CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Wagner, Franziska |
|---|---|
| Title | Crisis Communication in the Fourth Age of Political Communication. Three Essays on Social Media Communication and Computational Text Analysis. |
| Summary | Social media has taken on a pivotal role in politics, creating a hybrid media system and introducing the fourth age of political communication. It has been heralded as the solution to all democratic deficits and has presented itself with increasingly destructive impacts on democracy. However, its impact on political communication, particularly during crises -- times of uncertainty, threat, and heightened political competition -- remains unclear. This dissertation contributes to this gap and examines the role of social media in political crisis communication through three interconnected studies, drawing on computational text analysis and Facebook data throughout all chapters. Focusing on the complex interplay between political communication, crisis communication, citizen interaction, and social media ecosystems, I investigate (1) patterns of government communication regarding environmental issues and how citizens engage with them; (2) how political parties adjust their issue agendas following unexpected crises across communication channels; and (3) how media reporting shapes citizens' blame attribution in multilevel governance systems. Using cluster analysis for the first study, I identify three distinct government communication patterns: Formal Institutional Communication, Strategic Policy Advocacy, and Symbolic Leadership. The patterns significantly influence user engagement, with symbolic and action-oriented content generating more positive public engagement than informational posts. For the second empirical chapter, following German parties' discourse surrounding Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I demonstrate that while crises generally increase parties' agenda diversity in political communication, this effect varies significantly by communication channel and party status: parliamentary speeches show uniform increases in agenda diversity for both governing and opposition parties, while on Facebook, opposition parties expand their issue agendas significantly more than governing parties. Finally, analysing the 2021 Ahrtal floods in Germany, the third study applies blame attribution classification through LLM few-shot prompting. It reveals that prior media blame attribution strongly influences citizens' responsibility attributions. Additionally, users shift their blame targets in alignment with media reporting over time, which shows different effects across government levels. In combination, these findings highlight social media's crucial role in contemporary political communication, particularly during and after crises. In addition, the dissertation reveals a fundamental tension between social media architecture and democratic goals across each study. It raises crucial questions about how government communication can be effective on online platforms, the importance of quality journalism and digital literacy initiatives, and social media's potential to realise democracy's epistemic potential. |
| Supervisor | Enyedi, Zsolt |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/wagner_franziska.pdf |
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