Unpopped Collar

Facebook, Twitter and Barack Obama: New media and the 2008 Presidential election

Update: I have now posted the entire thesis and created a page for it on here: http://unpoppedcollar.com/thesis  But, if you’d like a .pdf copy, feel free to get in touch and I can send one your way.  Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or critiques I would love to hear them.  Cheers!

As many of you know I finally finished my master’s thesis last week!  Once everything gets cleared by Georgetown I plan to publish it online (probably with Scribd) so that anyone who wants to endure enjoy 55 pages of econometric analysis can read it.  In the meantime, though, I’m excited to share my abstract with you so that you can get a sense of the work I’ve been doing.  To the best of my knowledge, it’s the first comprehensive study to quantitatively analyze how new media consumption informed voting behavior in the 2008 election.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions I’d love to hear from you via Disqus comments, email, or Tumblr Ask!  

Political strategists and analysts have dubbed Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential victory as the “Twitter election,” a “triumph of new media in politics,” and “the election decided by Facebook.”  But, does the reality match the rhetoric?  This paper examines the role of new media in the 2008 Presidential election, asking the question of whether the consumption of both new media and old media in the 2008 Presidential election have a significant effect on a person’s likelihood to engage in the political process by voting, or whether disparities exist by type of media.

Through a quantitative analysis based on data provided by the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life project, this study finds that contrary to the popular rhetoric, old media consumption still remains dominant in explaining voting behavior.  This study characterizes new media as that which is two-way in communication, has low barriers to entry and virtually zero marginal cost of participating — as contrasted with old media which remains cost-prohibitively expensive. 

After controlling for a number of demographic variables, the paper utilizes a probit regression model on the likelihood of a person voting with independent variables representing both new media and old media consumption patterns and actions.  The model shows that, holding all other variables constant, getting most of one’s information about the election through old media sources such as television, radio and newspapers has a statistically significant and positive effect on the likelihood of a person voting.  Similar new media variables — including “friending” a candidate on a social networking site and discussing the election on Twitter — fail to have significant explanatory powers.  This study focuses on media’s ability to convert non-voters to voters, but does not address how it informs one’s choice of candidate — a potential area for future research.

The implications for this manifest themselves both in political strategy as well as campaign finance reform laws.  On the political strategy side, this paper suggests that campaigns — contrary to popular discourse — cannot simply rely upon new media to engage voters.  As a corollary, these results show that because the much more expensive old media remains dominant, campaign finance laws need to be reconsidered.  Had new media had a statistically significant and positive impact on engaging voters, one could have argued that campaign spending limits were thus rendered unnecessary.  On the contrary, however, after showing that expensive old media remains more important to campaigns than new media, this paper provides evidence that limits in campaign spending remain crucial for democracy to flourish in the United States.

This paper concludes that in an examination of new media and the 2008 Presidential election, old media remains dominant in getting people to vote who otherwise would not.  The rhetoric simply does not match the quantitative reality.

Update: I have now posted the entire thesis and created a page for it on here: at unpoppedcollar.com/thesis.  But, if you’d like a .pdf copy, feel free to get in touch and I can send one your way.  Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or critiques I would love to hear them.  Cheers!