Young Platforms and Old Politics: Quantitative Analysis of Parties’ Instagram Posts During the 2022 French Legislative Elections
Keywords:
political campaigning, Instagram, Quantitative analysis, content analysis
Abstract
The French legislative elections of 2022 saw President Emmanuel Macron's majority in the National Assembly being dramatically tilted. This was driven by youth votes that favoured the left-wing group NUPES and the far- right party Rassemblement National. The literature on young people's online political communication, on the characteristics of social media campaigns and on political outreach to young people usually assumes dichotomies of political engagement and age. The aim of this study is to challenge these dichotomies and establish a baseline of communication characteristics for each of these areas, as well as for the areas of political campaigning on Instagram and political campaigning for young people. The content of the Instagram pages of the parties in the elections and their youth branches was analysed quantitatively. A codebook combining a priori, inductive and deductive knowledge was used to highlight patterns in the use of social media, visual and campaign features. Statistical tests were conducted to examine their relationship to the pages of youth and traditional parties, and to the pages of parties more or less successful in mobilising young voters. Statistically significant features were arranged in a matrix that summarises them visually. The results show that youth parties and the parties that are more successful in mobilising young voters have similar visual approach to information structure and presentation. Additionally, while youth and more successful parties might follow different strategies in their choices of topics and issues, they follow similar trends identifiable only by considering the strategies employed by their counterparts.
References
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Vromen A., Xenos M., & Loader B. (2015). Young people, social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(1), 80-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2014.933198
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Bakker, T. P., & De Vreese, C. H. (2011). Good news for the future? Young people, Internet use, and political participation. Communication Research, 38(4), 451-470. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650210381738
Bennett, W. (2012). The Personalization of Politics: Political Identity, Social Media, and Changing Patterns. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716212451428
Bowman, B. (2016, August 9) The under 30s in the UK: A generation used to not getting what they voted for. Retrieved from http://www.democraticaudit.com/2016/08/09/the-under-30s-in-the-uk-a-generation-used-to- not-getting-what-they-voted-for/
Brown, M., Ray, R., Summers, E., & Fraistat, N. (2017). #Say¬HerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(11), 1831-1846. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1334934
Citarella, J. (2021 April 24) Are we ready for social media influencers shaping politics? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/24/social-media-influencers-shaping-politics
Cordonnier, A. (2022 June 27) A News Revolution for Young People Takes Root in France. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/world/europe/france-politics-news-youtube.html
Dobbs, K. L. (2019). Active on the street but apathetic at the ballot box? the voting behavior of tunisian youth (2011 - present) in a comparative perspective. Available from Politics Collection; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Ekström, M. (2016). Young people's everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1048207
Epstein, I. (2015). Introduction: The Global Dimensions of Contemporary Youth Protest. In I. Epstein (ed.) The Whole World Is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age. Rotterdam: Brill, pp. 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-055-0_1
Fisher, R. A. (1934). Statistical methods for research workers, 5th edn. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh
Fourcade, M. (2021). Sociolinguistics of Youth Activism: Implications for The Future of Political Language. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 10(6), 1-15. Retrieved from https://journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJALEL/article/view/7116
Gherghina, S., & Rusu, E. (2021). Begin Again: Election Campaign and Own Opinions Among First‐Time Voters in Romania. Social Science Quarterly, 102(4), 1311-1329. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12979
Haßler, J., Kümpel, A. S., & Keller, J. (2021). Instagram and political campaigning in the 2017 German federal election. A quantitative content analysis of German top politicians' and parliamentary parties' posts. Information, Communication & Society, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1954974
Haynes, O. (2021 December 2) When a far-right candidate has ‘le buzz’, France shouldn’t take young people for granted. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/02/far-right-candidate-france-youth-movement-eric-zemmour
Henn, M., & Foard, N. (2014, May 27). Compulsory voting may reinforce the resentment young people feel toward the political class. Retrieved from https://www.democraticaudit.com/2014/05/27/compulsory-voting-may-reinforce-the-resentment-young-people-feel-toward-the-political-class/
Hermann, J. (2020 June 28). TikTok Is Shaping Politics. But How? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/style/tiktok-teen-politics-gen-z.html
Herring, S. C. (2007). A Faceted Classification Scheme for Computer-Mediated Discourse. Language@Internet, 4, article 1. Heywood, A. (2013). Politics. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hoffman, G. D., & Mitchell, T. D. (2016). Making Diversity "Everyone's Business": A Discourse Analysis of Institutional Responses to Student Activism for Equity and Inclusion. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 9(3), 277-289. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000037
Inthorn, S., Street, J., & Scott, M. (2013). Popular Culture as a Resource for Political Engagement. Cultural Sociology, 7(3), 336-351. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975512457141
Ipsos. (2022 June 12). Législatives 2022 | Sociologie des électorats et profil des abstentionnistes - 1er tour. https://www.slideshare.net/IpsosFrance/lgislatives-2022-sociologie-des-lectorats-et-profil-des-abstentionnistes-1er-tour-12-juin-2022
Loader, B., Vromen, A., & Xenos, M. (2016). Performing for the young networked citizen? Celebrity politics, social networking and the political engagement of young people. Media, Culture & Society, 38(3), 400-419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715608261
Mihailidis, P. (2014). The civic-social media disconnect: exploring perceptions of social media for engagement in the daily life of college students. Information, Communication & Society, 17(9), 1059-1071. https://doi-org.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/10.1080/1369118X.2013.877054
Ohme, J., De Vreese, C., & Albaek, E. (2018). The uncertain first-time voter: Effects of political media exposure on young citizens' formation of vote choice in a digital media environment. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3243-3265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817745017
Page, R., Barton, D., Unger, J. W., & Zappavigna, M. (2014). Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315771786
Pearson, K. (1900). X. On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 50(302), 157-175. https://doi.org/10.1080/14786440009463897
Raynauld, V., & Lalancette, M. (2021). Pictures, Filters, and Politics: Instagram's Role in Political Image Making and Storytelling in Canada. Visual Communication Quarterly, 28(4), 212-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/15551393.2021.1986827
Rekker, R. (2022). Young trendsetters: How young voters fuel electoral volatility. Electoral Studies, 75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102425
Schwartz, H. A., Eichstaedt, J. C., Kern, M. L., Dziurzynski, L., … Ungar, L. H. (2013). Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach. PloS one, 8(9), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
Statista. (2022 April 10). Répartition des scrutins exprimés pour le premier tour de l'élection présidentielle 2022, au 11 avril 2022, selon l'âge des électeurs. https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1302004/resultats-premier-tour-presidentielles-2022-age/
Stockemer, D., & Sundström, A. (2021). Rule by the elderly: The absence of youth in cabinets of France, Germany and the UK. Fr Polit 19, 440-449. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-021-00158-6
Storsul, T. (2014). Deliberation or Self-presentation? Nordicom Review, 35(2), 17-28. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2014-0012
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2015). So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet. Language in Society, 45, pp. 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404515000780
Velasquez, A., & Larose, R. (2015). Youth collective activism through social media: The role of collective efficacy. New Media & Society, 17(6), pp. 899 -918. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813518391
Vromen A., Xenos M., & Loader B. (2015). Young people, social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(1), 80-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2014.933198
Zappavigna, M. (2011). Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society, 13(5), pp. 788-806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385097
Zappavigna, M. (2014). Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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2022-12-06
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