This study investigates, over an 18-month period surrounding the 2016 Brexit referendum, the commenting activity of nearly 2 million Facebook users engaging with political news from British media or with the posts of referendum campaigns. We ask whether citizens’ engagement with political news on Facebook motivates their participation with political campaign posts, and we examine whether users commenting on campaign pages trend towards ideologically reinforcing media. Overall, we find comparatively low levels of commenting activity on the official referendum campaigns vis-à-vis the media, and the majority of users (70%) commented only once. Looking at the subset of users commenting on both page types (“cross-posters”), we identify a general spillover effect from media to campaign pages, suggesting a positive correlation between political interest and online participation on Facebook. Reverse spillover occurs immediately around and after the vote, with Remain cross-posters active on the Guardian while Leave cross-posters’ media engagement registers as more diffuse.
Bimber, Bruce, Marta C. Cunhill, Lauren Copeland, and Rachel Gibson
2015 “Digital Media and Political Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Interest across Acts and Over Time.” Social Science Computer Review 331: 21–42.
Bossetta, Michael, Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, and Hans-Jörg Trenz
2017 “Engaging with European Politics through Twitter and Facebook : Participation beyond the National?” In Social Media and European Politics: Rethinking Power and Legitimacy in the Digital Era, ed. by Mauro Barisione, and Asimina Michailidou, 53–75. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boulianne, Shelley
2011 “Stimulating or Reinforcing Political Interest: Using Panel Data to Examine Reciprocal Effects between News Media and Political Interest.” Political Communication 28 (2): 147–162.
Boyer, Dominic
2013The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bruns, Axel
2005Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang.
Bullock, John G.
2011 “Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate.” American Political Science Review 101: 496–515.
Cantijoch, Marta, David Cutts, and Rachel Gibson
2016 “Moving Slowly up the Ladder of Political Engagement: A ‘Spill-over’ Model of Internet Participation.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18 (1): 26–48.
Chadwick, Andrew
2013The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dahlgren, Peter
2013The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dahlgren, Peter, and Tobias Olsson
2008 “Facilitating Political Participation: Young Citizens, Internet and Civic Cultures.” In International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, ed. by Kirsten Drotner, and Sonia Livingstone, 493–507. London: SAGE.
de Vreese, Claes H.
2007The Dynamics of Referendum Campaigns: An International Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Druckman, James N., Erik Peterson, and Rune Slothuus
2013 “How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation.” American Political Science Review 107 (1): 57–79.
Dutceac Segesten, Anamaria, and Michael Bossetta
2017 “A Typology of Political Participation Online: How Citizens used Twitter to Mobilize during the 2015 British General Elections.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (11): 1625–1643.
Esser, Frank, and Jesper Strömbäck
2014Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, Heather K., Victoria Cordova, and Savannah Sipole
2014 “Twitter Style: An Analysis of how House Candidates used Twitter in their 2012 Campaigns.” PS: Political Science & Politics 47 (2): 454–462.
Freelon, Deen
2017 “Campaigns in Control: Analyzing Controlled Interactivity and Message Discipline on Facebook.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 1–14.
Gardiner, Becky, Mahana Mansfield, Ian Anderson, Josh Holder, Daan Louter, and Monica Ulmanu
2016 “The dark side of Guardian comments.” The Guardian, April12 2016 [URL].
Haleva-Amir, Sharon, and Karine Nahon
2016 “Electoral Politics on Social Media.” In Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, ed. by Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, and Chrstian Christensen, 471–487. New York: Routledge.
Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini
2004Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobolt, Sara B.
2009Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Iyengar, Shanto, and Sean J. Westwood
2015 “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science 591: 690–707.
Leruth, Benjamin, Yordan Kutiyski, André Krouwel, and Nicholas J. Startin
2017 “Does the Information Source Matter? Newspaper Readership, Political Preferences and Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom, France and The Netherlands.” In Euroscepticism, Democracy and the Media: Communicating Europe, Contesting Europe, ed. by Manuela Caiani, and Simona Guerra, 109–131. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nielsen, Rasmus K., and Cristian Vaccari
2013 “Do People ‘Like’ Politicians on Facebook? Not Really: Large-Scale Direct Candidate-to-Voter Online Communication as an Outlier Phenomenon.” International Journal of Communication 71: 2333–2356.
Pedersen, Rasmus T.
2014 “News Media Framing of Negative Campaigning.” Mass Communication and Society 171: 898–919.
Pariser, Eli
2011The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. London: Penguin Books.
Prior, Markus
2005 “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 491: 577–592.
Quinlan, Stephen, Mark Shephard, and Lindsay Paterson
2015 “Online Discussion and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum: Flaming Keyboards or Forums for Deliberation?” Electoral Studies 381: 192–205.
Semetko, Holli A., and de Vreese, Claes H.
2004Political Campaigning in Referendums: Framing the Referendum Issue. London: Taylor & Francis.
Strömbäck, Jesper, and Adam Shehata
2010 “Media Malaise or a Virtuous Circle? Exploring the Causal Relationships between News Media exposure, Political News Attention and Political Interest.” European Journal of Political Research 491: 575–597.
Sunstein, Cas R.
2009Going Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vesnic-Alujevic, Lucia
2012 “Political Participation and Web 2.0 in Europe: A case study of Facebook.” Public Relations Review 381: 466–470.
Cited by
Cited by 13 other publications
Ayres Pinto, Danielle Jacon & Isabela Moraes
2020. As mídias digitais como ferramentas de manipulação de processos eleitorais democráticos: uma análise do caso Brexit. Revista de Estudios Sociales :74 ► pp. 71 ff.
Bene, Márton, Melanie Magin, Daniel Jackson, Darren Lilleker, Delia Balaban, Paweł Baranowski, Jörg Haßler, Simon Kruschinski & Uta Russmann
2022. The Polyphonic Sounds of Europe: Users’ Engagement With Parties’ European-Focused Facebook Posts. Politics and Governance 10:1 ► pp. 108 ff.
Bliuc, Ana-Maria, Ayoub Bouguettaya & Kallam D. Felise
2021. Online Intergroup Polarization Across Political Fault Lines: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Bouko, Catherine, July De Wilde, Sofie Decock, Orphée De Clercq, Valentina Manchia & David Garcia
2021. Reactions to Brexit in images: a multimodal content analysis of shared visual content on Flickr. Visual Communication 20:1 ► pp. 4 ff.
Bouko, Catherine & David Garcia
2020. Patterns of Emotional Tweets: The Case of Brexit After the Referendum Results. In Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation, ► pp. 175 ff.
2019. Online political participation of young people in Mexico, Spain and Chile. Comunicar 27:61 ► pp. 83 ff.
Fierro, Pedro, Patricio Aroca & Patricio Navia
2020. How people access the internet and the democratic divide: Evidence from the Chilean region of Valparaiso 2017, 2018 and 2019. Technology in Society 63 ► pp. 101432 ff.
Galpin, Charlotte
2022. At the Digital Margins? A Theoretical Examination of Social Media Engagement Using Intersectional Feminism. Politics and Governance 10:1
Haenschen, Katherine
2020. Self-Reported Versus Digitally Recorded: Measuring Political Activity on Facebook. Social Science Computer Review 38:5 ► pp. 567 ff.
Hall, Natalie-Anne
2021. Understanding Brexit on Facebook: Developing Close-up, Qualitative Methodologies for Social Media Research. Sociological Research Online► pp. 136078042110373 ff.
Sandoval-Almazan, Rodrigo & David Valle-Cruz
2020. Sentiment Analysis of Facebook Users Reacting to Political Campaign Posts. Digital Government: Research and Practice 1:2 ► pp. 1 ff.
Saud, Muhammad, Dima Bassam El Hariri & Asia Ashfaq
2020. The role of social media in promoting political participation: The Lebanon experience. Masyarakat, Kebudayaan dan Politik 33:3 ► pp. 248 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. References. In The Brexit Referendum on Twitter, ► pp. 73 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.
