ارزش های مشترک و همرنگی در شبکه های اجتماعی اعضای مجلس فنلاند
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Literature review
3- Data collection & methods
4- Results & discussio
5- Conclusio
References
Abstract
While Twitter has become an essential part of daily politics across Western countries, little research has focused on origins of politicians’ social circles on social media. This paper contributes to how structural, ideological and contextual factors affect tie formation between parliamentarians’ Twitter networks. The study focuses on Finland, where over 80 percent of parliamentarians are using the platform. For empirical analysis, we first extracted parliamentarians’ followee network connections from their Twitter accounts (36 294 nodes and 113 108 edges) and combined it with data from a national voting advice application, which includes information regarding parliamentarians' societal position and opinions regarding social, cultural and economic issues. According to the explanatory analysis, we found that connections between parliamentarians and the share of mutual followees are clearly based on matching values, similar background and shared contextual factors. Additionally, we found that shared context had strong confounding effects on the function of value homophily in relations and shared networks between Finnish parliamentarians.
Introduction
Social media has become an essential part of daily politics globally (e.g. Larsson and Kalsnes, 2014; Vergeer, 2015) as political actors have set up profiles on various platforms. Yet, there is a growing concern that social media is working as an echo chamber which facilitates and even encourages ideological categorizations and political conflicts while reinforcing former opinions and blocking divergent views from spreading (Engesser et al., 2016; Hargittai et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2018). Although parliamentarians are at the core of political life, little research considers the construction of parliamentarians’ Twitter networks in multi-party systems (see however Del Valle and Bravo, 2018; Teernstra et al., 2018). Earlier Finnish research has focused on politicians’ social media networks in general, (see Laaksonen et al., 2017; Marttila et al., 2015; Railo and Vainikka, 2017; Vainikka and Huhtamäki, 2015), but research seeking to clarify mechanisms that explain the premises from which these networks are formed remains scarce. In this article, we narrow this research gap by addressing the extent to which Finnish parliamentarians are directly and intermediately connected to one another on Twitter. More importantly, we examine how shared background, shared values, and shared contexts affect the formation of Finnish politicians’ social media networks. By doing so, we can evaluate the importance of homophily in parliamentarians’ social media networks and also assess how political cleavages and echo chambers manifest in social media interconnections in multi-party systems such as in Finland. Further, we focus on how shared offline contexts amplify and attenuate the effect of homophily on social media. Accordingly, we contribute to the wider discussion about contextual factors’ confounding effects in social tie formation.