{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,10]],"date-time":"2026-01-10T19:10:41Z","timestamp":1768072241463,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":65,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,25]],"date-time":"2021-10-25T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1635120000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Internet Technol."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2022,2,28]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n            A fundamental tenet of democracy is that political parties present policy alternatives, such that the public can participate in the decision-making process. Parties, however, strategically control public discussion by emphasising topics that they believe will highlight their strengths in voters\u2019 minds. Political strategy has been studied for decades, mostly by manually annotating and analysing party statements, press coverage, or TV ads. Here we build on recent work in the areas of computational social science and eDemocracy, which studied these concepts computationally with social media. We operationalize\n            <jats:italic>issue engagement<\/jats:italic>\n            and related political science theories to measure and quantify politicians\u2019 communication behavior using more than 366k Tweets posted by over 1,000 prominent German politicians in the 2017 election year. To this end, we first identify issues in posted Tweets by utilising a hashtag-based approach well known in the literature. This method allows several prominent issues featuring in the political debate on Twitter that year to be identified. We show that different political parties engage to a larger or lesser extent with these issues. The findings reveal differing social media strategies by parties located at different sides of the political left-right scale, in terms of which issues they engage with, how confrontational they are and how their strategies evolve in the lead-up to the election. Whereas previous work has analysed the general public\u2019s use of Twitter or politicians\u2019 communication in terms of cross-party polarisation, this is the first study of political science theories, relating to issue engagement, using politicians\u2019 social media data.\n          <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3467020","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,25]],"date-time":"2021-10-25T20:42:11Z","timestamp":1635194531000},"page":"1-25","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Using Social Media Data to Analyse Issue Engagement During the 2017 German Federal Election"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"22","author":[{"given":"Florian","family":"Meier","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Alexander","family":"Bazo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Chair for Media Informatics, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"David","family":"Elsweiler","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Chair for Information Science, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1134271.1134277"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 6th Annual Comparative Agendas Conference","author":"Albaugh Quinn","year":"2013","unstructured":"Quinn Albaugh , Julie Sevenans , Stuart Soroka , and Peter John Loewen . 2013 . The automated coding of policy agendas: A dictionary-based approach . In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Comparative Agendas Conference ( Antwerp, Belgium). http:\/\/www.lexicoder.com\/docs\/CAP 2013v2.pdf Quinn Albaugh, Julie Sevenans, Stuart Soroka, and Peter John Loewen. 2013. The automated coding of policy agendas: A dictionary-based approach. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Comparative Agendas Conference (Antwerp, Belgium). http:\/\/www.lexicoder.com\/docs\/CAP2013v2.pdf"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of ICWSM\u201916","author":"Alvarez-Melis David","year":"2016","unstructured":"David Alvarez-Melis and Martin Saveski . 2016 . Topic modeling in Twitter: Aggregating tweets by conversations . In Proceedings of ICWSM\u201916 . David Alvarez-Melis and Martin Saveski. 2016. Topic modeling in Twitter: Aggregating tweets by conversations. 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