Echo chambers and polarisation in the German federal election 2017: Our findings suggest that there is no echo chamber in political communication on Facebook in Germany

Echo chambers and polarisation in the German federal election 2017. Wolf J. Schünemann, Stefan Steiger, Fritz Kliche. Panel "Political Organisations and the Digital", ECPR General Conference, August 2018, Hamburg. https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/2df1d48e-c319-456f-89ef-4ad9d5256546.pdf

Abstract: This paper examines the phenomenon of polarisation and radicalisation and in particular tests the echo chamber hypothesis for explaining these prominently discussed features of current political communication. To investigate these phenomena, we draw on a sample of 1.3 million posts and comments from public Facebook profiles of German political parties. The data was collected during the federal election campaign in 2017 and therefore a phase of heightened political debate. In order to identify potential echo chambers we built on selective exposure theory and therefore focused on practices of information sharing on respective profiles. Specifically, we investigated the sharing of links (URLs) and tried to identify, whether users of different party pages were referring to different (more reassuring) sources. Focusing on polarisation we employed different corpus linguistic tools such as topic modelling, cluster and keyword analysis in order to identify differences in respective discourses. While being tentative, our findings suggest that there is no echo chamber in political communication on Facebook in Germany. Instead of distinct sets of different sources, we found that all parties refer to more or less the same leading media outlets. We found only few sources that could be clearly identified as being partisan.With regard to polarisation, we found that there is a clear distinction regarding the tonality of discourse on the different profiles. Uncivil language featured very prominently on the profile of the new German right-wing populist party (AfD).