A primary definer online: the construction and propagation of a think tank’s authority on social media

Nick Anstead and Andrew Chadwick

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Who has power in the construction of economic news in the UK? Are social media reshaping how this power is enabled? We examine the public Twitter interactions between journalists, political elites, and what is arguably the UK’s most important think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), during the 2015 UK general election campaign. Combining human-coded content analysis and network analysis of Twitter discourse about the IFS during a 38-day period, we explain how and why the authority of this think tank is being translated to social media. We develop a new, social media theory of ‘primary definers’ and show how the political authority on which such roles rest is co-constructed and propagated by professional journalists and political elites. Central to this process is a behaviour we conceptualize and measure: authority signalling. Our findings call into question some of the more sanguine generalizations about social media’s contribution to pluralist democracy. Given the dominance of public service broadcasters in the processes we identify, we argue that, despite the growth of social media, there can be surprising limits on the extent to which contemporary media systems help citizens gain information about the assumptions underlying economic policy.

Keywords: social media; news; journalism; authority signalling; power; economic policy; austerity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2018-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Media, Culture and Society, 1, March, 2018, 40(2), pp. 246 - 266. ISSN: 0163-4437

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:69628

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