Measuring elite-mass linkages through the Internet

The chapter argues that political communication on the Internet has become a reliable source of data to revisit research on political partisanship and especially elite-mass linkages. It first proposes a general overview on the literature on parties on the Internet. The authors show how the Internet in political science has shifted from being an object of study to being a source of data in parallel to the progressive normalization of political parties and politicians presence online. They then proceed to address existing works which take advantage of social media data to place political parties and elites on a left-right axis, either from the content of their posts (content analysis), or from the political preferences of their followers (network analysis). Following these works, they detail possible applications regarding the representation linkage