Political Competition and Social Media: Can Facebook Change The

Running head: POLITICAL COMPETITION AND SOCIAL MEDIA Political Competition and Social Media: Can Facebook Change the Status Quo of Finnish Politics? Aleksi Suuronen UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE Faculty of Social Sciences Master’s thesis in Public Choice March 2018 DESCRIPTION Political competition and social media: Title of the master’s thesis Can Facebook change the status quo of Finnish politics? Author Aleksi Suuronen Supervisor Professor Katri K. Sieberg Time of Completion March 2018 Place of Completion University of Tampere, Faculty of Social Sciences Pages: 102 Pages of appendices: 3 ABSTRACT The rise of multiple social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have sparked a debate within political sciences on the degree to which these new platforms influence the overall political system. For some, the expected impact is assumed to diversify the number of people who wield and influence political power, while for others the impact concentrates and solidifies power to those who could be considered as political elites. The purpose of this thesis is thus to investigate the underlying assumptions surrounding this debate and to construct a theoretical understanding of how social media can influence political power relations. The research conducted in this area has thus far mainly focused on studying Twitter and not many studies exist that have examined Facebook. Moreover, considerable gaps exist within the Finnish context, and no studies exist there that have explicitly examined what direct political gains social media platforms are able to give to its users. This thesis aims to fill these gaps by adopting a case study strategy on the 2015 parliamentary elections held in Finland by using quantitative techniques to estimate the impact that Facebook has had on the electoral performance of those candidates who have chosen to use it in their campaign. The results of this study show that Facebook is indeed linked with electoral gains, and especially the ability of candidates to acquire Facebook ‘likes’ is a significant factor that can boost their electoral performance. Furthermore, not all candidates are equal in this, and it is non-incumbent politicians who have gained the most from Facebook during these elections. These results highlight the fact that social media in general and Facebook in particular are important subjects of political study and that they do capture a resource that the candidates can use to impact political outcomes. Moreover, this has implications for the future of the status quo of political competition within Finland and might change how politics and deliberation are conducted in the future. Keywords: Facebook, Social Media, Elections, Finland CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 3 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ................................................... 8 3. DEFINITION AND THEORETICAL USES FOR POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ....................... 17 3.1 What is social about social media? ................................................................................................... 17 3.2 Social media as a political tool ......................................................................................................... 20 4. LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................................................................................................... 29 4.1 Social media adaptation rates ............................................................................................................ 30 4.2 Analyzing the intensity and patterns of use ...................................................................................... 34 4.3 Investigating impact .......................................................................................................................... 38 5. REACHING VOTERS THROUGH INFECTION ................................................................................. 45 5.1 Algorithms and prisons, how visibility is allocated within Facebook .............................................. 46 5.2 Political candidate as a disease – SEI model of candidate spread .................................................... 50 5.3 The normalization v. equalization debate revisited, again ................................................................ 57 6. RESEARCH METHODS AND DATA .................................................................................................. 63 6.1 Main variables ................................................................................................................................... 65 6.2 Data and descriptive statistics ........................................................................................................... 69 7. EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .................................................... 77 8. CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 96 9. REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................................... 104 10. APPENDIX ......................................................................................................................................... 113 POLITICAL COMPETITION AND SOCIAL MEDIA P a g e | 3 1. INTRODUCTION In 2008 Barrack Obama was running for the highest office in the United States, and the internet and social media was an integral part of his strategy to getting there. By using various methods from grassroots campaigning, fundraising to supporter mobilization, the way Obama utilized social media has become a prime example of how the platform can be used for electoral gains and later for more effective governance (Katz & Jain, 2013). Later, in 2016, a similar pattern would emerge, although the candidates could not have been more different from one other. While Donald Trump can be criticized on multiple fronts as a politician, one aspect in which he is universally given credit for is his masterful use of Twitter during his campaign. In contrast to Hilary Clinton Trump’s campaign was significantly less funded, the candidate was much less politically experienced and multiple scandals during the campaign trail lead most observers to believe that Trumps days were numbered and his presidency a near impossibility (Allen & Parnes, 2017). And yet, it did happen. It would be an overstatement to say that Twitter was the main element contributing to Trump's victory, but it allowed him to directly communicate with his supporters and, furthermore, to create controversial Tweets that perpetually gave him free coverage within the media. Actions such as these cannot be discounted as meaningless either. In other parts of the world, the events of 2011 and the Arab Spring gave fuel to the idea of cyberoptimism and lead some scholars to claim that “Twitter revolution” was a reality in many Arab states. Twitter, so the argument goes, gives citizens new tools to organize protests and crystalized public resentment towards governing regimes in authoritarian states. This, in turn, leads to stronger oppositional forces and, eventually, to regime changes and to democratization (Diamond & Plattner, 2012). Furthermore, social media has not only been claimed to mobilize oppressed citizens in authoritarian regimes; it accomplishes this in western democratic states as well. A study conducted in collaboration between political scientists and Facebook staff claims that a single message on Facebook’s platform can mobilize hundreds of thousands extra voters to the polls on election day. On 2nd of November 2010, during the US congressional elections, approximately 60 million users were shown a message of their friends who had clicked the “I voted” button, which was a new feature introduced by the experiment. The message was claimed to directly increase turnout by approximately 60,000 votes and a further 280,000 people were indirectly nudged to the polls (Bond et al., 2012). POLITICAL COMPETITION AND SOCIAL MEDIA P a g e | 4 Although all of the above are mainly anecdotal evidence about the influence of social media to the political sphere, it is by no means a controversial stance to claim that social media matters in politics. Social media platforms are worthy to take under serious investigation within the political context by the sheer number of global users alone. According to Statista1, the number of global social media users has reached 3.02 billion by January 2017, which at the time accounted for over 40% of the world population2. However, social media matters to politics not only because of the sheer number of people using these platforms but because it presents a shift in how people communicate with one other. As I will argue during this thesis, social media platforms and the functionality brought by the Web 2.0 era have changed the nature of information dissemination, how that information is organized and processed by individuals, and how the same information is further distributed and modified outside from its original sender. These changes in the flow of information have a direct impact on politics because it redefines who controls, consumes and interprets information and thus meaningfully changes political calculus and power distribution. Indeed, the importance of social media has been noted by the academic field, and a lot of ink has been spilled on, for example,

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