“Andreas Jungherr: Zwischen Wahlkampf und Hörsaal.” Ein Interview von Philipp Albrecht mit Andreas Jungherr. politik-digital.de. 21/03/2012.

Zusammen mit Harald Schoen und den Firmen Neolox und Searchmetrics habe ich in einem kurzem Report untersucht, wie Parteiseiten von der Suchmaschine Google bewertet werden und zu welchen Suchbegriffen Parteiwebseiten an prominenter Stelle in den Google Ergebnislisten angezeigt werden. Im Einzelnen untersuchten wir die Webseiten von Parteien im Bund sowie von Parteien in Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Niedersachsen. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse sind:

Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Webseiten der Bundesparteien prominent in den Google Ergebnislisten zu Anfragen nach Parteinamen und Spitzenpolitikern platziert sind. Wird nach tagesaktuellen oder allgemein politischen Begriffen gesucht, erscheinen die Webseiten der Bundesparteien nur vereinzelt und unsystematisch in den Ergebnislisten. Einzige Ausnahme ist die Piratenpartei.

Die Webseiten der Landesverbände von Parteien erscheinen nur prominent in Ergebnislisten, wenn gezielt nach Parteinamen und Kandidaten gesucht wird. Bei Suchanfragen zu tagesaktuellen und allgemein politischen Begriffen bleiben die Webseiten der von uns untersuchten Landesverbände (Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Niedersachsen) überwiegend unsichtbar.

Gründe für die geringe Sichtbarkeit der Parteiwebseiten könnten unter anderem die für Suchmaschinen schwer verständliche Codierung der Seiten, ein vor allem auf eine ansprechende Optik bedachtes Seitendesign sowie die mangelnde redaktionelle Betreuung der auf den Seiten angebotenen Inhalte sein.

Die Ergebnisse unserer Untersuchung dokumentieren wir ausfürlich unter Sichtbarkeitsreport.de.

[Update: 26 September 2011]
Die folgenden Beiträge beziehen sich auf den Report:

Anika Kreller (26 September 2011) ‘Die Unsichtbaren’ news.de.

Thorsten Stegemann (26 September 2011) ‘Webseiten der politischen Parteien sind unsichtbar’ Telepolis – heise online.

fgpk.de (13 September 2011) ‘Wie sichtbar sind die Websiten politischer Parteien für Suchmaschinen?’.

Philipp Albrecht (12 September 2011) ‘Was Parteien online verbessern können’ politik-digital.de.

Andreas Jungherr, David J. Ludwigs und Harald Schoen (12 September 2011) ‘Wie sichtbar sind die Webseiten politischer Parteien für Suchmaschinen?’ ZEIT Online: Zweitstimme.

Andreas Jungherr (12 September 2011)‘ Die Suchmaschinensichtbarkeit von Parteiwebseiten’ PolitCamp Blog.

We first happened upon the idea that certain users, based on their position in conversation networks of politically interested users, were able to keep political information from reaching specific sections of the network in a paper on the use of Twitter during the run up to the German federal election of 2009, Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009 [Preprint]. In that paper we called these users New Gatekeepers in reference to the Gatekeeper concept in mass communication research.

We met the New Gatekeepers again in a blogpost for the ZEIT blog Zweitstimme. In the post “Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter” we constructed a network based on Twitter conversations between politically vocal users during one day. We showed that the unity of the network depended critically on a few well connected users. Once we excluded these users from the network it scattered into many isolated components. This shows that these users, because of their position in the structure of the network, are vital for the distribution of information to different sections of the network.

Conversation network of politically interested Twitter users on 9/1/2009

In “Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter” we decided to look for a specific metric in quantitative social network analysis that corresponded with our interpretation of New Gatekeepers and to check if users existed in our network that corresponded with said metric. We ended up using a concept based on work by Stephen Borgatti (2005) and Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo (2010). Based on their reasoning we decided to identify those nodes in the network whose exclusion had the strongest impact on the entropy of the whole network. Our analysis showed that the exclusion of only a few nodes critically impacts the entropy of the network. For us this is an indicator for the ability of a small number of users to effectively filter the flow of information on Twitter.

For a more detailed discussion of this and the bias these users showed in their Twitter activities please have a look at the paper. Please let us know what you think of the concept and its operationalization in the context of social network analysis.

[Update: 2011/06/21]
Meanwhile Pascal has uploaded his presentation.

Also, our contribution was mentioned in “The Science of the Web” by David De Roure [@dder] on his nature network blog eResearch.

[Update: 2011/07/21]
Pascal’s presentation has been posted as a video on videolectures.net [Video: Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter]

Further Reading:
Stephen P. Borgatti (2005) ‘Centrality and network flow’, Social Networks 27, 55-71. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2004.11.008.

Andreas Jungherr, Pascal Jürgens and Harald Schoen (2011) ‘Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter’ Zweitstimme.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2011) ‘Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009’, in: Eva Johanna Schweitzer and Steffen Albrecht (eds.), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-92853-1_8.

Pascal Jürgens, Andreas Jungherr and Harald Schoen (2011) ‘Small Worlds with a Difference: New Gatekeepers and the Filtering of Political Information on Twitter’. Paper presented at the conference ‘ACM WebSc ’11: 3rd International Conference on Web Science’ Koblenz, Germany on 14-17 June. [pdf at the conference's website]

Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo (2010) ‘Discovering Sets of Key Players in Social Networks’, in: Abraham, A., Hassanien, A.-E., and Snásel , V. (eds.). Computational Social Network Analysis. Springer Verlag, Dordrecht et al., 27-46. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-229-0_2.

Für mich war es dieses Jahr die erste re:publica, die ich besuchte. Mir fehlt also der Vergleich zu den Konferenzen der letzten Jahre. Allerdings muss ich sagen, dass ich die Vorträge in diesem Jahr nur semispannend fand. Wenig Neues. Es scheint fast als hätte sich in den netzpolitischen Aufregungen von 2009 die Innovationsenergie des deutschsprachigen Netzes erst einmal für die folgenden Jahren verbrannt. Es müsste doch inzwischen möglich sein, über mehr zu sprechen als vermeintliche Revolutionen oder vermutete Potentiale diverser neuer oder weniger neuer Online-Dienste. So ganz allein scheine ich mit dieser Einschätzung nicht zu sein.

(cc) Jonas Fischer/re:publica

Am Donnerstag hielt ich einen Vortrag mit dem Titel “Politische Klicks: Nutzungsdynamik des deutschen E-Petitionssystems“. In dem Vortrag stellte ich die Ergebnisse einer Studie von Pascal Jürgens und mir zu Nutzerverhalten auf der E-Petitionsplattform des Deutschen Bundestags vor. Hier die Präsentation:

Wer an mehr Informationen zu der Untersuchung interessiert ist wird bei dem Open Access Journal Policy & Internet fündig. Dort haben Pascal Jürgens und ich die Ergebnisse ausführlich in dem Artikel “The Political Click: Political Participation through E-Petitions in Germany” dokumentiert.

Eva Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Hrsg.): Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009

Just got news that Eva Schweitzer’s and Steffen Albrecht’s edited volume “Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009” is out. The book collects papers that address different aspects of the internet’s role in the campaign for the German general election of 2009. Pascal Jürgens and I contributed a paper on the use of Twitter during the campaign called “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″ [SpringerLink] [preprint in German].

The collection offers a broad perspective on the state of political internet use in Germany. It also contains interesting pieces by Steffen Albrecht who writes about blogs, Jesscia Kunert and Jan Schmidt who write about social networking sites, Thorsten Faas and Julia Partheymüller who write on political internet use in Germany, Thomas Roessing and Nicole Podschuweit who focus on political uses of Wikipedia, Christoph Bieber who comments on the role of online tools in the overall party campaigning strategies and Eva Schweitzer who focuses on political websites during the campaign. There are many other interesting articles in this collection so if you are interested in the topic be sure to check it out.

Conversation network of politically interested Twitter users on 9/1/2009

As shown above these highly interconnected individuals are crucial for the information flow through the network of politically interested Twitter users. For a more comprehensive discussion of this idea please see the blogpost or our forthcoming paper Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2011) “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″, in: Eva Johanna Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Eds.), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag (forthcoming).

Jungherr, Jürgens (2010) The Political Click: Figure 1 Signatures per day across all petitions

We also introduced the concept of the co-signature overspill. We found that the daily number of co-signatures of e-petitions below a total of 10.000 co-signatures rose when highly successful e-petitions were active. This is shown by the development of the black area in the graph above.

Jungherr, Jürgens (2010) The Political Click: Figure 3 Number of co-signatures per petition collected in steps of 10,000 co-signatures

Also we showed that only a very small number of e-petitions collected most of the co-signatures on the e-petition platform.

These and other results of our analysis can be found in Andreas Jungherr and Pascal Jürgens (2010) ‘The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany’, Policy & Internet, 2(4) Article 6.

Abstract: Electronic petitions can serve as an influential mechanism for political participation. We present a study on the dynamics in the German e-petition system which was introduced in late 2008. Drawing on a data set of signatures, we analyze four aspects: (a) the types of petitions found, (b) the temporal dynamics of petitions, (c) the types of users found, and (d) the intersection of different petitions’ supporter populations. We present evidence that (a) the system is dominated by a very small number of high-volume petitions and (b) these high-volume petitions have a delayed boosting effect on the base activity in the petition system. We furthermore (c) present a typology of users, showing that although highly active “new lobbyists” and “hit-and-run activists” exist, one- or two-time petitioners have the largest impact. Finally, it is indicated that (d) many of the high-volume petitions share a significant part of their user base, hinting at a complex, topically motivated network of supporters. Through the application of methods from what has been called “Computational Social Sciences,” we illuminate a highly relevant field of political behavior online, while demonstrating the capability of data-driven approaches in such novel domains.

A copy of the paper is available on the website of the journal.

Jungherr, Andreas and Jürgens, Pascal (2010) “The Political Click: Political Participation through E-Petitions in Germany,” Policy & Internet: Vol. 2: Iss. 4, Article 6.

DOI: 10.2202/1944-2866.1084

More on that here.

Supporter Networks, Blogs, Tweets, and YouTube Videos: Political Campaigns Online

Social media tools have become common features in election campaigns around the world. Still, their adoption varies from country to country and campaign to campaign. This offers a valuable opportunity for researchers interested in political communication and political campaigns. Campaigns exist in specific political, cultural and technological contexts. These contexts determine the way political actors use social media tools in their campaigns. By comparing online campaigns in different countries and of different political leanings we can learn more about the nature of political communication online independent of specific local contexts. To this end the panel “Supporter Networks, Blogs, Tweets, and YouTube Videos: Political Campaigns Online” invites papers that examine recent political campaigns and their use of online channels and social media tools in their specific political, cultural or technological contexts. Questions that might be addressed are: Which social media tools did the campaign in question choose to use and why? How were these decisions grounded, in specific local contexts or advice from international campaigning professionals? Did the campaign achieve its goals and how was this evaluated? From a methodological perspective we are open to different approaches, be it in the form of qualitative case studies, quantitative analysis or work based on the digital methods approach. Also we invite papers that connect specific campaigns to concepts from communication theory, be it for example a discussion in the context of professionalization, mobilization, the digital divide or political learning.