Unintended Effects of Co-Creation? User Engagement with Election Campaigns on Facebook in the Czech Republic

This paper presents a comparative analysis of party communication and Facebook users’ participation in the campaigns for the 2013 National Parliamentary Elections and the 2014 European Parliamentary Elections in the Czech Republic. In general, the paper is situated within the rapidly expanding area which examines the role of social media in electoral communication. While many studies following this path focus on the mere process of adoption of the Web 2.0 platforms by parties and individual candidates, as well as on the intensity of interactions of the users of social network sites (SNS) with parties’ messages distributed during the campaign, there is still a relative lack of data concerning the question how do the users actually react to and engage with the content of communication produced by the parties. Inspired by the concept of a “co-created campaign” (Lilleker and Jackson, 2010), highlighting the interactive and, essentially, an open-ended character of campaigns in the Web 2.0 environment, this paper aims to investigate the content of communication produced by the Facebook users on the profiles of the eight most relevant Czech political parties during the two recent election campaigns, the 2013 Parliamentary elections and the 2014 EP elections. The empirical base for this study consists of a sample of contributions (party statuses, comments and replies) posted in the course of the last week before the elections, generating over 7,200 and 6,100 unique messages from each of the two election campaigns. The analysis focused particularly on the tone of communication and the plurality of actors. The preliminary results indicate that while there are significant differences in users’ engagement between mainstream and new/alternative parties, overall most of the party profiles were characterized by a notable activity of party opponents and by presence of dissenting voices, contradicting the perception of SNSs as heavily managed communication environments.