Popular Politics // Authentic Australians: A study of political leaders’ Facebook posts during the 2019 Australian Federal Election

Abstract

This thesis examines political communication on Facebook. In doing so, it addresses a surprising gap in empirical research on political communication on social media in Australia which to date has largely focussed on Twitter. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the shock election result that was a Coalition win in the 2019 federal election, little has been said among scholarly publications regarding social media use by politicians during that period. Therein, a notable gap in knowledge exists regarding the use of Facebook by Australian politicians or the use of social media surrounding the 2019 federal election. This thesis is a response to that gap, offering three linked studies of Facebook use by six of Australia’s federal party leaders in the lead up to the election. The three studies offer the results of a content analysis guided by frameworks of ideational populism, mediated authenticity and open coding applied to a collection of Facebook Page posts collected from Meta’s CrowdTangle platform. The results of this analysis identify that appeals to populism and authenticity were widespread, but rarely present in the majority of posts. Comparisons between supply-side communication and user engagement also identify that authenticity appeals performed better on the platform than populist appeals. Indexing of the issues raised by politicians also identifies the economy, domestic locations, and health and emergency services at the forefront of their online campaigning. Collectively these studies provide a broad-ranging analysis of how Australian party leaders approached their communication practice on Facebook ahead of the 2019 federal election, affirming notions of fragmentation and the hybrid media system, and raising new questions regarding the role of news sharing by politicians.