How to identify salient issues in an election campaign: A methodological exploration
Speaker(s):
Bio: Esmeralda works as a research associate for DiCED at the Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester. DiCED is a major new comparative project about digital campaigning and electoral democracy in 5 countries and 7 national elections (2020-2023). She has obtained her PhD in Politics at the University of Nottingham.
Abstract:
During election campaigns, there is more attention on current affairs and political news. While many issues can feature on the public agenda and shape voters' decisions, some issues tend to be core to determining most voters' choices. The data used to identify and track changes in these most important issues are typically derived from public opinion surveys of the electorate. However, increasingly, studies use social media data to measure the salience of issues on the public agenda. This session will compare data measuring the most important issues collected using both methods during an election campaign. First, I will compare the key issues identified by survey data gathered by YouGov as part of a national online survey in three recent election campaigns between 2020 and 2022, in the US, Germany and France, to those identified using data from the Twitter API. Second, I show how qualitative and (automated) quantitative approaches can be applied to discerning issue salience on Twitter and the differences that emerge. I conclude by discussing how the choice of survey data versus social media data using either manual or automated lexica (created and validated with AI techniques) can affect researcher insights into the most important issue during elections.