Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From “Watchdog” to ”Attackdog”
Dr Bart Cammaerts, London School of Economics and Political Science
Wednesday, 9 November
Windsor-0-05
4-5:30pm
We hope to see you there!
Vaccari publishes article on the implications of online political mobilization
A new article by Cristian Vaccari on how mobilization messages received via email and social media may affect political participation has just been published in the high-impact journal Political Communication.
Based on unique survey data collected as part of a large comparative project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Dr Vaccari found that citizens who receive messages via email or social media inviting them to vote for a party or candidate are substantially more likely to engage in a variety of political activities besides voting, even after controlling for most known covariates of political participation and even after pre-processing the data to take into account self-selection biases in who receives online mobilization messages, and recalls receiving them.
The full abstract of the article, available here, reads as follows:
This study analyzes the relationship between online voter mobilization and political engagement in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the 2014 European election campaign. Internet surveys of samples representatives of these countries’ populations with Internet access show that respondents who received an invitation to vote for a party or candidate via e-mail or social media engaged in a significantly higher number of political activities than those who did not. Moreover, the relationship between mobilization and engagement was stronger among those who followed the campaign less attentively, as well as in countries where overall levels of engagement with the campaign were lower (Germany and the United Kingdom) than where they were higher (Italy). These findings indicate that online mobilization may contribute to closing gaps in political engagement at both individual and aggregate levels, and thus suggest that digital media may contribute to reviving democratic citizenship.
The article is part of a special issue on "Digital Politics: Mobilization, Engagement, and Participation", co-edited by Karolina Koc-Michalska and Darren Lilleker.
Strategic narratives in The Conversation
What do they see? (The Conversation / Creative Commons)
Laura Roselle, co-author of Strategic Narratives with Ben O'Loughlin and Alister Miskimmon, has published a short article in The Conversation explaining why Americans and Russians see the world differently. This was prompted by US Secretary of State John Kerry's recent remark that he lives in a "parallel universe" to his Russian counterparts. Laura uses strategic narrative theory to explain why this is the case. This is of huge importance, since it explains why the US and Russia cannot agree how to deal with the crisis in Syria.
Laura, Ben and Alister will published a new volume on strategic narratives in 2017.
Beyond Borders and Boundaries in Political Communication Research
As part of a series of regional events funded by the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association’s (MeCCSA) Postgraduate Network, PhD candidates in the New Political Communication Unit will be hosting a half-day workshop discussing and debating the methodological challenges faced by researchers in the field of political communication.
Following on from previous regional events funded by the MeCCSA PGN on the theme of ‘Boundaries and Borders’, this event explores existing boundaries and borders within the growing field of political communication and poses the following questions:
· What problems do we face as researchers?
· What is being done currently to overcome these problems?
· What can be done in the future to ensure our research remains relevant and robust?
The first half of the workshop comprises a masterclass with presentations from Gordon Cameron, Press Officer and Senior Researcher at the Greater London Authority, and Dr Jinghan Zeng, Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Mr Cameron and Dr Zeng will discuss their approaches to research in this field from both a professional and an academic perspective. The second half of the workshop will be led by presentations from current PhD candidates in the New Political Communication Unit: Declan McDowell-Naylor; Ellen Watts; and Amber Macintyre. A Q&A session and discussion with this panel will take place, chaired by one of the event’s organisers.
The event runs from 14:00-18:00 on Wednesday 12th October. Tea and coffee will be provided and a wine reception will be held after the event in the Political and International Relations Department.
All members of staff and postgraduate students are welcome, please email Claudia.ferreira.2015@live.rhul.ac.uk to indicate your interest as numbers are limited.
Speaker Biographies
Gordon Cameron has been working in politics for the past 7 years. After completing his Politics BA from Carleton University, he started working in politics by providing volunteer online communications support for different local candidates and charities in Ottawa, Canada. Following several years of working in the Canadian government he joined the New Political Communications MSc programme at Royal Holloway in 2010.
Since 2011 he has been working for the Greater London Authority and is now a Senior Researcher / Press Officer for the Conservative Group. Over that time he has led several City Hall projects such as improving mobile connectivity on the Tube, holding a Met Crime museum exhibition, improving flexible ticketing on London Transport, reducing the cost of drunkenness to London’s health services, and promoting tourism with technology.
Currently Gordon is working in the opposition group to the Mayor of London scrutinising the new administration’s delivery of campaign pledges.
Dr Jinghan Zeng is Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He holds degrees from the University of Warwick (PhD, May 2012- April 2014) and the University of Pittsburgh (MA, 2009-2011).
His research and teaching interests lie in the field of Chinese politics and research methodology, with more specific interests in the study of China's authoritarian system, elite politics of contemporary China, and Chinese foreign policy. Jinghan is the author of The Chinese Communist Party's Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (Palgrave, 2015). His academic papers have appeared in International Affairs, Contemporary Politics, Journal of Contemporary China, and Journal of Chinese Political Science. Before his academic career, he worked for the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York City.
Declan McDowell-Naylor is a doctoral researcher based in the Department of Politics and International Relations, at Royal Holloway, University of London. His PhD project explores how issues of democracy and citizenship arise in the design and development of the ‘Internet of Things’. In particular, he focus on the processes of public engagement with the aim to challenge conventional understandings about democracy and the way in which citizens can engage with digital technology.
Ellen Watts is a PhD candidate in the New Political Communication Unit, co-supervised by Andrew Chadwick and Ben O'Loughlin. Ellen's research explores the interventions of celebrities in the political field, and citizen engagement with celebrity-led campaigns. At this workshop, she will discuss the challenges of studying online communities in an ethical way, in relation to a developing case study of 'Our Shared Shelf', a feminist book club and discussion forum founded by actor and UN Women Ambassador Emma Watson.
Amber Macintyre is currently undertaking research for a PhD on the culture of data within membership organisations. The research will focus on the unspoken contract the organisation forms with their members and how this impacts their use of data. This includes questions on how individuals in the organisation view the agency of their audience, perceive their role as experts and if they rely on the authority of big data. The research was inspired by her previous work on digital activism at Amnesty International and the tension between the risks and capabilities of digital technologies.
The battle for the battle of the narratives: NPCU presentation at Lund University on #CVE
Lund University, Sweden
A NewPolCom research team will present a paper at a workshop later this month in Sweden, Managing Societal Threats in the Digital Age: The Case of Propaganda and Violent Extremism. The workshop is hosted by the Department for Strategic Communication at Lund University on 28-29 October 2016. Organised by Lund's James Pamment and Corneliu Bjola of Oxford University, the workshop involves speakers from NATO and the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy as well as academics. The NewPolCom team will question the current approach to narrative battles and argue that any efforts at persuasion should be based on a different set of assumptions.
The battle for the battle of the narratives: Sidestepping the double fetish of digital and CVE
Akil Awan, Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin
CVE is hot; digital CVE is hotter still. As the US replaces the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications with another new CVE hub, the Global Engagement Center, other Western governments follow suit in building teams charged with countering the narratives thought to radicalise individuals and groups into violence. Officials seek to “contest the space” and, while most evidence points to the role of offline social dynamics in leading individuals to violence, the space is often taken as digital. To fetishise is to imbue an object with special, even magical qualities, ignoring its banal reality. The banal reality is that all media are new media once, whether cave paintings or digital. The banal reality is that CVE was COIN a decade ago and previous acronyms in the decades before that. This double-fetish comes at a cost: the “battle of the narratives” becomes conceptualised and practiced as the quantitative online dominance of “our” content over “theirs”. Rather than admitting how intractably difficult persuasion is, and rather than responding to the real-world concerns of those persuadable by radical narratives – political disenfranchisement, socio-economic depravation, personal identity crises, and xenophobia – the mass takedown of pro-IS accounts on Twitter in 2015 is instead considered a mark of progress. NATO explores simply stopping information from Russia reaching Baltic states in the name of “Stratcom defence” rather than exploring why Russia might be attractive and its narrative persuasive. The enemy is extremism and extremism must be stopped.
This paper makes three moves against this framing. First, we argue this is a radically unrealistic account of communication and persuasion that ignores decades of research on radicalisation and a century of research on media effects. It is radical because it is almost wilfully counterproductive. Second, we ask what move is being made by this act of double fetishization. We find the bureaucratic, target-driven goals of governments can explain this grasping for a tangible, quantifiable mark of progress and the amnesia towards prior COIN and other campaigns. Third, we propose a model of narrative contestation through which governments can address real-world concerns. Our strategic narrative framework that identifies alignment across narratives of the international system, narratives of identity, and narratives of specific problems, can help explain why a certain problem-definition or even worldview becomes meaningful to those open to radicalisation and violence.
Vaccari publishes article on accidental exposure to political news on social media in New Media & Society
Cristian Vaccari has published a new article, coauthored with Augusto Valeriani (University of Bologna), on the relationship between accidental exposure to political news on social media and political participation. The article is part of a special issue on Civic political engagement and social change in the new digital age, guest edited by Karolina Koc-Michalska, Darren G Lilleker, and Thierry Vedel.
In the article, Valeriani and Vaccari show that accidental exposure to political news on social media is quite widespread among internet users in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, and that such accidental exposure, in turn, is strongly and positively correlated with online political engagement. Moreover, the correlation is relatively stronger among individuals who are less interested in politics than among those who are more interested in politics. As a result, accidental exposure to political news on social media can have positive implications for democracy, as it both increases online political engagement across the board and closes the engagement gap between citizens who are more interested in politics and those who are less interested.
The article is based on survey data collected as part of WebPolEU, a three-year comparative research project on social media and political engagement funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, of which Vaccari is the Principal Investigator.
O'Loughlin Senior Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna
Ben O'Loughlin has won a prestigious Senior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna. He will be working there September-December 2016. Previous Senior Fellows include philosopher Nancy Cartwright, historian Hayden White and political scientist Michael Laver. Ben will be based in the Department of Language, Literature and Modern Culture.
On 15 November 2016 Ben will deliver a public lecture at the Institute entitled Europe in Crisis: Words, Images, Media.
Thanks are due to Federica Ferrari for hosting Ben's Fellowship and Barbara Cimatti for all her help behind the scenes.
Vaccari, Chadwick, and O'Loughlin's "Dual Screening the Political" Wins the Walter Lippmann Award
Cristian Vaccari, Andrew Chadwick, and Ben O'Loughlin's article "Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement" (Journal of Communication 65 (6), pp. 1041–1061) has been recognized at this year's American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting held in Philadelphia.
The study was given the 2016 APSA Political Communication Section's Walter Lippmann Award for the Best Article in the Field of Political Communication.
The study finds that “lean-forward” dual screening practices, such as commenting live on social media as a political debate unfolds, and engaging with conversations via Twitter hashtags, have the strongest and most consistent positive associations with political engagement.
Join @newpolcom at #ecprconf16 Prague: Cyber-Security, Theorizing perceptions, + WhatsApp...ening
Seal from 1360. Charles University is old. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Adam Drew, Ben O'Loughlin and Cristian Vaccari will each present papers at the ECPR Annual Convention at Charles University, Prague this week.
Adam will present a paper, Mutually Assured Disconnection, on the panel Global Internet Governance. Adam will argue that while norms exist that have so far prevented major powers launching devastating cyber attacks on one another, this development has taken place not from a position of mutual understanding and cooperation, but from one of mutual and balanced fear.
Time: 08/09/2016 15:50
Location: Building: Faculty of Arts Floor: 3 Room: FA325
Ben will take part in a panel on Theorizing Perceptions, comparing how different theories of international political communication (strategic narrative, image theory, normative power) explain communication's role in power and influence in current world affairs. The panel features original public opinion research to identify how news publics in different parts of Africa are responding to a world order of rising powers like Iran, China and Turkey.
Time 10/09/2016 09:00
Location Building: Faculty of Law Floor: 2 Room: FL214
Cristian's paper is titled, WhatsApp...ening to political discussion in Europe? Instant messaging services and political engagement in Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. Co-authored with Augusto Valeriani, the paper features research from Cristian's ongoing comparative study of digital democracy in European countries. This is on a great-looking panel chaired on Digital Intermediaries and Political Communication chaired by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.
Time: 08/09/2016 09:00
Place: Building: Faculty of Arts Floor: 3. Room: FA325
We hope to see you at these panels.
Newpolcom at UACES this week: The EU's Strategic Narrative on China
Alister Miskimmon and Ben O'Loughlin will present new analysis this week at the UACES 46th annual conference being held at Queen Mary in London. In their paper, The EU's Struggle for a Strategic Narrative (on China), they identify the problems crisis-strewn Europe has projecting a coherent narrative through EU institutions. However, they argue that China's One Belt, One Road initiative offers the kind of hybrid governance organisation that European leaders understand. By finding alignments with China's new infrastructure programmes across the historic Silk Road territories of Eurasia, the EU may be able to articulate a world order not based simply on sovereign states, and attach itself to a constructive project for the future at a time when it seems mired in the present. Disagreements with China over the value of human rights and market forces mean the EU will need to temper its identity narrative of being a 'normative power' for others to emulate. However, this pragmatic turn has already been happening. It is time for the EU to turn to a 'building block' narrative in order to reconstruct itself and play its role in the construction of the new 21st Century multipolar order.
Time: 15:10 - 16:40, Tuesday 6 September 2016
Place: Queen's Building, Panel 615, Queen Mary, University of London (map)
Other presenters: Michèle Knodt, Ole Elgström, and Natalia Chaban.
This paper is part of a panel, EU Global Perceptions, featuring presentations from the Jean Monnet project C3EU: Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy.