Politics as Usual? When and Why Traditional Actors Often Dominate YouTube Campaigning

ABSTRACT This research explores the extent to which YouTube helps democratize campaigns by allowing nontraditional political actors to be heard. We examine political advertisements posted on YouTube in races for the U.S. Senate in 2010. We find that ads posted by citizens and quasi-political organizations are viewed just as often as ads sponsored by some traditional electoral actors, such as parties and interest groups, but that ads sponsored by candidates are most likely to be viewed. However, news media coverage of ads posted online by nontraditional actors is dwarfed by coverage of traditional television advertisements.

[1]  Kevin Wallsten.  Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere: An Analysis of the Relationship between Mainstream Media and Political Blogs , 2007 .

[2]  M. Winograd,et al.  Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics , 2008 .

[3]  A. Chadwick,et al.  Parties, Election Campaigning and the Internet:Toward A Comparative Institutional Approach , 2008 .

[4]  Kirsten A. Foot,et al.  Politics As Usual, or Politics Unusual? Position Taking and Dialogue on Campaign Websites in the 2002 U.S. Elections , 2005 .

[5]  S. Soroka,et al.  Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames , 2014 .

[6]  Kirsten A. Foot,et al.  Online Action in Campaign 2000: An Exploratory Analysis of the U.S. Political Web Sphere , 2002 .

[7]  D. Rucinski.  The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. , 1994 .

[8]  Yochai Benkler,et al.  The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom , 2006 .

[9]  Eva Johanna Schweitzer.  Normalization 2.0: A longitudinal analysis of German online campaigns in the national elections 2002–9 , 2011 .

[10]  P. Howard.  Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy , 2005 .

[11]  Tanni Haas,et al.  From “Public Journalism” to the “Public's Journalism”? Rhetoric and reality in the discourse on weblogs , 2005 .

[12]  S. Hilgartner,et al.  Politics as Usual , 1992 .

[13]  P. Howard,et al.  Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics , 2018 .

[14]  Patrick J. Kenney,et al.  The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns , 1999 .

[15]  Bruce Bimber and Richard Davis.  Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections , 2003 .

[16]  Stephen D. Reese,et al.  Mapping the blogosphere , 2007 .

[17]  Aaron Smith and Lee Rainie.  The internet and the 2008 election , 2008 .

[18]  D. Karpf.  Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization? , 2010 .

[19]  Costas Panagopoulos.  Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications , 2009 .

[20]  Travis N. Ridout,et al.  Free Advertising , 2008 .

[21]  R. Gibson,et al.  Normalising or Equalising Party Competition? Assessing the Impact of the Web on Election Campaigning , 2015 .

[22]  Grey Giddins,et al.  Statistics , 2016, The Journal of hand surgery, European volume.

[23]  Michael Margolis.  Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections , 2004, Perspectives on Politics.

[24]  Richard R. Lau,et al.  Two Explanations for Negativity Effects in Political Behavior , 1985 .

[25]  Christine B. Williams,et al.  Congressional Candidates' Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale , 2010 .

[26]  Jason Rittenberg,et al.  Online news creation and consumption: Implications for modern democracies , 2008 .

[27]  M. Hindman.  The Myth of Digital Democracy , 2008 .

[28]  Kevin Wallsten,et al.  “Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon , 2010 .

[29]  曹宇,et al.  The Internet And I , 2004 .

[30]  W. Bennett,et al.  Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States , 1990 .

[31]  David A. Dulio,et al.  The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Online Medium Matter? , 2011 .

[32]  Chirag Shah.  Supporting Research Data Collection from YouTube with TubeKit , 2010 .

[33]  Susan O'Donnell,et al.  User-generated online video: The next public sphere? , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society.

[34]  Kristen D. Landreville,et al.  Evolution of Online Campaigning: Increasing Interactivity in Candidate Web Sites and Blogs Through Text and Technical Features , 2006 .

[35]  Erika Franklin Fowler,et al.  Negative, Angry, and Ubiquitous: Political Advertising in 2012 , 2013 .

[36]  David K. Perry,et al.  Viral Marketing or Electronic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examining Consumer Responses and Motivations to Pass Along Email , 2004, Journal of Advertising Research.

[37]  Harry Boxer,et al.  About the Online Video , 2014 .

[38]  Chirag Shah,et al.  ContextMiner: Supporting the Mining of Contextual Information for Ephemeral Digital Video Preservation , 2009, Int. J. Digit. Curation.

[39]  Travis N. Ridout,et al.  Local Television and Newspaper Coverage of Political Advertising , 2009 .

[40]  W. Lance Bennett,et al.  Response to Ellen Mickiewicz's review of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina , 2007, Perspectives on Politics.

[41]  R. Klotz.  The Sidetracked 2008 YouTube Senate Campaign , 2010 .

[42]  D. Graber,et al.  Mass media and American politics , 1980 .