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. 2013. The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bruns, Axel. 2005. Gatewatching: 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. 2013. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dahlgren, Peter. 2013. The 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.2007. The 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. 2014. Mediatization 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. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobolt, Sara B.2009. Europe 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. 2011. The 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.2004. Political 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.
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Vesnic-Alujevic, Lucia. 2012. “Political Participation and Web 2.0 in Europe: A case study of Facebook.” Public Relations Review 381: 466–470.
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[no author supplied]
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. 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.
