Flows of Information in Election Campaigns: Who Influences Whom?

Despite the proliferation of the use of social media in politics, few studies demonstrate the extent to which social media sets the news agenda during electoral campaigns. The traditional media – both broadcast and print – is still thought to hold a privileged position among the public and amongst political parties in terms of determining important issues during a campaign. However, theories and methods for understanding issue agenda-setting must be extended to reflect the prominence of social media in modern campaigns and to incorporate messaging by parties on social media and potential biases among news outlets. The question has generally been framed as which parties are more successful in driving coverage in news media as an aggregate. We expand the research to investigate agenda-setting capturing the diversity of news sources, the public and party messaging on social media. Our research demonstrates a new approach to understanding these often dynamic and reciprocal relationships. Using an information theoretic frame-work, we model the flows of information from traditional to social media using data collected around the time of the 2015 British general election. Specifically, we assess whether social media has altered the gatekeeping role of traditional media and whether the flow of information is dependent on the issue. Our findings suggest that while social media allows the public and parties to share information without the need for traditional media, it is traditional media that drives the conversation and campaign agenda: traditional media influences the issue priorities of the public and the priorities of party messaging about issues on social media.