DiCED is at EPSA 2024, in Cologne, Germany, to present the below paper on the panel: “Methodological Innovations”. This is the 14th annual conference of the European Political Science Association. Come say hi if you’re around! 

Esmeralda Bon, Rachel Gibson, Fabienne Greffet, Mickael Temporão, Peter Smyth: “What a difference a method makes? Comparing and evaluating approaches for identifying Online Political Influencers (OPI)”

Abstract

Online political influencers (OPIs) are increasingly important actors during election campaigns, however, there is as yet little agreement on what defines them. This lack of conceptual clarity is reflected in the diversity of methods that have been used to identify them. In this paper, we seek to advance this debate by applying three distinct approaches to identifying OPIs on Twitter during the 2022 French Presidential and Parliamentary elections and assessing the pros and cons of each. Specifically, we compare the outcomes from using expert judgement versus more inductive methods that rely either on digital trace data supplied by survey respondents, or automated identification strategies that use aggregated tweets for identifying political influencers. We evaluate the performance of each approach post-identification by comparing the influencers they identify on a range of indicators including their overall number, degree of overlap, variance in ideological outlook and type of actor, as well as follower numbers and network reach. Based on our findings we argue there is no one ideal method for identifying OPIs and choice of approach is largely dependent on the research question posed.

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