A Comparative Study of Campaign and Non‐Campaign Facebook Strategies: The Case of Taiwan’ s Legislators
Yu‐jui Chen and Pin‐yu Chu National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan slamdunkrei @ hotmail. com vchu @ nccu. edu. tw
Abstract: Facebook, the most popular social media in the world, has changed ways of citizen involvement in governance. Politicians and( elected) public administrators worldwide have adopted Facebook as an important approach to connect with citizens. This study investigates differences in communication strategies and patterns of legislators’ Facebook in Taiwan during the 2011 election periods and during the 2012 regular legislative sessions, with the aim of exploring whether the Facebook phenomenon can improve the process of online political communication and citizen participation. The lessons from this study will help pave the way for future research on political campaign and electronic participation.
Keywords: electronic participation, Facebook, campaign strategy, web 2.0, legislator
1. Introduction
As Web 2.0’ s sharing, interaction, and collective creation platforms become increasingly commonplace, a democratically‐oriented internet environment has been created, which draws particular attention from the fields of public administration and political communication. With more than one billion users, Facebook now is the most popular web 2.0 and social media in the world. As access increased, Facebook has changed ways of citizen involvement in governance and even has contributed to social changes in countries such as Egypt and Iran.
By and large, politicians and( elected) public administrators worldwide have adopted Facebook as a method for communicating with citizens. Following the trend, most legislators in Taiwan also create personal Facebook accounts and Facebook pages as an additional way to reach their potential voters and citizens in general. Ideally, legislators can efficiently operate their constituents and directly communicate with their“ friends.” Facebook pages of legislators seem to offer the promise of electronic participation( e‐participation), reaching citizens on a common platform and allowing for citizen comments. On the other hand, citizens can establish a link to legislators via information‐sharing, dialogue, and consensus‐building on Facebook. If the two‐way communication works properly and successfully, Facebook will certainly help to create more citizen participation and more public values.
While previous literatures show that campaign web sites do not utilize two‐way communication successfully( Wang, 2009. Jackson & Lilleker, 2010), this study investigates differences in communication strategies and patterns of legislators’ Facebook between the election periods and the regular legislative sessions, with the aim of exploring whether the Facebook phenomenon can improves the process of online political communication and citizen participation, using Taiwan incumbent legislators’ Facebook as a case study.
The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we first discuss the development of citizen participation and particularly the trend of e‐participation. We also utilize studies on political campaign and election websites to summarize a list of strategies commonly used by politicians and( elected) public administrators on their web sites and blogs, such as calling for change, mobilization and participation, emphasis on the future, nostalgia for the past, moral appeal, and emphasis on personal characteristics. To further comprehend strategies and patterns used on Facebook pages, we apply content analysis to review and compare differences in communication strategies and patterns of the Facebook posts of incumbent legislators during the 2011 legislator election and the 2012 regular legislative sessions. We summarize the methodological approach in section 3, present the results of content analysis in section 4, and discuss how lessons we learn from this study will help pave the way for future research on political campaign, e‐participation, and e‐governance in the last section.
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