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What’s the matter? A text mining analysis of political topics and user engagement on politicians’ Facebook pages during the 2018 Hungarian general election campaign
94-123.Views:152The research investigates the way users interact with leading topics of the 2018 Hungarian
general election campaign on candidates’ Facebook pages. It expects that the prominent
(immigration, corruption) and campaign-related topics generate more user engagement, while
policy topics and mobilization content are less interacted. It also tests the theory of issue ownership
in relation with user engagement. These expectations are tested on a dataset that includes all
posts (38030 posts) posted by all candidates during the campaign (511 candidates). Topics
are identified by text mining methods. The study demonstrates that corruption, development
policy and campaign are highly engaged topics, while immigration was more interacted only on
opposition politicians’ pages since the followers of pro-government candidates engage less with
immigration-related content. The most surprising result is that a reversed issue ownership effect
can be detected since politicians are generally less successful with their own topics. -
The 2019 local elections in Szeged
52-66Views:142The 2019 local, municipal election outclasses the second-order elections in the given political constellation. This is especially true in the case of Szeged, where the opposition – unlike the situation at the national level – has the power for a long time. To change this situation, the governing parties, taking advantage of their dominant position – and using all means – conducted a very vigorous campaign, changing the city into a battlefield. According to the results, the governemt’s attempt was not successfull, it was rather contraproductive. The reigning mayor and city management won an unprecedented victory. The root cause of it is a special urban policy which extracted the local politics from the partyfights and overrode party interests, and which represented the interests of the city succesfully and with credibility even against cross-wind. Based on the cooperation of the entire opposition the implemented urban policy is symbolized by and embodied in the person of the mayor in office since 2002.
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Presence and plebiscitary representation: Representative performances of Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar in the 2024 election campaign
39-67Views:283The study examines the interactions of meaning effects and presence effects in the mass events of Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar in the 2024 election campaign, attempting to show that the performances of both leaders can be interpreted as forms of plebiscitary representation, although there are also substantial differences between them (for example, in the degree of asymmetry of the representative relationship and the palette of leader-follower interactions). The text argues that such an analysis, blending traditional aspects of representational claims analysis with ethnographic method, can help to shed light on a blind spot in contemporary performative approaches to representation: the corporeal-material aspects of performativity. Plebiscitary representation, in which a unified mass acclaiming a leader plays a key role, is a particularly suitable context for demonstrating the importance of presence-effects in the constitutive process of representation.
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The Suppression of Discourse: The Hidden Internet Communities Related to the Alt-right and the US Presidential Elections of 2016
62-80Views:130I examine the US presidential election of 2016 and how hidden groups related to the alt-right
manipulated the social media with hoaxes and memes. I examine some of the media platforms
and forums where these contents mainly appeared during the campaign and I also present the
anatomy of the groups’ previous actions, and from these I attempt to demonstrate that their
efforts are coordinated and their methods have become more sophisticated in the recent years.
