Featured Lendület Researcher: Márton Bene

For years, practically since the beginning of his doctoral research, Bene has been investigating the impact of social media on the political process, the functioning of politics, and on citizens themselves. In the past he has explored this topic from many different angles, and in recent years he has been joined by an increasing number of doctoral students, thus a small research group has already been established. The political scientist will expand this research with the support of the Momentum programme.

A popular topic

“During the period of the Momentum grant, we will continue our previously started research, but at the same time we will focus more specifically on the question of what social media means in terms of political representation,” says Bene. “Social media has become a popular topic in political science today, as well as in the general public, but very few people have asked

how this radically changed communication environment is changing the nature of political representation. This is what we will explore.”

Márton Bene Photo: ELTE

The significance of this question lies in the fact that modern democracies operate on a representative principle. In recent decades, however, many researchers have argued that political representation is in crisis, which is because people do not feel represented by political actors; and this also means a crisis of democracy. Many researchers have linked the crisis of representation to the media environment and political communication. They argue that political communication has become so professionalised that it has become increasingly detached from people’s everyday reality. A gap has thus been created between politicians and their professionalised communication reality and people’s everyday perception of it. People feel that their needs and thoughts are less reflected in the sphere of politicians, and this has led to a crisis of trust and cynicism about the political elite and politics in general.

New actors in the political communication system

“Our research is based on the assumption that the crisis of representation was more related to the previous media era, since the highly elite-driven media system was established then,” continues the research team leader. “However, this has changed significantly in the last ten to fifteen years, precisely because of social media. Citizens have become participants in the political communication system. The question arises as to whether this has any effect on political representation.”

In social media, political actors can engage directly with citizens without having to conform to the logic of traditional media, which may have made their communication appear more “designed” in the past. Of course, communication is still strategically driven, but the technique has changed: it is more about authenticity and the appearance of credibility; in the context of Donald Trump, many explain his social media success by his ability to make people believe that he is communicating authentically. Meanwhile, it is known that the operators of his social media site have deliberately made spelling mistakes in their posts to make this content appear more authentic.

“Political actors can only reach their audiences effectively on these platforms if they can elicit as many reactions from people as possible. For this reason, they need to communicate what ordinary people want to talk about and react to,” argues Bene. “In the past, they tried to influence people’s cognitive and emotional capacities through mass media. So they wanted to influence thinking, but they were not concerned with what people were talking about or how they were talking. But now their task is to hack into online conversation between citizens. This requires a different logic, and we can expect the communication reality of citizens and political actors to converge.”

New forms of representational inequalities

According to the political scientist, it is noticeable that politicians are speaking more and more like ordinary people. For this reason, the emergence of social media could be seen as a way of solving the crisis of political representation, though this needs to be proven through research. However, this may also mean a new dimension of political inequalities. After all, if political actors seek to elicit a reaction from citizens, this also means that those citizens who react to messages received on social media have an effect on politicians. This only pertains to a certain proportion of citizens, which is why inequality in representation is emerging again. “Therefore, the other main thrust of our research is to explore these new kinds of representational inequalities.

We are looking at those whose needs, desires and communication are being channelled into the new system of representation and those who are being ignored,”

says Bene. “There have always been inequalities in political participation. The needs of those who go to the polls are, by definition, more visible in the representation process. The big difference here is that participation inequalities have so far been determined primarily by interest and political knowledge. However, in social media, many new circumstances influence participation.”

Many people are uncomfortable expressing themselves politically in this medium, not because they do not want to influence the political process, but because they are repelled by social media. The researchers therefore believe that psychological factors play a big role in this: people who are conflict-averse or introverted will be left out of this representational process. Their research will explore the extent to which political inequalities are linked to psychological differences.

Questions and methods

One strand of the studies will be of a basic research nature: the social media activity of all nationally elected German and Hungarian political actors on Facebook and Instagram between 2010 and 2024 will be collected. The question is how politicians’ communication has changed over this period and how well it has adapted to the needs of citizens: whether it can indeed be shown that when politicians find that certain communication strategies are more popular with voters, they subsequently become more prominent, and what impact this has on representation. The comparison of the German and Hungarian situation is interesting, according to the researcher, because while the political balance of power in Hungary was quite stable during this period, in Germany there were changes of government. Therefore, it can be examined whether the change of government there also has any effect on communication in social media. A number of methods will be used for the research, including automated machine learning content analysis techniques, in addition to traditional content analysis and communication analysis.

“The other major strand of research will focus on citizens. We will look at who is represented in this medium, what factors determine this representation, and what political inequalities this opens up,” says the researcher. “We will also investigate what representational strategies are effective in strengthening citizens’ sense of representation.”

Social media has also brought about changes in political communication in other ways. It is no longer only political actors who make claims to representation, nor do voters look only to institutional political actors to represent their political interests. Many other actors are also emerging as “voices of the people”, whether they be opinion leaders, influencers, NGOs or movements. According to the political scientist, these existed before, but in the social media space they have gained greater power and have a greater voice.

The Momentum programme will also examine the effectiveness of these non-political actors and the extent to which they take over representational functions from political actors: To what extent do citizens feel better represented by these actors than by traditional political actors? In order to answer this question, a method that has only recently been gaining ground in social science research, data donation”, will be used. The research participants share their social media history, and from this data the researchers will reconstruct what political content they are sensitive to and what kind of political actors can address them. Finally, the third leg of the research is explicitly theoretical, as the problem of representation is a political theory question. They therefore seek to include their findings into political theory discussions.