Omat ja muiden aiheet : laskennallinen analyysi vaalijulkisuuden teemoista ja aiheomistajuudesta

Kirjoittajat

• Salla-Maaria Laaksonen
• Matti Nelimarkka

Abstrakti

In this article we use the perspectives of agenda-building and issue ownership to study the public agenda preceding elections. By using computational topic modeling we investigate, how the pub­lic agenda and the topics covered in candidates’ social media messages are connected. Our data consists of candidates’ social media messages and political news of 20 major Finnish newspapers one month prior to the Finnish parliamentary elections 2015. The analysis shows that social media was used more for campaigning than policy-related messaging. Instead of clear issue ownership patterns the candidates and the media focus on same main issues: economic situation, security politics, and work and entrepreneurship. To a large extent the public agenda online followed the main topics of news media. Exceptions are the topic of immigration raised by conservative parties, and conversations related to education and youth wellbeing raised by NGO campaigns. Our analysis implies that the candidates react to the themes present on online arenas, which suggests that citizens or NGOs can use social media to exhibit agenda-building power over the public, po­litical agenda. In addition, our analysis demonstrates the ability of computational methods to explore issue coverage across media arenas.