Social Media and Voter Behavior

Flashcards on Social Media, Political Campaigns, and Voter Behavior

Political Participation

Involves voting, political information and knowledge, political trust (election integrity), and support for democracy.

Horizontal Flows of Information

Two-way communication between users on social media, facilitating coordination for collective actions like campaigns and protests.

User-Generated Content

Changes interaction between politicians and citizens, allowing immediate feedback and voicing support or political discontent.

Manipulation of Online Content

Enabled by low-cost automated accounts and anonymous posting, potentially leading to political persuasion and misinformation.

Data Targeting

Online platforms collect user data to target specific groups, making manipulations more effective.

Anti-Establishment Populist Opposition Parties

Benefited politically from the expansion of mobile Internet infrastructure in Europe between 2007 and 2018.

Informational Asymmetries

More uniformed voters abstain, while more informed and politically interested voters turn out.

Age Effects

Linked to biological and social processes of aging, including physiologic changes and accumulation of social experiences, unrelated to time period or birth cohort.

Period Effects

Result from external factors that equally affect all age groups at a particular time period arising from environmental, social and economic factors.

Cohort Effects

Result from unique experience/exposure of a group of subjects (cohort) as they move across time, affecting age groups differently.

Life Cycle Voting

Political participation follows an age-related cycle. Younger people vote less compared to older people due to structural, social, moral, and economic factors.

Political Socialization

Process of transferring knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and general dispositions about politics from one generation to another.

Agencies of Political Socialization

Institutions (family, religious institutions, schools, welfare institutions, media, political parties) through which political socialization accumulates and transfers.

Political Lens

Framework by which individuals learn/internalise that frames their perceptions of power structures and how the world around them is (and should be) organized.

Narrowcasting

Fragmentation of audiences combined with more partisan/ideological product differentiation.

Demassification of Mass Communication

Shift from one-to-many communication with broad-appeal content to many-to-many communication with massive information from multiple sources and more audience control.

Selective Exposure

Audiences are increasingly likely to receive information that is customized to their personal tastes, interests, and political viewpoints to the possible exclusion of other information.

Hyperpersonalisation

Algorithmic gatekeepers and recommendation systems replace human selection of information.

News Fatigue and News Avoidance

Result from overwhelming sources, pace, and tone of modern news.

Great Democratic Inversion

Voters have become more polarised by education - with less-educated voters gravitating to populists.

Need for Cognition

People with this prefer tasks requiring reasoning and effortful thinking, investing time and resources to evaluate complex issues.

Populism

Mistrust of politicians and traditional institutions, favouring popular sovereignty over traditional decision-making processes.

Anywhere vs. Somewhere

A larger divide between people who see the world from anywhere and people who see it from somewhere over class and economic divides.

Economic Precarity

Unsurety about one's economic future.

Squeezed Middle Class

Middle class faces increased house prices, jobs at risk of automation and financial vulnerability.

Relative Status Deprivation

High status individuals who perceive a sense of injustice or relative status loss are more likely to vote for populists.

Double Anxiety

High status groups cannot meet ambitions of joining highest earners and face cultural anxieties and economic insecurity, leading to perceiving relative decline in social status.

Campaign Diffusion

Adoption model where parties import successful practices or shopping model where adoption depends on fit in the context of their own country.

Americanisation

Diffusion of U.S. campaign practices through visiting practitioners, US political consultants working abroad and media-coverage.

Internal Professionalization (of campaigns)

More people working within parties acquire greater knowledge and expertise in campaigning and communication.

External Professionalization (of campaigns)

Parties and candidates increasingly hiring professional, external advisors and consultants with specialised knowledge/expertise.