Media Context and the 2017 General Election: How traditional and social media shape elections (an extension of ES/M010775/1)

The snap election called by Theresa May presents an urgent opportunity to assess and understand the role of media in British politics at a time when a fractured media system is being held at least partly responsible for presenting misleading information to voters.

Our previous research (ES/M010775/1) examined traditional (television, newspapers and radio) and social media during and after an election in which some form of coalition government was the expected outcome, confirmed by extensive and widely reported polls, and economic issues dwarfed all other coverage. Our aims were to: 1) Develop a model of information flows and intermedia agenda setting from traditional and social media; 2) Assess the contrasting influence of national, and sub-national media on specific constituencies and subsets of the electorate; 3) Understand the role of social media in the electoral process; 4) Examine media effects on learning, preference change during the campaign and perceptions of the legitimacy of the outcome in the post-election period.

Some of the key findings of our study have cast new light on intermedia agenda setting with respect to issues and leaders, as well as offering experimental evidence that post-election reactions to the same "broken manifesto promise" are highly contingent on attributions of responsibility. Two years later the electoral context has shifted, with a majority Conservative government, different leaders of almost all the major parties, Brexit is both the main issue and the ostensible reason the election was called, the possibility of the incumbent government gaining the largest proportion of the vote in a generation, and a growing distrust of polling data and the media e.g., 'fake news' and Twitter bots. This provides us with the opportunity to re-examine and extend our original aims in a contest of different leaders and different issues, "fake news" and a seeming far less competitive race. Taken together, these will allow us to address the extent to which media contribute to the ability of voters to hold governments accountable through the electoral process. We accomplish them using a combination of the existing infrastructure that we developed for large scale media data retrieval and analysis (ES/M010775/1 and ES/N012283/1), and a survey panel capturing clickstream activity, which will provide us with a unique opportunity to examine information search and exposure (e.g. filter bubbles).

By examining flows of campaign information, as well as by linking them to individuals, we are able to understand both where social and traditional media fit in the contemporary information environment, the implications for governance, and media's effects on individual attitudes and behaviours. These research foci allow us to address ESRC strategic priorities such as influencing behaviour and informing interventions. In addition, based on the implications of the research outputs our project will inform debates about how to enhance the quality of political life in Britain by illustrating where media appear to have a positive influence and where its influence is less positive or detrimental. In light of ongoing discussions regarding media (e.g., Leveson inquiry, Political and Constitutional Reform Committee's inquiry on voter engagement in the UK), the data will allow us to identify and deliver policy recommendations by providing a more in-depth understanding of the nature of media coverage of politics and its effects on governance and the British public.

1. Potential Policy and Societal Impact
- The user community outside academe is large and diverse. It consists of all those institutions and individuals who have a professional interest in media, media regulation, elections and electoral processes. One segment of this extra-academic user group is centered around political parties: elected office holders, party officials, campaigners, and those working in research institutes and thinktanks connected to political parties. A slightly different group consists of those representing social groups and organised interests and who equally have a stake in the outcome of elections, and sometimes in providing their members with relevant information and advice (labour unions, employers organisations, churches, sundry cause groups, formal lobbyists, etc.). Another component consists of media organisations and journalists who provide audiences (the mass audience as well as more specialised and targeted audiences) with information on elections. Finally there is a plethora of firms (mainly, but not exclusively, SME's) that cater to the rest of the extra-academic user community (market research companies, media and campaign specialists, consultancy firms, etc.).

- The research findings will also contribute towards evidence-based policy making in the area of media and media regulation. The findings should give clear indications of the impact of social media competition on the production of electorally relevant information, and of variation by source and mode (e.g., TV vs. newspapers). Public broadcasters in particular are interested in fulfilling the remit of informing citizens and can base policy recommendations on the indications from our research about the influences on, and of, their election coverage. The workshop at the 2017 EPOP conference will advance these areas of impact.

2. Research Area Impact
Another benefit of the research is to the UK Research Area: The visibility of the UK as a venue for research on matters pertaining to electoral behaviour, electoral representation, the role of the media, and democracy will be promoted. The innovation of automated media coding also places the UK at the forefront of research using content analysis, while the methods we use to discern media effects using the survey data will have applicability to a rich set of causal questions in the social sciences in general.