Final Project- Results/Conclusion

Are Facebook’s users partisan?  That’s the question we are trying to answer with our final project.  We’re taking a look at who does more on Facebook – Democrats or Republicans.  We chose those two groups because they are the two largest political parties in America.

In order to determine which group had more active users, we looked at each party’s largest fan page.  We observed the “Positively Republican!” fan page and “Democrats” fan page from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on a Tuesday.  We chose a workday with the assumption that more people would have access to a computer and Facebook, and also because President Barack Obama was giving a speech that day, and we thought it might generate a little more action on the pages.  We looked at both the page posts and the “Just Fans” posts on each page for our project.

We set up a point system based on each page’s activity…
•+4 for a comment by an individual not associated with the production of the page
•+3 for a post by those who run the page
•+2 for a comment on a post
•+1 for a “like” on a post

The following are the results we found on each page:

Democrats
•Page posts: 1 (x 3)
•Likes: 82 (x 1)
•Comments on posts: 31 (x 2)
Total: 147

•Fan posts: 3 (x 4)
•Likes: 0
•Comments on posts: 0
•Total: 12

Positively Republican!
•Page posts: 3 (x3)
•Likes: 351 (x 1)
•Comments: 193 (x2)
•Total: 746

•Fan posts: 3 (x4)
•Likes: 0
•Comments: 0
•Total:  12

Conclusion:

Based on the results of our study, we found that the Republican party had a more active page than the Democratic party. The points for the fan pages disproved our hypothesis that Facebook users would be more active as Democrat fans. A possible reason the Republican fan page’s fans are more active than Democrats on Facebook is that the Democrats have several other new media outlets as well as more options within the page that allowed users to be active online elsewhere; the Republicans, however, only had a few options for political activity via a different social networking site.  We therefore believe that they are working to have more of a presence on the site than Democratic users.

We also noticed that the content of many posts on the Republican page focused on attacks at the present administration. This is probably an effort to gain ground for the next election cycle, because they would like to regain power from the Democratic party. The Democrat posts, however, were more focused on pointing out that the present administration is actively working on public objectives. The Democrats are looking to maintain political ground for the next election cycle.

Interestingly, the most popular vote on the fan pages was about the cancellation of the Peanuts’ Christmas Special that evening. There were no posts about the pending speech, not even to say “tune in,” on the Democratic site. Henry Jenkins (2008) believes that ideas that appeal to nostalgia are more likely to be spread. This event also leads the project’s authors to believe that Facebook users are still in the consumer area of political activism. Not only did the page administrators comment about entertainment instead, but there were also only 3 posts with no comments or “likes” on the user side of the page. Users were much more likely to participate when all they had to do was “like” or contribute a little with a comment.

These findings show that there is a correlation between higher levels political activity and a particular party on Facebook. The fact that the Democratic party has spread their online efforts elsewhere is a likely contributor to the Republican’s dominance on Facebook as well as the Republican party’s efforts as the party not in power. Because the age demographic of Facebook users is fairly young (Smith 2009), they seem to still be on the consumer side of political activity and may become more contributory as high-income, highly-educated adults.  However, it is interesting to see that Smith (2009) found the fastest growing Facebook demographic to be age 55 and older females.  This factor implies that the demographic of Facebook users may be aging as the number of new users has more and more older people, and the present young demographic will enter this older demographic in the future.

The implications for politics in the new media of social-networking sites include a change in how politician’s are reaching out to their voters. However, based on Melican and Dixon’s study we don’t think that sites like Facebook are not changing the users’ perceptions, but more likely the sites are reinforcing present perceptions.  However, the fact that the demographics of Facebook users has become less college-age focused (through still predominantly college-age) is probably the most important finding.  Smith, Schlozman, and Verba (2009) concluded that the most politically active people are still older, high-income individuals.  As older people in the larger-earning years of their life-cycle continue to become users of Facebook and today’s college demographic ages, political activity may occur more on Facebook.  Perhaps the parties have realized this, and are looking to gain a presence on Facebook now and, therefore, a presence in the minds of future higher-income earners–even if these earners are presently not so interested in political activism.  The authors of this study believe that both parties are in the right place for when the young demographic does become more interested in politics.  As far as when that shift in interest will occur, we can only speculate.  Given that there about 3 more years of college-grads to switch into a new demographic and the ongoing influx of older Facebook users, this project’s authors believe that we may see political activity far surpassing that on Facebook to date.  The increased activity will also be a result of the Republican party catching up with Democrats in utilization of new media for the next election.

The authors believe that further research akin to this project’s focus would probably find out even more about college voter characteristics and the effects of social-network sites through a qualitative study of the political substance in the Facebook users’ posts and comments.