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Social media has become an important tool for political discussion and participation. Furthermore, recently, the question of gendered harassment in online political spaces has gained much scholarly attention. However, work here has largely focused on elected representatives, with little work on how this affects ordinary citizens. This article seeks to establish whether there is a gendered online participation gap, using data from the British Election Study across three elections. It further seeks to reveal why this gap may exist by assessing specific questions about being harassed or fearing negative responses online. The findings show a persistent gender gap in political participation online across all elections studied. Furthermore, although women were not necessarily more likely to have been harassed online, they were far more likely to have avoided posting about politics for fear of a negative response. This suggests that fear of harassment may contribute to lower political participation online for women.

The apparent success of President Obama's online election campaigns in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections and the rapid growth in use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter by British voters since the last election has led to much speculation that 2010 would be a 'watershed' moment for UK politicians and parties in their adoption of digital tools. This article seeks to measure the precise extent of online campaigning during the 2010 general election campaign and explain the patterns of adoption observed. It does so by using an extensive and original data set that measures the adoption of Web sites by candidates from six parties in all constituencies in England, and measures adoption and use of four types of social media for a smaller group of more competitive constituencies. It aims to test one of the leading theories in the field of online campaigning, the normalization thesis, using the most comprehensive and rigorous data collected in the United Kingdom to date. The normalization thesis states that actors who already have the most influence will be the ones most likely to benefit from new online campaign methods. This paper finds that although patterns of Web site adoption among candidates do support normalization overall, adoption and use of certain types of social media refute normalization on some measures, some to a strong degree. Adapted from the source document.

Following the 2017 UK general election, there was much debate about the so-called 'youthquake', or increase in youth turnout (YouGov). Some journalists claimed it was the '. . . memes wot won it'. This article seeks to understand the role of memes during political campaigns. Combining meta-data and content analysis, this article aims to answer three questions. First, who creates political memes? Second, what is the level of engagement with political memes and who engages with them? Finally, can any meaningful political information be derived from memes? The findings here suggest that by far the most common producers of memes were citizens suggesting that memes may be a form of citizen-initiated political participation. There was a high level of engagement with memes with almost half a million shares in our sample. However, the level of policy information in memes was low suggesting they are unlikely to increase political knowledge.

This paper examines the structure of Twitter communication networks between MPs during the 2016 EU Referendum campaign. In particular, the research examines the impact of Twitter in two dimensions: (1) how far social media might facilitate inter-party linkages thus eroding traditional partisan relations between MPs? This was given added potential by the supposedly cross-party nature of the Referendum campaign and, therefore, we specifically examined the collective communicative networks that formed around Leave and Remain amongst MPs; (2) Given the potential of social media to provide a platform for individual politicians to personalize campaigns, we asked how far social media might disrupt traditional formal intra-party hierarchies? Did, for example, backbench or relatively unknown figures come to the fore in the EU debate? Our results indicate that whilst there existed a high degree of partisanship, interestingly, Remainer MPs tended to adhere to party networks resulting in a divided remain network. By contrast, the Leave network was more unified but also more porous. Within the networks themselves, the centrality of individual MPs did not always reflect their formal status.

Negative campaigning has long concerned scholars because of the potential effects on the electorate and on democracy. Most scholarship has focused on single-election studies in the United States, whereas less is known about how campaigns go on the attack in the UK, and few compare two elections. Drawing from a dataset of Facebook posts by parties and leaders in Great Britain during the five weeks of campaigning in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections (N = 3560), we use supervised machine learning to categorise posts as negative campaigning and distinguish between attacks focused on issues and attacks on candidates' images. Our findings show that the 2019 election was more negative than in 2017, and that larger parties were more inclined to adopt attacks as a campaign strategy. Moreover, we found that party accounts posted more attack messages than leader accounts and were more focused on attacking based on issues, rather than personal character or image. Finally, we found that attack messages elicit stronger engagement from audiences, with attack messages receiving more attention, particularly attacks on image.

This paper uses Twitter data to forecast the outcome of the 2015 UK General Election. While a number of empirical studies to date have demonstrated striking levels of accuracy in estimating election results using this new data source, there have been no genuine i.e. pre-election forecasts issued to date. Furthermore there have been widely varying methods and models employed with seemingly little agreement on the core criteria required for an accurate estimate. We attempt to address this deficit with our 'baseline' model of prediction that incorporates sentiment analysis and prior party support to generate a true forecast of parliament seat allocation. Our results indicate a hung parliament with Labour holding the majority of seats.