Understanding the dynamics of politicians' visibility in traditional and social media

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which politicians' visibility in traditional news coverage explains individual politicians' visibility on social media, and vice versa. We also explore whether these relationships depend on commonly identified characteristics of individual politicians. We collected data for all elected candidates from the 2012 Dutch national elections covering each 15 days prior to the election day (N = 2250). This includes 2736 newspaper articles and 77,597 mentions on Facebook and Twitter. Our results show that the traditional news agenda and social media agenda impact each other, but that the reciprocal influence is not independent of politician characteristics