Publisher

© University of Ljubljana

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article was published in the journal Teorija in Praksa and is made available with the kind permission of the publisher.

ISSN

0040-3598

Language

  • en