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From Brussels with love? Data Analysis of Social Media usage by Czech Members of the European Parliament
Vanka, Boris ; Váška, Jan (advisor) ; Ullrichová, Eliška (referee)
Populism is on growth throughout Europe and the World. Research has shown that especially in the European Parliament, the number of populist politicians is rising over the last decades. Likewise, social media usage by users is booming and is used particularly by this type of politicians who spread their messages, using emotionality and negativity. Since the literature indicated that populists are especially active, efficient, and followed this research aimed to analyze the relationship between the degree of populism and its influence on the three variables of the Members of the European Parliament elected for Czechia. In order to evaluate such a relationship, the data from Facebook (page posts, interaction by users, and numbers of followers) were utilized to test defined hypotheses and answer the research question. Exploratory Data Analysis was used as a wider framework, while Pearson Correlation Coefficient served as a tool for computing the correlation. Therefore, the scale of the independent variable (degree of populism) was based on data about Czech political parties, reflected in anti-elitism, corruption salience, protectionism, and nationalism. The dependent variables were based on activity, efficiency, and acquirement of followers. Moreover, the test of statistical significance was conducted...
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From Brussels with love? Data Analysis of Social Media usage by Czech Members of the European Parliament
Vanka, Boris ; Váška, Jan (advisor) ; Ullrichová, Eliška (referee)
The central theme of this thesis was a deeper understanding of social media communication by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected for Czechia between 2020 and 2022. The author decided to conduct the research due to the influence the politicians maintain (factual within the legislative process and the one based on their authority when co-creating opinions in the public sphere), while a lack of academic studies on such a topic existed, establishing a research gap to be filled. In the past, researchers within the field of political sciences focused primarily on the qualitative dimension of online communication (text analysis) or only one of the social media platforms (mostly Twitter). This approach could uncover sentiments but made it much more challenging to spot trends. Therefore, the data from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were obtained via an online provider Zoomsphere, mainly from the parties' leaders in the European elections of 2019. These pieces of information were researched with a data analysis approach, which consisted of nine main steps. After evaluating the research aim, data were identified, collected, extracted, cleaned, aggregated, analyzed, and finally visualized in order to make conclusions based on the outcomes. Once this process was finished, the data were compared...
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