Media Visibility and Information-Seeking: Analyzing the Impact of News Coverage on Wikipedia Pageviews of Estonian MPs (2015–2023)

IF 4.3 2区社会学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS

Social Science Computer Review Pub Date : 2025-11-07 DOI:10.1177/08944393251394710

Tatiana Lupacheva

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The news media are a primary but limited source of political information for voters. This article examines how the media coverage of members of parliament (MPs) prompts people to seek more information about MPs—an important element of voters’ political knowledge and democratic accountability. I use all available online content from four major Estonian newspapers during 2015–2023 ( ∼ 140,000 articles) and pre-trained transformer models to classify the sentiment and policy issues of news articles that mention MPs. I match media data with MPs’ Wikipedia pageviews on a daily basis over two legislative terms. First, the results show that media visibility of MPs is associated with more views of their Wikipedia page on the same day. Second, news articles with negative sentiment have a greater impact on information-seeking than those with a positive or neutral tone. Third, the impact of MPs' media appearances on information-seeking is dependent on the policy context as well as party affiliation. The findings have implications for understanding the consequences of political communication and democratic representation in the digital age.

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媒体知名度和信息寻求：分析新闻报道对爱沙尼亚国会议员维基百科页面浏览量的影响（2015-2023）

新闻媒体是选民获得政治信息的主要但有限的来源。本文考察了媒体对国会议员的报道如何促使人们寻求更多关于议员的信息——这是选民政治知识和民主问责制的重要组成部分。我使用2015-2023年期间爱沙尼亚四家主要报纸的所有可用在线内容（约14万篇文章）和预训练的变形模型，对提到国会议员的新闻文章的情绪和政策问题进行分类。我将媒体数据与国会议员在两个立法任期内每天的维基百科页面浏览量进行比对。首先，结果显示，媒体对国会议员的曝光率与当天维基百科页面的更多浏览量有关。第二，带有负面情绪的新闻文章比带有积极或中性语气的新闻文章对信息寻求的影响更大。第三，议员在媒体上露面对信息寻求的影响取决于政策背景和党派关系。这些发现对理解数字时代政治沟通和民主代表的后果具有启示意义。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Social Science Computer Review 社会科学-计算机：跨学科应用

CiteScore

9.00

自引率

4.90%

发文量

审稿时长

>12 weeks

期刊介绍： Unique Scope Social Science Computer Review is an interdisciplinary journal covering social science instructional and research applications of computing, as well as societal impacts of informational technology. Topics included: artificial intelligence, business, computational social science theory, computer-assisted survey research, computer-based qualitative analysis, computer simulation, economic modeling, electronic modeling, electronic publishing, geographic information systems, instrumentation and research tools, public administration, social impacts of computing and telecommunications, software evaluation, world-wide web resources for social scientists. Interdisciplinary Nature Because the Uses and impacts of computing are interdisciplinary, so is Social Science Computer Review. The journal is of direct relevance to scholars and scientists in a wide variety of disciplines. In its pages you''ll find work in the following areas: sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, psychology, computer literacy, computer applications, and methodology.