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Communication Power of Politicians in a Digital Age (CEPOL)

Project Background

Digitalization challenges the traditional role of mass media as gatekeepers and distributors of political information in the public sphere. Thus new opportunities open up for politicians to set the agenda and communicate with voters. In the current political climate, this development has caused international concern, with the Brexit vote and the Twitter communication of Donald Trump as imminent cases.

Project Aim

The CEPOL project studies the implications of this development for representative, deliberative and participatory democracy by studying politicians’ agenda setting and framing powers vis-a-vis citizens, and relates this to citizens’ behaviour in the digital political communication system.

Project Approach

On the one hand, digitalization can be positive for representative democracy, by enabling effective dissemination of political information and direct communication between politicians and citizens. On the other, it can give politicians excessive power vis-à-vis their voters. For deliberative democracy a main question is whether increased media power of politicians leads to an open and pluralistic public sphere, or whether it leads to polarization and the formation of echo chambers and ideological clusters. For participative democracy, a core issue is whether digitalization leads to more civic and political participation, across social groups, and what role political information emanating from politicians play in this context.

CEPOL employs survey data, media content data, and social media data to examine:

1. The structure of Norwegian politicians’ Twitter audiences
2. The agenda-setting and framing power of politicians in social media
3. Changes in political media use and consequences for democratic participation among Norwegian citizens from 2011 to 2018

CEPOL finally uses findings from the empirical studies as basis for a normative discussion of the implications of the new media power of politicians to representative, deliberative and participatory democracy.

Participants

Participant	Degree	Phone	E-mail
Audun Beyer Senior Research Fellow	PhD	+47 402 23 626	audun.beyer@samfunnsforskning.no
Bernard Enjolras Research Professor, Director Center for research on civil society and voluntary sector	PhD	+47 976 89 237	bernard.enjolras@samfunnsforskning.no
Rune Karlsen Senior Research Fellow	PhD	+47 916 88 219	rune.karlsen@samfunnsforskning.no
Kari Steen-Johnsen Research Director, Politics, democracy, civil society	PhD	+47 906 49 417	kari.steen-johnsen@samfunnsforskning.no
Cristian Vaccari (University of Loughborough, UK)
Andrew Salway (Uni Research Computing)

Tags: Elections and Democracy, Civil Society, Digitalization