Social Media in Politics: Case Studies on the Political Power of Social Media (Public Administration and Information Technology Book 13)

This volume sets out to analyse the relation between social media and politics by investigating the power of the internet and more specifically social media, in the political and social discourse. The volume collects original research on the use of social media in political campaigns, electoral marketing, riots and social revolutions, presenting a range of case studies from across the world as well as theoretical and methodological contributions. Examples that explore the use of social media in electoral campaigns include, for instance, studies on the use of Face book in the 2012 US presidential campaign and in the 2011 Turkish general elections. The final section of the book debates the usage of Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools in mobilizing people for riots and revolutions, presenting and analysing recent events in Istanbul and Egypt, among others. The Digital Divide has been considered key to understanding the relation between Internet and politics. However, today the use of the Internet is following a normalization trend and new country contextual factors must be taken into consideration in explaining the unequal use of the Internet in politics. This study focuses on the unequal presence of political parties online across political systems. By combining multiple sources, this study explores the relation between the unequal online presence of political parties in 190 countries, and country-contextual factors, including level of Digital Divide, and economic and democratic indicators. Here, the empirical findings resize the relation of causality between the Digital Divide and the use of the Internet for politics. They highlight that democratic status, among various other country-contextual specificities, is the strongest contextual factor in determining the unequal use of the Internet in politics for political parties