Some Insights into the Role of Social Media in Political Communication
Matthias Roth
1
, Georg Peters
1,2
and Jan Seruga
2
1
Munich University of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Munich, Germany
2
Australian Catholic University, School of Arts and Sciences, North Sydney, Australia
Keywords:
Microblogging, Politics, Social Media, Twitter.
Abstract:
Political communication in the social media network of Twitter has enjoyed a popularity increase in recent
years. This also meant that the microblogging platform Twitter is now used in different countries for political
campaigns as well as political discussions. For this study we collected data from more than 1,400 politicians in
three countries Australia, Germany and the U.S. through the Twitter API. This data set with nearly one million
tweets is the basis for our analyses, where we compare the behavior of the politicians on Twitter regarding
differences and similarities in the political context. Amongst others we compare key figures concerning the
year of joining, age groups, gender, user activity, and trend topics in the named parliaments. Thus we gain
insight into the political communication on Twitter in the mentioned countries.
1 INTRODUCTION
Social media using Web 2.0 technology has emerged
over the past few years as space for online commu-
nication. Meanwhile different services like Wikis,
Blogs and Social Networks provide the opportunity
for people to get together online. In addition it is pos-
sible to consume content and also publish your own
content. Furthermore, social media caused a change
in the traditional structure of mass communication in
the political context. Besides newspapers, magazines
and TV channels a lot of political communicationnow
goes through these Social Media Platforms. These al-
low a straight forward communication between politi-
cians and citizens who are interested in politics.
Based on the U.S. Congress, the development of
political participation in social media can be traced.
It was observed that more than 65% of members of
the U.S. Congress had established a personal web site
by 1997 (Adler, 1998). Also in 2005 it was inves-
tigated that nearly all members of the U.S. Congress
had developedweb sites (Esterling et al., 2005). In the
near past, February 2009, two months after the 2008
election 69 Congress members (which was a share of
about 13% of the U.S. Congress) maintained a Twit-
ter account (Golbeck et al., 2010). Just after the 2012
election the share was about 91%. These increased
figures show that the political communication in the
U.S. has evolved in the direction of social media.
With interfaces that allow people to follow the
lives of friends, acquaintances, and families, the num-
ber of people on social networks has grown expo-
nentially in recent years. Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn, to give a few examples, contain hundreds
of millions of members, who use these networks for
keeping track of each other. In 2004, Mark Zucker-
berg created Facebook as a way to connect with fel-
low students. Now, in October of 2012 Facebook
has about one billion monthly active users (Facebook,
2012).
Another example: Twitter, launched in July 2006,
is an online social networking and microblogging ser-
vice that has about 500 million accounts (Semiocast,
2012). Also LinkedIn is a social networking web
site for people in professional occupations and was
launched in 2003. With more than 180 million mem-
bers in over 200 countries LinkedIn is the largest
professional network in the world (Morphy, 2012).
According to the user base of these three platforms
also the site visits rose sharply. Alexa, a company
that tracks web traffic, ranked Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn as three of the most visited sites in the
world. Currently, Facebook is in this ranking on po-
sition two just behind Google. The web sites Twitter
and LinkedIn follow with the rankings of eight and
thirteen (Alexa, 2012). This shows that social media
is more and more spread.
In this paper, we contribute to the research field
of social media in politics by examining the relevance
of Twitter in political communication by the exposi-
351
Roth M., Peters G. and Seruga J..
Some Insights into the Role of Social Media in Political Communication.
DOI: 10.5220/0004418603510360
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2013), pages 351-360
ISBN: 978-989-8565-60-0
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
tion of Twitter activities in politics for three differ-
ent countries. More specifically, we explore the ac-
tivity of using social media in general and compare
the single parliaments of Australia, Germany and the
U.S. regarding activity, contribution in online politi-
cal communication and further statistical figures.
Based on our findings, we derive implications, re-
garding politics in the named countries. Additionally,
we provide a section related work for the fields of po-
litical science and social media.
This paper is structured as follows. The next sec-
tion provides related work on political science and so-
cial media. Also you can find information about the
methodology and research questions in section two.
Furthermore, in our main part we present our research
findings in sections three and four. The paper ends
with an conclusion and gives an outlook for future re-
search.
2 RELATED WORK AND
METHODOLOGY
Twitter is a digital realtime Application for the dis-
tribution of short messages. It is also described as a
communication platform for social networking or as
a public online log. Private persons, enterprises, mass
media and also politicians use the platform for distri-
bution of short messages. On this basis we provide in
this section related work about political science and
social media and especially Twitter. In addition to the
related work this section contains a description about
the used methodology.
2.1 RELATED WORK
There has been some prior work on analysing social
media. As a basis for further investigations there
are works about social networks like the book by
Wasserman and Faust, which describes different mod-
els, methods and applications for analysing social net-
works (Wasserman and Faust, 1994). Also much re-
search is available about social science topics, which
focus on the subjects of measuring performance of in-
dividuals and collectives to networks of social rela-
tionships. Backstrom, for example investigated group
formations like membership, growth and evolution in
large scale networks (Backstrom et al., 2006).
In terms of political communication Golbeck et al.
present in their study a framework for viewing or un-
derstanding the content of Congressional communi-
cation through the capturing and categorizing of in-
dividual messages (Golbeck et al., 2010). Java et al.
identified different types of user intentions and stud-
ied community structures also with respect to politics
(Java et al., 2007).
In this elaboration, the focus is on Australia, Ger-
many and the U.S. For these three countries initial
studies have already been conducted with regards to
political discussion on Twitter. For example Missing-
ham looked at the Australian parliament in the Twit-
terverse (Missingham, 2010). Missingham found in
her 2010 study that the Australian parliament was ex-
ploring the use of Twitter and about 15% of the Aus-
tralian parliament members had a Twitter account.
For the German parliament Tumasjan tried to in-
vestigate in an analysis of the 2009 election whether
Twitter is used as a platform for political communi-
cation and in addition whether Twitter can be seen as
a valid mirror for offline political sentiment (Tumas-
jan et al., 2010). Regarding the U.S. Smith shows,
how Barack Obama has used social media in the 2008
election campaign and the following use of social me-
dia in political campaigns in the U.S. (Smith, 2011).
2.2 Methodology
This paper aims to understand how members of a par-
liament communicatethrough Twitter. When and how
often they tweet, howmany followers and friends they
have and how often their tweets are being retweeted.
In addition to the named figures, a comparison be-
tween the parliaments of Australia, Germany and the
U.S. is made. Thereby the focus is on the flow of
communication from the government to the public.
For example all the tweets and followers of various
politicians will be examined but not the comments
and communication from public to the government.
As such, we have collected and analysed information
about Twitter accounts and single posts. In this sec-
tion, we will describe the data collection and research
questions.
2.2.1 Data Collection
First of all, information about the Members of the Par-
liaments like forename, surname, age, party affiliation
and Twitter account names were obtained by the cor-
responding web sites of the Australian, German and
U.S. parliament. Thus we have acquired data for dif-
ferent houses. Our data consisted of a Senate and a
House of Representatives each for Australia and the
U.S., whereas for Germany, we used the comparable
Bundestag and Bundesrat.
In Table 1, we show the different houses for Aus-
tralia, Germany and the U.S. together with the corre-
sponding seats. The House of Representatives is also
called the Lower House or Bundestag in Germanyand
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represents the people. The Senate or Upper House
in Germany is called Bundesrat and is established for
representing the single states of a country.
Therefore, difference between the Senate and
House of Representatives is less conceived as repre-
sentation of the total number of the states people, as
more than representation of the states at the federal
level. For easy intelligibility we will speak about par-
liaments and parliament members or parliamentarians
for all three countries.
Table 1: Houses and seats of the parliaments.
Australia Germany U.S.
Lower
House
House of
Represen-
tatives
Bundestag House of
Represen-
tatives
Seats 150 620 435
Upper
House
Senate Bundesrat Senate
Seats 76 69 100
For subsequent collection of Twitter data a Java
application was developed which makes use of the
Twitter Application Programming Interface (API)
(Twitter, 2012). Over this interface information like
Twitter account data and tweets can be accessed.
Through the development of further analysis capabil-
ities for our application we could gain more informa-
tion from the downloaded data. Among others we
have developed functions to identify trending topics,
calculate the activity status and get the quantity of
mentions of an account in the corresponding parlia-
ment. All these information serve as the database for
research.
Users. We only have added accounts to our data
set for which a profile picture existed, because
only then real interest for social media is iden-
tified. Furthermore there are a lot of fake ac-
counts for politicians. There are currently more
than 20 fake accounts for the former Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Some of the fake accounts clearly labeled as fakes
and some are not so easy to recognize as fakes.
Most easily this can be handled by Twitter verified
accounts, but not many politicians have verified
accounts.
So we found the proper accounts by visiting
politicians web sites. It is further pointed out that
many accounts are not maintained by the politi-
cians themselves, but by their staff. In our study
we have all accounts treated the same, whether led
by a politician themself or even led by their team.
Active Users. We have added all the politicians
and fetched their data, but the variable indicating
whether each Member of the Parliament has cre-
ated a Twitter account is not convincing. Not all
Members of the Parliament continue using their
Twitter account after creating it. For example, 109
Australian (48%), 283 German (41%) and 489
member of the U.S. parliament (91%) created al-
ready a Twitter account, but overall there are still
13 accounts with not a single tweet. Therefore,
we use an additional measure named active user
in an effort to account for these differences. Here
we determine that an active user has on average
two or more tweets per week posted.
As shown in Table 2 this results in 74 Australian,
168 German and 393 active users in the U.S. The
table furthermore shows the indicators regarding
tweets, followers and friends for our data set di-
vided into three countries of investigation. These
three indicators relate to the total number of ac-
counts, not just the active users.
Table 2: Indicators of the data set.
Australia Germany U.S.
Members 226 689 535
Accounts 109 283 489
Active Users 74 168 393
Tweets 117,121 291,671 482,945
Followers 2.3 M 0.5 M 32.7 M
Friends 720,929 105,144 1,369,424
2.2.2 Research Questions
In this paper, we answer different questions regarding
the social media behavior of politicians. Therefore,
we have gathered data, as described. We use these
to generate information out of the demographic data,
like gender and age group. Furthermore, we compute
analyses regarding the Twitter data like the numbers
of tweets, followers and friends. Subsequently we use
the language and environment R for statistical com-
puting and graphics to analyse the data regarding our
research topics (Gentleman and Ihaka, 2013).
In the next section we will present our findings.
Afterwards we present in another section more anal-
yses about social media on Twitter. In this part we
show summary findings regarding our data set.
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Amongst others we have there analyses about the year
of joining and a summary about the complete data set.
3 FINDINGS
This is one of two main parts of our studies, where
we will present the results of our statistical calcula-
tions. Therefore, we extract relevant data for each
analysis from our database and calculate figures re-
garding gender, age groups, tweets, followers, friends
and the moving average and trend of tweets. Subse-
quently, we present our results in tables and figures.
3.1 Gender
In this subsection we want to find a relation between
gender and the number of Twitter accounts among
the parliamentarians. An exhaustive study of Twit-
ter users across the world showed that more women
(53%) than men (47%) are active on Twitter (Udani,
2012). Therefore, we assume a similar picture for
politicians. In the following Figure 1 we present our
findings. These figures show that in all parliaments
the share of women with a Twitter account is larger
then the share of men. We recognized that the num-
ber of male and female accounts in each country is
close, but if we compare the countries we see signif-
icant differences, especially when compared with the
U.S.
AUS GER US AUS GER US
Gender
Percent of Parliamentarians
0 20 40 60 80 100
male
45.63%
40.00%
90.50%
female
54.55%
43.30%
94.68%
Australia Germany U.S.
Figure 1: Accounts spread across gender.
For our statistical analysis regarding the gender
we used the Pearson’s Chi-squared test with Yates’
continuity correction and got the results in Table 3.
Thereby following null hypothesis was accepted: Be-
tween men and women, there is no significant differ-
ence, regarding the number of Twitter accounts. If we
put the p-values our significance level α = 0.05, we
can see there is no significant p-value and therefore
we can not reject our hypothesis. The Phi-coefficient
in Table 3 shows us the strength of an relation. In our
case we can see a relationship between gender and the
number of accounts, but it is only a weak relation.
Table 3: Results for the statistical analysis regarding the
gender and accounts.
Australia Germany U.S.
x-Squared 1.1533 0.552 1.2129
df 1 1 1
p-Value 0.2829 0.4575 0.2707
Phi-Coefficient 0.08 0.03 0.06
The second hypothesis we test for the gender is
that the number of followers is related to the gender
and the female politicians have more followers than
male. So we use the t-test and compare the mean val-
ues of the male and female Twitter users of the in-
dividual parliaments. As null hypothesis, we assume
that the mean values are equal. Our results in Table
4 show that there are no significant p-values for our
α = 0.05. Therefore, we must assume that there is
no relation between the number of followers, and the
gender.
Table 4: Results for the statistical analysis regarding the
gender and followers.
Australia Germany U.S.
Sum Men 1823354 371768 31394863
Sum Women 489467 179287 1279302
Mean Men 24977 1998 78487
Mean Women 13596 1848 14374
t 0.6142 0.3135 1.0107
df 102.87 200.447 402.011
p-Value 0.5405 0.7542 0.3127
Conf. Inter. -25372 -795 -60586
Conf. Inter. 48134 1096 188812
3.2 Age Groups
In Figure 2 we can see an analysis of our data with
respect to individual age groups. We expect that the
younger generations are more represented on Twitter
than the older ones, as younger generations adopt new
technologies like Twitter faster than older. In addition
to this outcome it also turns out, as already in the last
section about gender, that far more politicians in the
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U.S. are present on Twitter. In comparison to Aus-
tralia and Germany, this is particularly the case in the
age groups over 35 years.
In Figure 2 we can see, while in the first age group
<34 all three countries have an identical rate of 100%.
In Australia and Germany the rate declines in the fol-
lowing age groups. However, in the U.S. the rate al-
ways remains well above 80%. In the U.S. Twitter
plays a major role over all age groups, while the par-
ticipation in Australia and Germany decreases with
the age. With increasing age, this distance between
the U.S. on the one hand and Australia and Germany
on the other hand increases. This shows that there is
a great catch-up in older politicians in the countries
Australia and Germany.
< 35 35 − 44 45 − 54 55 − 64 > 64
Age Groups
Accounts in percent
0 20 40 60 80 100
Australia Germany U.S.
Figure 2: Accounts spread across age groups.
3.3 Tweets & Followers & Friends
In this section we compute the correlations for the
variables tweets, followers and friends and present the
results in scatter plots. A scatter plot displays the di-
rection and strength of the linear relationship between
two variables and therefore it is well suited.
First, we calculated the correlation and found
a slight correlation of 0.16 between followers and
tweets, even if our p-value indicates a statistically sig-
nificant value, we can not assume at this low correla-
tion that a politician can enlarge the number of his
followers by publishing more tweets. We present the
resulting scatter plot in Figure 3.
Second, as we have further assumed, there is a
correlation between friends and followers. The Cor-
relation Coefficient (cor) has a value 0.53 and it is
thus worth to be classified as a medium correlation.
This shows that politicians can increase their reach by
adding more friends to their profile as this leads to an
increase of followers.
Finally, we calculated the Correlation Coefficient
(cor) for the variables friends and tweets. There we
20 50 100 500 2000 5000 20000
1e+01 1e+03 1e+05
Tweets
Followers
Figure 3: Correlation between followers and tweets.
can also find only a slight value of 0.14. It reveals that
the number of friends a politician has, is not related to
the number of tweets and therefore a politician who
tweets frequently does not necessarily add regularly
friends to his network.
Our results in this section show, therefore, that
politicians, especially when they actively invite
friends in their network can achieve a greater scope.
This is the case, as the addition of new friends in-
creases the number of followers as we found through
the calculation of the correlations.
3.4 Tweets Moving Average and Trend
In Figure 4 we show the simple moving average
(SMA) and the trend for the U.S. parliament regarding
the average of tweets. Thus we reveal, how the use of
Twitter among parliamentarians has developed. The
goal is to check whether a trend is present in the time
series or not. For our calculations we used for each
parliament the dates of the entire years from 2009
to 2012. The computations furthermore assume that
the observations are independent. Since the gradients
of the individual countries are comparable, we show
only the U.S. figure as an example.
For Australia the figures show that for every turn
of the year the SMA line has a deep, which means,
that the politicians tweet less in this time. Nonethe-
less, we see a strong increase of the number of tweets
during the investigated years from 2009 to 2012. At
the end of the graph we see again that the number of
tweets at year-end decreases in Australian parliament.
For the German figures we see the phenomenon
for Australian turn of the year only from year 2009
to year 2010. Otherwise, the number of tweets in-
creases during the relevant period. At the beginning
less strongly but from mid-2011, we see a very strong
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355
5000 10000 15000 20000
Observed Month
Average Tweets
Jan 09 Sep 09 Mai 10 Jan 11 Sep 11 Mai 12
Figure 4: Moving average and trend for the number of
tweets in the U.S.
increase, which only will weaken slightly at the end
of the year 2012.
Finally, we have the SMA and trend for the num-
ber of tweets in the U.S. in Figure 4. Here we can see
again at the turn of the years 10/11 and 11/12 there is
a decrease in the number of tweets. In the U.S. there is
a strong increase in the number of tweets in the same
period. However, in 2012 the number of tweets has
fallen steadily since mid-year, what can be observed
in the corresponding period at the slope of the graph.
4 SUMMARY FINDINGS
This is the second part of our findings, where we
present summary results. In addition to examination
of our entire data set we investigate the year of joining
and trending topics.
4.1 Data Summary
In this subsection we show some descriptive analyses
for our complete data set. Therefore, we present for
each parliament the classical ve-number summary
(sample minimum, first quartile, median, third quar-
tile, sample maximum) together with the mean and
standard deviation (σ), which are normally no part of
the five-number summary. These figures are used be-
cause they provide a concise summary of the distri-
bution and also point out the center and spread of it.
This makes it possible to compare quickly the result-
ing numbers of our observations.
Table 5 shows the summary regarding the number
of tweets. At minimum we can recognize that in each
parliament there are politicians, which have a Twit-
ter account but never posted a tweet. Furthermore for
Germany we can see the largest mean and 3rd quar-
tile, which leads to the conclusion that Germany has
compared to the other countries the most active quar-
ter of politicians on Twitter. The standard deviation
shows in the U.S., the number of tweets seen from the
parliament deviates the least from the mean values.
Table 5: Summary statistics regarding tweets.
Australia Germany U.S.
Minimum 0 0 0
1st Quartile 218 146 369
Median 576 440 694
Mean 1,348 1,390 1,060
3rd Quartile 1,631 1,728 1,289
Maximum 11,620 16,650 12,900
Stand. Dev. 2,048 2,303 1,309
Now we look at the following summary in Table 6.
Germany compared to Australia and the U.S. has by
far the lowest follower numbers. However, the U.S.
has by far the biggest follower numbers. Based on the
mean values it is well to assess in which category the
individual countries are classified.
Table 6: Summary statistics regarding followers.
Australia Germany U.S.
Minimum 57 0 0
1st Quartile 1,491 457 2,518
Median 3,201 977 4,664
Mean 21,220 1,947 66,820
3rd Quartile 6,274 1,656 8,185
Maximum 1.2 Mio. 32,440 25.3 Mio.
Stand. Dev. 117,388 3,865 1,145,331
Table 7 shows a similar picture for the friends as
we have already seen in the followers. Germany has
by far the lowest and U.S. by far the most friends.
Australia is again between the two countries. This
suggests that there is a dependence between the fol-
lowers and friends. This conjecture, we already ex-
amined in more detail with our statistical findings in
the section about the correlations between tweets and
followers and friends.
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Table 7: Summary statistics regarding friends.
Australia Germany U.S.
Minimum 0 0 0
1st Quartile 159 55 123
Median 442 146 359
Mean 6,614 371 2,800
3rd Quartile 986 359 1,114
Maximum 369,800 12,560 667,800
Stand. Dev. 40,258 909 30,329
4.2 Year of Joining
From Cheng et al. we know that the big hype of Twit-
ter was in 2009 (Cheng et al., 2009). We assume that
this also applies for politicians, and compared to other
years, most of the investigated politicians have their
Twitter account created in 2009. We will check this
to see whether the number of politicians in the year
2009 actually is the highest, or whether the number is
maybe bigger in an election year. To determine how
the proliferation of Twitter has evolved in the polit-
ical landscape over the years, we have analysed the
data collected to that effect.
Twitter was launched in 2006 and the first politi-
cian of the current parliaments have created their ac-
counts in 2007. In Australia and Germany this was
one politician in each country, whereas in the U.S. 14
politicians created their Twitter account in 2007.
In Figure 5 we can see that in the U.S. 2009 was
the peak of the Twitter hype. Also we can see in
our data that, although in this year in Germany was
the Federal Election, the percentage of new arrivals in
both countries are almost on par with 23.45% in Aus-
tralia and 23.06% in Germany. In the U.S. the share
with 33.83% is even bigger.
If we look at the already shown figures in a cu-
mulative shape, we can see that the number of Twitter
joining politicians is the highest in the U.S. over all
three years. Our data set also shows that, altogether
the share of politicians with a Twitter account in Aus-
tralia with 48.23% is higher than in Germany with
41.07%. Nevertheless the largest share of Twitter ac-
counts in the parliament has the U.S. with 91.40%.
Such a high percentage of politicians with a Twitter
account in the U.S. shows that social media is ac-
cepted as a medium for sharing political information
in this country. In Australia and Germany, this is not
seen to such an extent. In Figure 6 we show the fig-
ures for the U.S. as an example.
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
0 10 20 30 40
Years
Percent of Joining
U.S.
Figure 5: Year of joining per cent.
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
0 20 40 60 80 100
Years
Percent of Joining Cumulative
U.S.
Figure 6: Year of joining cumulative.
4.3 Trending Topics
In addition to the previously described indicators of
our data set, we have also examined the trending top-
ics in each parliament during the year 2012. Here we
have analysed all the tweets from our possession in
2012.
After we excluded filler words, like is, the and oth-
ers, we took the three mostly mentioned words for
each country. They are ordered by their frequency for
Australia
1. Carbon tax
2. Health
3. Economy
Germany
1. Europa
2. Fiskalpakt
3. Griechenland
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357
U.S.
1. Job
2. Tax
3. Health
Then we have considered the individual tweets to
the respective topics in more detail in order to get an
idea for what the discussion was.
4.3.1 Australian Trending Topics
As already mentioned the most trending topics in
Australia were the carbon tax, health and furthermore
the economy. When we look at the line of carbon
tax in Figure 7, we see a rise in the mid of the year
2012, with a peak in July. This we can justify by the
fact, that the carbon pricing scheme for business was
introduced in Australia by the Gillard government at
the 1st July 2012. During the text analysis of single
tweets with respect to the keyword health, we found
that in this context also often the following keywords
are used: Denticare, Medicare and Private Health In-
surance.
Our data set shows a continuous discussion on
these different health topics. Regarding the economic
topic we can give two different reasons for the on-
going discussion. For one thing, Moody’s have reaf-
firmed in May the AAA credit rating of Australia,
due to a strong economy and strong public finances.
Therefore, we see an increase in May and June for the
economic topic. On the other hand in the parliament
was regularly praised the low unemployment rate, low
inflation, low interest rates and the economy growing
trend.
2 4 6 8 10 12
0 50 100 150
Month in 2012
Number of Tweets
Carbon tax
Figure 7: Trending topics in Australia.
4.3.2 German Trending Topics
The most mentions of the German parliament in 2012
had the topic Europe (German: “Europa”) as we can
see in Figure 8. Followed by the topics European
Fiscal Compact (German: “Fiskalpakt”) and Greece
(German: “Griechenland”). For the keyword Europe
the peak in June and the previous rise was created by
a lively discussion about the Euro Crisis, the Europe
politics and the commercial policy altogether. Also
we can see a rise in September and October. The rea-
son for that is the award of Nobel Peace Prize to the
European Union.
The European Fiscal Compact sets for the Euro-
pean countries a debt limit in relation to the Gross
Domestic Product (GDP). Furthermore this compact
sets an upper limit for the annual new debt also in
relation to the GDP and establishes penalties for non-
compliance with these two limits. In Germany, the
compact on 29th June 2012 entered into force, which
leads to the peak in June. The last we have seen of
Germany was the catchphrase Greece.
Here we see two rises. One in February and an-
other in November of 2012. This is the case, as was
voted in these two months each on a bail-out package
for Greece in the German parliament. In February
was voted for the bail-out package number two and in
November for number three.
2 4 6 8 10 12
0 200 400 600
Month in 2012
Number of Tweets
Europa
Figure 8: Trending topics in Germany.
4.3.3 American Trending Topics
Australia and Germany have shown that the trending
topics especially in the middle of the year reach max-
imum values. But for the U.S. we can see in Figure 9
the mostly mentioned topic about jobs has already in
March the highest value. But also in June and July the
topic reaches high values. According to our data the
reason for that are good job growth figures which are
published in these months. The mentions of the tax
topic are high, as regularly about the achievements of
Obama tax cuts.
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2 4 6 8 10 12
0 500 1000 1500 2000
Month in 2012
Number of Tweets
Job
Figure 9: Trending topics in the U.S.
Also frequently was discussed about the tax plans
of Obama and Romney after the 2012 elections. The
last U.S. topic is health, and here especially the Pa-
tient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)
which is commonly called Obamacare or the Federal
Health Care Law. It was signed into law by President
Barack Obama on 23rd Mach 2010, but PPACA con-
tains provisions that became effective after enactment
and therefore there is still a regular discussion about
this topic in the U.S. parliament.
Overall we have seen for Australia and the U.S.
that the three most important issues are about eco-
nomic (jobs, taxes) and health topics. For Germany,
however, we see that the three main topics revolve
mainly around Europe.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
This paper focuses on social media in politics and
therefore especially on the Twitter platform and the
parliaments of Australia, Germany and the U.S.
Firstly, this paper provides an introduction to the topic
of social media in politics including Twitter followed
by other related work. Secondly, we describe the
used methodology for our studies with data collec-
tion and our research questions. Then we provide the
key findings of our investigations, based on statistical
results. Here we found that the investigated politi-
cians in each country showed a growing interest in
social media. This we were able to see, because of
the growing number of Twitter accounts registered by
the politicians and also by the increasing number of
tweets posted by the politicians. We have also found
that politicians use Twitter not only for political cam-
paigns but also for daily political discussions. Still
we have learned much about trending topics in par-
liaments. About which topics were most discussed in
the parliaments and also about the lifetime of topics
in the investigated parliaments.
Regarding the topic of social media in politics the
contributions of this paper are as follows. Overall we
provide insight into the topic of social media in poli-
tics with a focus on Twitter. We did not focus only on
the U.S. as in previous studies, but always conducted
the comparison with Australia and Germany. Next
to an insight into the subject, the results also provide
suggestions for dealing with social media in the polit-
ical context.
Our results provide an insight into social media in
politics with Twitter, but it will be important in fu-
ture research to address more social media platforms.
Especially the frequently used platforms in politics
of Facebook and YouTube should be investigated in
more detail. Furthermore, the individual websites or
blogs of politicians could be investigated or even tra-
ditional media like newspapers, magazines and TV
channels. This would provide a more detailed picture
of this topic. Also other countries could be added to
obtain more comprehensive results.
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