Hashtag Wars: The Role of Social Media in Driving Participation and Engagement in Referendums

This paper utilises advances in social media gathering to focus on questions on political participation utilising referendum-related hashtags, from #indyref and the various #av hashtags in the recent UK referendums to a variety of Irish referendums and the New Zealand #mmp related tags. According to mobilisation theory the emergence of social media should lead to new forms of democracy and civic participation at least partly through lowering barriers and reducing communication costs. In other words, traditional forms of political engagement are challenged by new online participatory behaviours. This paper asks if we can determine the emergence of new participation patterns among citizens or whether digital technologies simply reinforce existing practices of participation and engagement. The hasthag related analysis allows us to examine the networks and communities built around the various referendums and asks if we are witnessing non-traditional forms of online participation, facilitating open political discussions in the “digital agora”. Normatively if civil culture is improved the pubic should become more likely to seek out new information. This paper thus also examines the extent to which the technologies are utilised as dissemination feeds, with the value of a political hasthag deriving from the real-time nature of the information shared. Drawing together advances in big data in social science the paper utilises a novel complete dataset comprising over a million tweets on a range of referendums and hashtags in four counties over four years, These are New Zeeland (MMP, 2011 ), the UK (AV Referendum, 2011), Scotland (independence, 2014) and Ireland (Seanad abolition, 2013 Parliamentary Inquiries, 2011) .