{"id":2658,"date":"2013-09-16T09:16:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T23:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/?p=2658"},"modified":"2013-09-15T15:25:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T05:25:02","slug":"ausvotes-the-australian-federal-election-on-twitter-final-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2013\/09\/16\/ausvotes-the-australian-federal-election-on-twitter-final-week\/","title":{"rendered":"#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Final Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2013 Australian federal election campaign is (finally) over \u2013 and as the final vote counts in tightly contested seats conclude, the incoming Abbott government will presumably be sworn into office any week now, after a surprisingly low-key start to the post-election period. Time, then, to explore how the final week of the campaign unfolded on Twitter<\/em>, and indeed to look back over the entire campaign period to chart the parties\u2019 and candidates\u2019 uses of Twitter<\/em> and the response from the Twitter<\/em> audience. This first overview will also form the basis for further, more detailed research which we\u2019ll publish in the months to come of course, and for comparative analyses of the Australian (7 Sep.), Norwegian (9 Sep.) and German (22 Sep.) social media election campaigns in partnership with our overseas colleagues.<\/p>\n

First, the obligatory reminder about what we\u2019re examining here: we are tracking all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we\u2019ve progressively extended our list as far as possible. My previous posts with week-by week analyses of the Twitter<\/em> activity patterns are also available here (week 1<\/a>, week 2<\/a>, week 3<\/a>, week 4<\/a>), and there are a few more posts on the networks of @mention and retweet interaction<\/a> and two posts on the electorate<\/a>-by-electorate<\/a> distribution of Twitter<\/em> activity.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin this week\u2019s analysis with another look at the @mentions directed at the key political leaders, now covering the entire campaign from the official declaration of the election on Sunday 4 Aug. to the Sunday following the election day on 7 Sep. As in previous weeks, a clear two-class system is evident: the two candidates for the Prime Ministership, incumbent Kevin Rudd and (successful) challenger Tony Abbott, are well ahead of their various party colleagues and the minor party leaders. Rudd, in turn, is well ahead of Abbott in the total number of @mentions he received over the course of the election campaign, although it should be noted that after the first week of the campaign the two leaders tracked one another very closely, and Abbott even pulled ahead of Rudd in week-by-week mentions for a while in mid-August. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, as it became clear that he would be the next Prime Minister of Australia Abbott also received significantly more mentions than Rudd on the election weekend itself. (As always, click the graphs to see a larger version.)<\/p>\n

\"Leaders<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to read more into these figures, but we simply don\u2019t yet have the comparative evidence that would support such interpretations. For example, Abbott\u2019s @mentions increased especially strongly in mid-campaign as he was fending off some criticism for a number of controversial and ill-advised statements, so we might speculate that on balance, a greater volume of @mentions is actually an indication of voter disenchantment rather than\u00a0 support; Rudd pulled ahead again in @mentions during the final week of the campaign just as his standing in the polls dropped. More detailed semantic analysis of @mentions will be required at a later date to examine the overall tenor of these tweets (and with automated sentiment detection still very, very unreliable, this will mainly need to be manual), so it\u2019s impossible to make any firm claims about this at this stage.<\/p>\n

The increase in @mentions of Abbott\u2019s account during the election weekend, at any rate, is related to his success in the election, of course, as Twitter<\/em> users are coming to terms with the change of government, congratulate the winner or warn him not to abuse his mandate, and tweet at Abbott to call for action on a broad range of policy issues. Interestingly, at the same time former PM Julia Gillard\u2019s @mentions also increase notably again: this is almost entirely due to the fact that she broke her campaign-long Twitter<\/em> silence on election night and tweeted her commiserations to the Labor election team, resulting in a substantial number of retweets and @replies.<\/p>\n

The day-to-day figures show some of these trends in some more detail. We see Rudd and Abbott track each other quite closely for most of the campaign, with synchronised spikes in the @mentions of both leaders especially on the days of the three televised debates. Rudd receives a strong boost in numbers (if not necessarily in electoral support) in the days following the Labor campaign \u201claunch\u201d on 1 September (and Deputy PM Anthony Albanese also spikes briefly as he plays a leading role during the event), but it\u2019s Abbott who wins the election weekend and to whom the focus shifts especially dramatically on the post-election Sunday. Minor party leader Clive Palmer also receives substantial @mentions on election day as reports emerge of his likely win in his own electorate of Fisher.<\/p>\n

\"Leaders<\/a><\/p>\n

Interestingly, though, while PM-elect Abbott is the clear frontrunner in @mentions during the election weekend, his party\u2019s other candidates don\u2019t fare anywhere near as well. In the following graph, we\u2019ve added up @mentions of all party candidates except for Abbott and Rudd (who are clearly in a league of their own), and it becomes evident that Labor candidates are mentioned significantly more often than their Liberal counterparts during the campaign as a whole, and even more frequently on the election weekend itself.<\/p>\n

Again, it is all too tempting \u2013 but, in the absence of content and sentiment analyses, premature \u2013 to read too much into this. Possibly, Twitter<\/em> users are simply lining up to say \u201cgood riddance\u201d to a range of MPs who\u2019ve just lost their seats \u2013 but just as possibly, they\u2019re commiserating with them, thanking them for the past six years of government, or expressing their views about how the Labor Party should reposition itself for the future as it seeks to regain government in coming elections.<\/p>\n

For the moment, my reading of the dramatic boost in @mentions for Labor politicians during the election weekend (and especially also on the post-election Sunday) tends towards the positive rather than negative: my sense is that it shows that, while they\u2019ve removed it from government, voters (or at least those voters who are active on Twitter<\/em>) haven\u2019t completely tuned out the ALP, but are in fact very actively tweeting at its politicians to influence the party\u2019s future direction. But that\u2019s no more than an inkling for now \u2013 future research will need to explore this in more detail.<\/p>\n

\"Parties<\/a><\/p>\n

But let\u2019s shift our attention from the activities of rank-and-file Twitter<\/em> users to those of politicians themselves. It\u2019s worth repeating an observation we\u2019ve made throughout the campaign: for the most part, the volume of @mentions of the political leaders has very little to do with how much those leaders themselves have tweeted. If it did, we should expect to see Greens leader Christine Milne well ahead of everyone else, since she (assisted by her campaign team, presumably) has been the most active of all major politicians throughout the campaign. Another minor party leader, Clive Palmer, is also well represented here: encouraged perhaps by the social media response to some of his more notorious campaign stunts<\/a>, his Twitter<\/em> activity took off from about mid-campaign onwards.<\/p>\n

More generally, it is notable that (where they did tweet at all) the major party frontbenchers have tended to be rather more active on Twitter<\/em> than their leaders: Albanese, Turnbull, Bishop, and Wong have tweeted considerably more than Rudd or Abbott, and a number of them have also shown an upward trajectory in activity over the last week or so of the campaign. Bishop was especially active on election day itself, while it\u2019s again all too tempting to suggest that Albanese\u2019s increased activity might also be a first step in his tilt at the leadership of a post-Rudd ALP.<\/p>\n

Rudd\u2019s and Abbott\u2019s far more restrained activity, by contrast, looks to me to be part of a deliberate attempt to be active throughout the campaign, but not to be so active as to overwhelm their followers with constant tweets (as Milne\u2019s high-volume tweeting may have done to her less committed followers, for example). By comparison, though, my sense is that the apparently so social media-savvy Rudd and his team might have underdone it a little \u2013 especially as the underdog in the campaign, I would have thought he\u2019d use Twitter<\/em> and other social media more forcefully (and that also means more frequently) to argue his case for re-election. Perhaps his greater volume of tweets during the second half of the campaign is an acknowledgment of this shortcoming, in fact \u2013 it\u2019s as if in late August they suddenly discovered that they needed to do more on Twitter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Leaders'<\/a><\/p>\n

But yet again, the leaders\u2019 activity provides only a very incomplete picture of the total volume of tweets originating from the various parties\u2019 candidates. In aggregate, Labor politicians tweeted significantly more than their counterparts in any other party, even if their leader\u2019s social media activities remained surprisingly restrained: ALP candidates tweeted even more than their colleagues from the Greens (though it should be acknowledged that, representing a minor party, the total number of tweeting Greens candidates was also smaller).<\/p>\n

\"Tweets<\/a><\/p>\n

This reflects the greater need for Labor to utilise social as well as all other forms of media to get its electoral message across, compared to its major rivals in the Coalition parties, and ties in well with perceptions of a \u201csmall target\u201d campaign pursued by the Coalition: better to keep Coalition candidates from engaging with social media than to risk any negative repercussions from potential gaffes (indeed, at least for less experienced Coalition candidates this strategy appears to have extended to mainstream media engagements as well).<\/p>\n

Overall, then (and excluding its leader\u2019s own Twitter<\/em> activity), Labor\u2019s approach to social media seems to have resembled that of a minor party seeking any kind of media exposure more than that of a major party using social media merely as an add-on to mainstream media coverage \u2013 like the Greens, the Pirates and Clive Palmer\u2019s United Australia Party (with the latter two running considerably fewer tweeting candidates, however), Labor appears to have encouraged its candidates to tweet, and tweet a lot.<\/p>\n

As we now know, this didn\u2019t change the eventual outcome of the election, of course (and neither should we expect any one medium to do so in the contemporary, multi-channel media landscape, barring any especially major gaffe). Whether local Labor candidates\u2019 social media performance helped to limit the losses by highlighting local contests over the Rudd\/Abbott battle for the Prime Ministership, though, that\u2019s a very different question \u2013 and one which will require a great deal of further analysis beyond the Twitter<\/em> data themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2013 Australian federal election campaign is (finally) over \u2013 and as the final vote counts in tightly contested seats conclude, the incoming Abbott government will presumably be sworn into office any week now, after a surprisingly low-key start to the post-election period. Time, then, to explore how the final week of the campaign unfolded … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Final Week”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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