The last few years have witnessed an intensified academic debate on the potential of online social networking sites (SNSs) in the Czech Republic. However, the ensuing academic discussions focused mostly on the SNS pages of political parties. Politicians in particular have recently become the focus of attention in the shift towards research exploring the use of SNSs. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the role of Facebook in the communication of parties and candidates during the Czech parliamentary elections in 2013. We analyse the adoption of Facebook as a mobilization tool by seven parties as well as by 200 individual deputies, looking for similarities and differences in terms of the adoption, strategy and engagement of users. Although party influence seems to be a significant predictor of Facebook adoption, our data also indicate that using other digital channels increases the chances of higher engagement on Facebook at the individual level.
Funding
The authors acknowledge the support of the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), Standard Grant number 14–05575S.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Medijske Studije
Volume
7
Issue
14
Pages
157 - 175 (19)
Citation
MACKOVA, A. and STETKA, V., 2016. Walking the party line? Determinants of facebook's adoption and use by Czech parliamentarians. Medijske Studije [Media Studies], 7 (14), pp. 157-175
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/