A framework for understanding citizens’ political participation in social media
Information Technology & People
ISSN: 0959-3845
Article publication date: 25 October 2019
Issue publication date: 19 June 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how the use of social media by citizens has impacted the traditional conceptualization and operationalization of political participation in the society.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on Teorell et al.’s (2007) classification of political participation which is modified to suit the current context of social media. The authors classified 15,460 tweets along three parameters suggested in the framework with help of supervised text classification algorithms.
Findings
The analysis reveals that Activism is the most prominent form of political participation undertaken by people on Twitter. Other activities that were undertaken include Formal Political participation and Consumer participation. The analysis also reveals that identity of participant does not play a classifying role as expected from the theoretical framework. It was found that the social media as a platform facilitates new forms of participation which are not feasible offline.
Research limitations/implications
The current work considers only the microblogging platform of Twitter as the data source. For a more comprehensive insight, analysis of other social media platforms is also required.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few analyses where such a large database covering multiple social media events has been created and analysed using supervised text classification algorithms. A large proportion of previous studies on social media have been based on case study and have limited analysis to only a particular event on social media. Although there exist a few works that have studied a vast and varied collection of social media data (Gaby and Caren, 2012; Shirazi, 2013; Rane and Salem, 2012), such efforts are few in number. This study aims to add to that stream of work where a wider and more generalized set of social media data is studied.
Keywords
Citation
Pandey, V., Gupta, S. and Chattopadhyay, M. (2020), "A framework for understanding citizens’ political participation in social media", Information Technology & People, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 1053-1075. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-03-2018-0140
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited