<p>What are the effects of political information on public opinion, political participation, and electoral outcomes? In this dissertation, I address these questions and investigate the ways that people acquire and incorporate information based on their levels of political knowledge and attentiveness. I examine the effects of political information among three groups whom we would expect to learn differently: those people with little knowledge or interest in politics; the potentially interested who possess some, but not much, knowledge; and the attentive experts. </p><p>In my first chapter, I look at the effects of information on people with little or no knowledge of politics by asking, "Do candidate visits affect voting decisions and candidate evaluations?" I link survey data with the location and topics of all speeches given by George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004 to empirically test the conventional wisdom that candidate appearances change electoral outcomes. I find that candidate visits do provide information to voters and that those effects are conditioned on consumption of local media. In my second chapter, I look at people with some knowledge of politics: college students. I ask, "How does the information that students 'incidentally' encounter in electronic social networks like Facebook.com shape their knowledge of current political events and their participation?" To answer these questions, I conducted a survey with an embedded experiment. I find that students do learn from Facebook, though the effects are small and vary across groups. My third chapter investigates the ways that the politically attentive incorporate information by asking, "What campaign information matters? Which campaign events are actually informative?" I develop a new measure of information flow using data from a political prediction market and a Bayesian estimation technique that adapts models from the economics literature. This measure offers a reliable way to describe the importance of campaign events that does not suffer from either post hoc judgments or reports from the principals involved in the campaign. Together, these projects address the consequences of political information in contemporary politics.</p> / Dissertation

I studien studeras hur komplexiteten kring sociala medier kan studeras, samt på vilket sätt sociala nätverk är relaterade till nätverken i sociala medier och hur det påverkar konsumenterna.  Syftet med studien är att undersöka de sociala medierna i förhållande till de sociala nätverken med fokus på konsumentbeteende och därigenom skapa en generell modell som förklarar problematiken.  Studien bygger på en litteraturstudie som i första hand sammanställts av artiklar med fokus på ämnesområdena sociala nätverk, elektroniska sociala nätverk och sociala medier. En enkätundersökning gjordes för att sammanställa konsumenters åsikter om ämnesområdena, i syfte att tillslut utmynna i en analys och diskussion.  Det går att konstatera att sociala medier har vidgat det sociala nätverket för den enskilde konsumenten. Detta resulterar i att den enskilde konsumenten nu kan komma i kontakt med fler aktörer och andra konsumenter som i många fall kan vara okända. Trots att de är okända tenderar konsumenter att lita på den information som erhålls i den utsträckningen att det kan påverka köpbeslutet. / The study examines the complexity of how social media can be studied, and in what way the social networks relate to networks in social media and how it affects the consumers. The purpose with the study is to examine the relation between social media and social networks, with a focus on consumer behavior and thereby create a general model that explains the problem.  The study is based on a literature review that is primarily compiled by articles with focus on issues surrounding social networks, electronic social networks and social media. A survey was done to compile consumers' opinions about the area for the topics, in order to eventually culminate in an analysis and discussion.  It is possible to conclude that social media has expanded the social network for the individual consumer. The result is that individual consumers now can get in touch with more influencing factors and other customers that in many cases may be unknown. Even though they are unknown, consumers tend to rely on the information obtained to the extent that it can affect the purchase decision.