Pulling the Trigger? – How Parties Influence Discourse Quality in Social Media

Analyzing incivility in political online communication is often studied in reference to user comments. However, as already the very term comment suggests, users react to initial content that has been posted by others. Especially during election campaigns, political parties, their candidates and politicians produce much of the most resounding content. This is why we are interested, in how parties influence discourse quality in social media by their initial posts. How do they trigger certain topics to appear and how do they possibly provoke affective and derivative comments? To answer this question, we rely on online communication data from the German federal elections. The dataset contains the facebook communication of all political parties in the newly elected Bundestag and their leading candidates. It encompasses the campaigning phase from January to September 2017 and consists of approx. 2.9 mio. entries, including 7.254 initial posts from parties / candidates and the respective user comments. We apply different data science techniques (e.g. comparative keyword and sentiment analysis) as well as qualitative tools of multimodal discourse research.