Abstract

For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 professionals from 2016 US presidential campaigns details how they use social media to understand and represent public opinion. I map these uses of social media onto a theoretical model, accounting for quantitative and qualitative measurement, for instrumental and symbolic purposes. Campaigns’ use of social media data to infer and symbolize public opinion is a new development in the relationship between campaigns and supporters. These new tools and symbols of public opinion are shaped by campaigns and drive press coverage (McGregor 2019), highlighting the hybrid logic of the political media system (Chadwick 2017). The model I present brings much-needed attention to qualitative data, a novel aspect of social media in understanding public opinion. The use of social media data to understand the public, for all its problems of representativeness, may provide a retort to long-standing criticisms of surveys—specifically that surveys do not reveal hierarchical, social, or public aspects of opinion formation (Blumer 1948; Herbst 1998; Cramer 2016). This model highlights a need to explicate what can—and cannot—be understood about public opinion via social media.

中文翻译：

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“感受房间的温度”政治运动如何使用社交媒体理解和代表舆论

摘要

在整个20世纪的大部分时间里，民意几乎与民意测验相似。进入社交媒体，它颠覆了构建公众舆论的社会，技术和交流突发事件。这项研究记录了政治专业人士如何求助于社交媒体以了解公众，绘制了对竞选活动以及民意研究本身的重要启示。一项针对2016年美国总统大选的13名专业人士的深度访谈的分析详细介绍了他们如何使用社交媒体来理解和代表舆论。我将社交媒体的这些使用映射到一个理论模型上，该模型负责定量和定性的测量，工具性和象征性的测量目的。竞选活动使用社交媒体数据来推断和象征公众舆论是竞选活动与支持者之间关系的新发展。这些新的舆论工具和符号受竞选活动和媒体报道的影响（McGregor 2019），突出了政治媒体系统的混合逻辑（Chadwick 2017）。我提出的模型非常需要关注定性数据，这是社交媒体理解公众舆论的一个新颖方面。使用社交媒体数据来了解公众，尽管存在代表性问题，但可以反驳对调查的长期批评，特别是调查不能揭示意见形成的等级，社会或公共方面（Blumer，1948年； Blumer，1948年。 Herbst 1998； Cramer 2016）。