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Reykjavík.
The final speaker in this ECPR 2011 session is Giovanna Mascheroni (or is it Alice Mattoni?), whose interest is in online politics in Italian regional elections during 2010. Her team developed a code book for assessing online party presence and performance during these elections, which is now also being applied to local and European elections. This included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube as well as general online presence.

To what extent does the use of social media in Italian elections bear any traits of a convergence culture, with political debate taking on elements of transmedia storytelling …

Reykjavík.
The next ECPR 2011 speaker is Rachel Gibson, who focusses on online campaigning in the 2010 Australian federal election. Has the type of Web campaigning that candidates engage in changed over time, and who is using social media for their campaigning activities? And does it matter – in other words, does it convert to support?

Part of this is related to the normalisation vs. equalisation debate – does online campaigning level the playing field between larger and smaller parties, or do the larger, richer parties also spend more funds on online campaigning (and more effectively so)? Is this different …

Reykjavík.
The next session at ECPR 2011 starts with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, whose interest is in the performance of politicians on Facebook. There have been a few spectacular successes, of course (most obviously, Barack Obama), and social media have now become a key tool in political campaigning, but it remains unclear how widespread such successes really are. Most politicians who use social media are largely ignored, in fact.

Rasmus’s study tracked candidates in the 112 most competitive electoral districts in the U.S. House and Senate races (who might be assumed to have the most resources at their disposal, given …

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Øyvind Kalnes, whose focus is on Norwegian nationalist parties online (very topical given recent events, of course). The three main nationalist parties in Norway are the Progress Party (around 16% of the votes), the Democrats, and the Coast Party (around 1% each). Local elections are coming up soon – so how are new technologies adopted by these parties?

Øyvind focussed on their online presences on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter since 2007, and also conducted interviews with key party personnel, he also engaged in some preliminary data analysis following the 22 …

Reykjavík.
The next presenter at ECPR 2011 is Matthew Wall, whose interest is on the 2011 Irish general election – with a specific focus on Sinn Féin. The 2011 elections reshaped the Irish party system (in response to the global financial crisis), and meant a further step for SF away from its close associations with the nationalist ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and towards becoming a mainstream party in the Republic of Ireland.

SF has a mixed history in terms of online initiatives: they were the first Irish party to launch a Website, and had presences in Bebo and MySpace …

Reykjavík.
The next ECPR 2011 speaker is Joan Balcells, whose interest is in the impact of the Net on voting behaviour in the 2010 Catalan elections, with a specific focus on the left, pro-independence ERC party (which was in the ruling coalition but lost substantial votes in the election: from 14% of the vote in 2006 to 7% in 2010).

The ERC is defined by its Catalan nationalism, and had a strong following amongst Internet users (in fact, pro-independence attitudes and Internet use appear to be connected). ERC competes with CiU (the mainstream Catalan nationalist party) as well as small …

Reykjavík.
Day two at ECPR 2011 starts with a paper by Sarah Oates, whose focus is on Russian political parties online. Generally, Russian political parties don’t function like democratic parties; they are coopted by state interests, and this is true especially for the parties supporting the current regime. Does a presence on the Internet reflect or transform them, however?

United Russia is the largest political party in Russia, with 64% of the vote in 2007; minor parties include the Communists (12%), Liberal Democrats (8%), and A Just Russia (8%). Sarah coded these parties’ Websites for their approaches to providing information …

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Ben O’Loughlin, whose interest is in the effect of near real-time semantic analysis of public sentiments (online) on continuing political processes: in the end, we may end up with a kind of semantic polling of available social media and other electronic data, which enables political actors to target their messages to voters with unprecedented precision and speed. The 2010 election in the U.K. may have been the first rudimentary example of such a feedback loop.

Ben’s study examined the social media data used by TV and print journalists during the election, and …

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Andreas Jungherr, whose interest is in using Twitter data to detect events by identifying sudden bursts of activity in the continuing stream of updates. Such research is especially straightforward on Twitter, due to its convenient API access formats; additionally, the short format of Twitter messages means that key themes in messages can be more easily identified.

Twitter itself does some of this, of course, with its ‘trending topics’ (also broken down for specific geographical regions); further, it is possible to identify the links which are shared as part of tweets, of …

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Rosalynd Southern, whose interest is in the UK general election. In the first place, this examined the Web presence of the various political candidates for the six largest parties (2424 in total), from profiles on their party sites through Web-in-a-box pages solutions organised by the parties to personalised sites. This provides an indication of the role the Web plays in each candidate’s campaigning.

Additionally, the study examined candidate presence in various social media spaces (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and blogs), dividing such presence into the four categories …