Media in Context and The 2015 General Election: How Traditional and Social Media Shape Elections and Governing

在主要政党支持率下降的时代，我们提出的2015年英国选举媒体研究是及时和重要的。在过去的两次选举中，主要政党以大约35%的选票组建了政府，2015年可能会出现类似的情况，可能还会组建另一个联合政府。这次选举还将进行辩论，包括更多领导人的辩论，讨论与国家和地区权力下放有关的重大宪法问题及其对威斯敏斯特的影响，以及就是否继续留在欧盟举行全民公投的可能性，所有这些都是在继续紧缩的背景下进行的。媒体对这类话题的报道和构思很可能对选举的动态、公众舆论和选举结果至关重要。然而，尽管自20世纪40年代以来，它们对选民的影响消耗了对英国、美国和其他民主国家选举政治的研究，但媒体影响的问题仍然悬而未决。此外，社交媒体发挥了作用，补充或取代了传统媒体--电视、报纸和广播--提供的信息，这一问题进一步搅乱了局面。在这项研究中，我们既寻求解决与媒体对治理和选举的影响有关的几个紧迫问题，也寻求收集关于2015年英国大选期间和之后媒体报道的及时和高质量的数据，以与用户社区分享。我们将在研究中审查的实质性问题包括：1)竞选信息流。传统的学术模型将竞选信息流描述为从精英到舆论领袖再到大众的线性流动，但在社交媒体可以为舆论领袖(和大众)提供产生信息的平台的世界里，这可能不再准确。虽然一些人认为社交媒体让意见领袖变得更加重要，但另一些人则认为，它把他们排除在外，信息直接流向消费者。2)不断变化的媒体格局以另一种方式重要--不是信息的流动，而是更直截了当的是，在报纸读者人数和对媒体的信任度不断下降的世界里，人们从哪里获得政治信息。此外，传统媒体不再扮演同样的把关角色，可能会稀释它们对问题议程的影响。例如，英国的传统竞选活动遵循这样一种模式，即政党在上午举行新闻发布会，启动“当天的主题”。虽然媒体可能并不总是以缔约方希望的方式制定主题，但记者招待会将问题议程设定为24小时。这种情况似乎不再是这样。3)社会媒体和传统媒体在选举后时期的作用。对选举结果的解释可能在两个方面很重要：赋予选举结果的合法性，从而促成有时被称为“失败者同意”的情况，以及提供关于即将上任的政府享有的授权的叙述。我们的研究还将解决现有英国媒体选举报道研究中的四个缺陷：它们倾向于关注选举报道，忽视非选举报道，因此不允许分析整体新闻背景或选举的突出程度；数据要么没有公开，要么只在选举几年后才公布；最近的英国选举研究由于关于媒体习惯的问题很少，所以对媒体影响的了解很少；英国媒体研究往往完全依赖调查数据，忽视了现场实验提供的因果关系和影响大小的好处。拟议的研究将调查人员与人类和自动化的传统和社交媒体内容分析和统计建模技能的独特专业知识结合在一起。

The 2015 British election media study we propose is timely and important in an era of declining support for the major parties. In the last two elections the leading parties have formed governments with roughly 35 percent of the vote, with 2015 currently promising a similar scenario and possibly another coalition. The election also promises debates--including more leaders' debates--on major constitutional issues pertaining to national and regional devolution and their consequences for Westminster, as well as on the possibility of a referendum on continuing EU membership, all in a context of continuing austerity. Media reporting and framing of such subjects is likely to be critical to the dynamics of the election, to public opinion, and to the election's aftermath.Yet although their effects on voters have consumed research on electoral politics in Britain, the US and other democracies since the 1940s, the question of media effects remains unsettled. Moreover, the issue of the difference that social media has made, supplementing or replacing the information provided by traditional media--television, newspapers and radio--further muddies the waters. In this research we both seek to address several pressing questions pertaining to media effects on governance and elections and also to gather timely and high quality data on media coverage during and after the 2015 British general election to share with the user community.The substantive questions we will examine within our study are:1) The flow of campaign information. Traditional academic models depict campaign information flows as linear, from elites to opinion leaders to masses, but this may no longer be accurate in a world in which social media can provide a platform for opinion leaders (and masses) to produce information. While some think that social media have made opinion leaders even more important, others argue that it has cut them out of the picture, with information flowing directly to the consumer.2) The changing media landscape matters in a second way--not in terms of the flow of information but, more straightforwardly, for where if at all people obtain political information in a world of declining newspaper readership and trust in media. Moreover, the traditional media no longer play the same gatekeeping role, potentially diluting their influence on the issue agenda. For example, traditional campaigns in the UK followed a pattern in which parties held morning press conferences that launched the "theme of the day." While the media may not have always framed the theme in the way parties would have wished, the press conference set the issue agenda for 24 hours. That no longer seems to be the case.3) The role of the media, both social and traditional, in the post-election period. Interpretations of election results may be important in two respects: in conferring legitimacy upon the outcome and thus fostering what is sometimes known as "losers' consent," and in providing a narrative about the mandate the incoming government enjoys.Our study will also address four deficiencies in existing studies of British media election coverage: that they tend to focus on election coverage, ignoring non-election coverage and thus not permitting analysis of the overall news context or the prominence of the election as an issue; that the data are either not made publicly available or only made available years after the election; that recent British election studies have permitted little understanding of media effects due to very few questions about media habits; and that British media studies tend to rely exclusively on survey data, ignoring the benefits for establishing causation and effect sizes offered by field experiments.The proposed research brings together investigators with a unique combination of expertise in human and automated traditional and social media content analysis and statistical modelling skills.