Analyzing Citizen Engagement With European Politics on Social Media

Pieter de Wilde, Astrid Rasch and Michael Bossetta
Additional contact information
Pieter de Wilde: Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Astrid Rasch: Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Michael Bossetta: Department of Communication and Media, Lund University, Sweden

Politics and Governance, 2022, vol. 10, issue 1, 90-96

Abstract: Contributions in this thematic issue focus explicitly on citizens and their online engagement with European politics. For social media research in the European Union, citizens remain an understudied actor type in comparison with political elites or news organizations. The reason, we argue, is four key challenges facing social media research in the European Union: legal, ethical, technical, and cultural. To introduce this thematic issue, we outline these four challenges and illustrate how they relate to each contribution. Given that these challenges are unlikely to dissipate, we stress the need for open dialogue about them. A key part of that involves contextualizing research findings within the constraints in which they are produced. Despite these challenges, the contributions showcase that a theoretical and empirical focus on citizens’ social media activity can illuminate key insights into vitally important topics for contemporary Europe. These include civic participation, institutional communication, media consumption, gender inequality, and populism.

Keywords: computational methods; European Union; Facebook; gender; news engagement; populism; social media; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/5233 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v10:y:2022:i:1:p:90-96

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v10i1.5233

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().