Morgan Williams and Jeremy C. Pope, Political Science
The make-up of political campaigns has transformed with the creation of the internet. What used to be a world of door to door canvassing and mass produced mailers sent to party members is now a world of entertaining YouTube videos and Facebook likes. It is no longer easy to gather and track the political advertisements that people are exposed to, because they come from so many different sources. It used to be that if you were a Republican, it would be likely you would only be exposed to Republican messaging with the same pattern reflected in the Democratic Party. This concept was called “political silos.” I hypothesized that with the internet and social media being used as the main sources of campaigning in recent elections that people would be exposed to a variety of political messages, from a variety of sources, breaking down these silos.
To test this theory I fielded questions on the Utah Voter Poll, a survey given to registered Utah Voters online throughout the year. On this survey I asked the voters questions about their political party identification, their use of Facebook, and their exposure to political messaging on Facebook. The questions were about how often they checked Facebook, how often they saw political messaging on Facebook, the source of the political messaging (family, friends, pages they liked etc.), and which party this message was supporting. All respondents who reported having a Facebook were given questions about political messaging. My goal in asking these questions was to investigate how the frequency of respondents logging in to their Facebook profiles influenced the amount and type of political messaging their received.
We received very interesting results from these questions. The first result that I would like to discuss is that a large majority of respondents have a Facebook and report checking it often. 87% of Democrats have a Facebook and 81% of Republicans. Every age group that we investigating, including 65+ had over 75% of Respondents having a profile. The youngest age category, 18-34, had 95% of respondents report having a Facebook. 47% report checking their Facebooks every day and 81% reporting logging in once a week or more. These results demonstrated to us that the population we were looking at was very exposed to Facebook, and therefore likely very exposed to political messaging on Facebook.
We found that the more frequently you checked Facebook, the more frequently you were opposed to Political messaging. Of those who checked Facebook every day, 86% were exposed to political messaging on Facebook. Of those who checked their Facebook less than once a week, 31% were exposed to political messaging. Overall, 67% of those who reported having a Facebook were exposed to political messaging.
The finding we were most interested in was about which party respondents saw messaging from. To allow them to report messaging from both parties the question was formatted in a unique way. Respondents were given three boxes- one for Republican, Democrat and other and told them to put the percentage of messaging that was from each party in the box, with the boxes totaling 100. We first looked at this variable by frequency of checking Facebook. This analysis showed that regardless of frequency of checking Facebook, respondents were exposed to messaging from both parties. Those who checked Facebook every day, said that 52% of their messaging was from the Republican Party, 32% was from the Democratic Party and 16% was from other sources. This pattern of being exposed to messaging from both parties is consistent through all levels of Facebook activity.
One other way we analyzed this data is to look at the exposure of messaging from each party by the respondent’s party strength. We found, as we expected, the stronger the partisan strength of the respondent, the more one sided their exposure to advertising appeared to be. Respondents who categorized themselves as Strong Republicans said that 74% of the political messaging they were exposed to came from Republicans. Those who identified as Strong Democrats said they were exposed to 54% of their messaging from Democrats.
These finding indicate that the idea of political silos is not as prevalent with the rise of social media campaigning. Regardless of party strength you receive messages from both parties. This data was gathered only in the state of Utah and of registered voters, meaning that we cannot extrapolate this data to a nationwide population. Further research on social media campaigning should be done on a large scale because of the recent developments in technology that allow this method of campaigning to reach such a large population of people. This is a new field that has had relatively little research done on it.
I believe that further research should be done looking into the algorithms social media uses to promote pages to like and advertisements that you see based on your posts, interactions and google searching. This type of micro-targeting of potential voters could potentially have a large future in social media campaigning.
Overall, what this project demonstrated to me was that with political campaigning done over the internet, voters are not limited as to what messages they see. They can see messages from both parties meaning that, if our political messaging was done right, we could use this form of messaging to create a more politically knowledgeable group of voters.