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Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-25, 15:38 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Augusto Valeriani
This article evaluates the potential that Twitter affords politicians to communicate to citizens directly, through messages that they broadcast to users who follow them, and indirectly, to the extent that their followers autonomously re-circulate politicians’ messages to their own contacts. Analysis of more than 2 million accounts of followers of 10 national party leaders during the Italian 2013 general election campaign shows that most users are rather inactive and have very small followings. Moreover, the most followed politicians have on average the least active and followed users, and vice versa. Users’ activity and followings are also unevenly distributed, with very tiny minorities accounting for the vast majority of tweets and followers. The most followed followers of politicians are celebrities in realms other than politics, or people who are already highly visible in the politics-media ecosystem. Our findings suggest that most of the potential for indirect communication may lie in the “vital middle” of the Twitter population who are more active than average, but are not part of the restricted elite of high-impact outliers.

Funding

This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of Education “Future in Research 2012” initiative (project code RBFR12BKZH) for the project titled “Building Inclusive Societies and a Global Europe Online” (http://www.webpoleu.net).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

New Media and Society

Volume

17

Issue

7

Pages

1025 - 1042

Citation

VACCARI, C. and VALERIANI, A., 2013. Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign. New Media and Society, 17 (7), pp. 1025-1042.

Publisher

Sage © The Author(s)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

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

2013

Notes

Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

ISSN

1461-4448

eISSN

1461-7315

Language

  • en