15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Thomas Gschwend
Discussant/s:
Shared by Panellists
Meeting Room M

Natalia Umansky
Repost and Like: Securitization Theory in the Digital Age

Rosa M. Navarrete, Anna Adendorf, Markus Baumann
Tweeting out loud. Coalition signals in social media

Anna Adendorf, Ines Rehbein, Oke Bahnsen, Thomas Gschwend, Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Who wants to go with whom? Identifying coalition signals in newspaper articles using supervised machine learning

David Moore
Explaining the Variation in Individuals' Conspiratorial Beliefs: The Effect of Exposure to Emotive Conspiratorial Messaging in the Media
Tweeting out loud. Coalition signals in social media
Rosa M. Navarrete 1, Anna Adendorf 1, Markus Baumann 2
1 MZES - University of Mannheim
2 Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

As coalition governments are the norm in most proportional systems, parties typically signal their coalition preferences before elections. Yet, there are proportional systems where coalition governments are uncommon and where parties do not send clear coalition signals to their electorate. When facing an election in which polls indicate that no single party will gain a majority and in which a coalition government will become necessary, parties in those systems are then in a situation in which they should announce their coalition preferences in order to enable voters to make an informed decision. The way in which parties signal their preferences concerning future alliances in systems with little experience with coalition governments is an understudied topic despite its utmost relevance. Will they follow typical patterns of coalition signaling, or will they signal more unusual preferences? We analyze the patterns of these inexperienced parties’ coalition signals and compare them to the patterns that we find in systems where coalition governments are the norm. The content of parties’ social media accounts provides us with the necessary information as parties might want to use these platforms to broadcast who their preferred partners are. We therefore assess Spanish and German parties’ and party leaders’ tweets before an election and extract their coalition preferences from there. Our findings hold important implications for representative democracy and provide valuable insights into parties’ communication patterns.