Yes / This study examines the extent to which acculturation and enculturation orientations affect online political participation, political involvement and voting intentions among a sample of Turkish-Dutch immigrants. The study uses data from Turkish-Dutch participants. Structural Equations Modelling (SEM) is employed for assessing the relationships in the conceptualized model. The findings show that enculturation and acculturation influence online participation and involvement, which in turn, are related to voting intentions. The study further examines the mediating role of political involvement and online political participation. Political involvement mediates the relationships between enculturation and acculturation and voting intentions. The results further indicate the effect of online participation on voting intentions is mediated by political involvement. The study findings provide insights into offline and online cultural and civic engagement tendencies among an important immigrant segment that policy makers should consider in the future.

This thesis seeks to challenge the dominant modes of conceiving the empirical link between citizens’ negative perceptions of immigrants and electoral support for Western European radical right parties, and in doing so, to offer a deeper understanding of the dynamics of radical right voting behavior based on an analysis of radical right parties’ online activities. Despite radical right parties' great popularity and important presence online, little scholarly attention has been paid to their activities in an online space. Accordingly, most empirical research on radical right voting behavior has been conducted in an offline context, ignoring the potential role the Internet plays in connecting radical right parties and voters. Building on Norris’s demand-supply framework, I consider the largely ignored factor, citizens' online activities, in my quantitative model and, ultimately, develop formal links between citizens’ anti-immigrant attitudes and electoral support for radical right parties conditional on their level of Internet usage. Thereby, I aim to provide an answer to the following research question: Does citizens’ Internet usage moderate the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and radical right voting? Using data from the 9th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), I test whether voters' high level of Internet consumption strengthens the positive relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and electoral support for radical right parties in eight Western European countries. The results show that my expectations are strongly supported at the cross-national level and partially confirmed at the national level by Belgium, Germany, and Italy. My findings hold promise for future work in designing more elaborate and practical voting models.

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This paper deals with online political discussion on social networking sites. Drawing from Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and former adaptations of public sphere theory to Internet research, the study examines to what extent political discussion on social networking sites displays public issue focus as well as deliberative, liberal and communitarian characteristics. The empirical analysis is a case study that scrutinizes two opposing Facebook pages created in the context of the topic ‘Stuttgart 21’ – a construction project that evoked a local civic protest movement in the city of Stuttgart in the south of Germany. Using an ethnographic approach, the study takes into account the architecture, culture and discussion style on the two pages and aims at describing the pages in terms of their degree of reciprocity, contestation, ideological homogeneity, rationality and contextualisation with the offline protest movement. The results show two polarized pages that lack deliberation and dialogue, but feature ideological homophily and identification. The results back the fragmentation theory of Internet audiences, while not maintaining the fear of losing the common ground in society. On the contrary, the study suggests that civic political engagement on social networking sites should be discussed in the context of radical democratic processes. It concludes that the utilization of social networks in order to politically inform, stimulate and mobilise scalable publics is desirable.

abstract: Millions of users leave digital traces of their political engagements on social media platforms every day. Users form networks of interactions, produce textual content, like and share each others' content. This creates an invaluable opportunity to better understand the political engagements of internet users. In this proposal, I present three algorithmic solutions to three facets of online political networks; namely, detection of communities, antagonisms and the impact of certain types of accounts on political polarization. First, I develop a multi-view community detection algorithm to find politically pure communities. I find that word usage among other content types (i.e. hashtags, URLs) complement user interactions the best in accurately detecting communities. Second, I focus on detecting negative linkages between politically motivated social media users. Major social media platforms do not facilitate their users with built-in negative interaction options. However, many political network analysis tasks rely on not only positive but also negative linkages. Here, I present the SocLSFact framework to detect negative linkages among social media users. It utilizes three pieces of information; sentiment cues of textual interactions, positive interactions, and socially balanced triads. I evaluate the contribution of each three aspects in negative link detection performance on multiple tasks. Third, I propose an experimental setup that quantifies the polarization impact of automated accounts on Twitter retweet networks. I focus on a dataset of tragic Parkland shooting event and its aftermath. I show that when automated accounts are removed from the retweet network the network polarization decrease significantly, while a same number of accounts to the automated accounts are removed randomly the difference is not significant. I also find that prominent predictors of engagement of automatically generated content is not very different than what previous studies point out in general engaging content on social media. Last but not least, I identify accounts which self-disclose their automated nature in their profile by using expressions such as bot, chat-bot, or robot. I find that human engagement to self-disclosing accounts compared to non-disclosing automated accounts is much smaller. This observational finding can motivate further efforts into automated account detection research to prevent their unintended impact. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2019

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[pt] Campanhas eleitorais passam por transformações provocadas pelo uso de anúncios políticos online, sobretudo a partir do surgimento de tecnologias digitais originadas nos EUA pós-2016. O objetivo dessa dissertação, portanto, é investigar essa transformação em campanhas eleitorais brasileiras, uma vez que há lacuna nessa área de estudos no Brasil. É conduzida revisão teórica sobre a visibilidade eleitoral no contexto político brasileiro, sobre o tradicional conceito de americanização e sobre os anúncios políticos online – objeto do que se chama, no Brasil, de impulsionamento. Duas abordagens empíricas são adotadas: a primeira é quantitativa e analisa as despesas de candidaturas para Deputado Federal em 2018 e 2022; a segunda é qualitativa e investiga, com entrevistas semiestruturadas, percepções de profissionais de campanha sobre o uso do recurso. Resultam disso três pontos: (1) anúncios políticos online são utilizados como meio compensatório de visibilidade eleitoral para campanhas com menor orçamento total; (2) anúncios políticos online são utilizados como mecanismo complementar de visibilidade eleitoral para campanhas de maior orçamento; e (3) há claro ganho de influência de plataformas pertencentes a empresas americanas hegemônicas no mercado digital nas eleições brasileiras. / [en] Electoral campaigns are being transformed by the use of online political ads, especially with the advent of digital technologies originated in the United States post-2016. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate the transformation on Brazilian electoral campaigns, considering there are not many papers about this issue in the field. To accomplish this, a literature review is conducted to study electoral visibility in Brazilian political context, the traditional concept of Americanization and online political ads – referred to in Brazil as impulsionamento. For this purpose, two empirical approaches are conducted: the first one is quantitative and analyses expenses of candidates for Federal Deputy in 2018 and 2022 elections; the second is qualitative and investigates, through semistructured interviews, campaign professionals perceptions of the use of the tool. The results reveal three main points: (1) online political advertisements are used as a compensatory means of electoral visibility for campaigns with lower total budgets; (2) online political advertisements are used as a complementary mechanism of electoral visibility for larger-budget campaigns; and (3) there is a clear gain in influence of platforms owned by hegemonic American companies in the digital market in Brazilian elections.

The recent political events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia (2011) have confirmed the key role of social networks (SNSs), as well as online political news in supporting citizens with their self-determination. Furthermore, “changes in the media landscape present new challenges for scholars interested in the relationship between the media and civil society. Additionally, the explosion of the Internet that started in advanced democracies and has spread through much of the globe provides new and unexplored pathways for communication. Moreover, the inclusion of the Internet in the media environment raises new questions for citizens, politicians, researchers, journalists, and government” (Oates, Owen & Gibson, 2006, p. 1). This study looks at the relationships between young people’s exposure to political news on the Internet and their political awareness. It develops and applies an index for political participation composed of several variables measuring political interest, discussion, knowledge, and participation. The survey among students in both countries was administered in Arabic and German, while the master questionnaire was developed in English. The survey was conducted between April and June 2010 in Egypt at Minia University and in Germany at Technical university of Dresden. The sample size was 1000 (500 in each country) students from several departments representing different academic fields: three departments of Engineering, three departments of Humanities and Social Science, and finally three departments of Natural Science. The study’s main research question was: “What is the impact of students’ exposure to political news on the Internet on their political awareness and civic activities?” The researcher started from the hypothesis that heavy use of political news on the Internet is positively related to political awareness. A further research question aimed at gauging the role of intervening variables such as gender and field of study for the relationship between the use of political news on the Internet and the level of political awareness. Results show that there is a positive relationship between using political online news and political awareness. German students’ political awareness for German students was higher than Egypt student’s political awareness (M=63.02, SD=15.65, comparing to M=45.72, SD= 17.65 for Egyptians).

This research uses the 2010-post election survey by Pew Internet and American Life project and traces the direct and indirect paths of online political information use, Facebook political information use, and mobile phones political information use to political participation to online and offline political participation. Indirect paths are traced through the paths of wider view exposure and the credibility to online and offline political participation. The theoretical framework of the O-S-O-R model is used to guide the path analyses for this research. This research finds that both online political information use and Facebook political information use expose respondents to a wider diversity of views, but that it does not lead to political participation. Furthermore, all three mediums are found to be credible sources of information leading to online political participation with different strengths, while Facebook political information use also leads to offline political participation. Thus, credibility is an important factor and even suggests the possible need for an opinion leader. This is especially so for the use of Facebook, which has the best balanced information dissemination structure its friend network of identifiable people, organisations, and institutions. Facebook also provides the best platform for critical debate and engaging potential voters. Mobile phone political use is also supportive of political participation, but is more questioned in terms of whether the participation it brings is able to lead to critical debate. Keywords: Political participation, Facebook, social media, mobile phones, online political information, wider view exposure, credibility.

While in Western democracies the study of the impact of Internet on civic and political participation is very popular, in the Czech Republic this type of study is still at the beginning. It is merely focused on the impact of Internet on voter turnout and political campaigning. However the study of the impact of the Internet on civic and political participation from the indivdual level is still missing. Because of that te aim of this study is to analyze the impact of Internet use on political and civic participation. Based on my research I analyzed the internet activities and main factors that influence participation. The results of this study show that Internet is not going to be a panacea for political participation.