Supplementary and replication materials for
"Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information"
This repository contains supplementary and replication materials for the paper "Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information" by Sascha Göbel and Simon Munzert, published in Social Science Computer Review.
We point to a popular yet underresearched platform of political information, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Considering the supply side of the marketplace, we argue that personal biographies on the platform are an attractive medium for politicians to enhance their appearance. We trace changes to biographies coming from the parliament using data that cover the entire edit histories for biographies on all German members of parliament (MPs) for the three last legislative periods. Our findings show editing of personal biographies to be a persistent phenomenon. Moreover, type, timing, and driving factors of editing behavior highlight the importance politicians’ attribute to Wikipedia for pursuing reelection. Our results speak to the domains of political professionalization, voting behavior, and the general measurement of communicative patterns.
code
- contains R code for downloading htmls and building data from it as well as Stata code for analyses and figures
data
- contains edit and traffic data for German MPs' (16th to 18th term) Wikipedia biographies
figures
- contains figures (.jpg) presented in the paper
htmls
- contains .html files of German MPs' (16th to 18th term) Wikipedia and Bundestag biographies
online-appendix
- contains additional descriptive statistics and analyses not included in the paper
Sascha Göbel (repository maintainer)
Graduate School of Decision Sciences
University of Konstanz
Box 85
78457 Konstanz, Germany
Email: sascha.goebel [at] uni-konstanz.de
Simon Munzert (corresponding author)
Hertie School of Governance
Friedrichstr. 180
D-10117 Berlin, Germany
Email: munzert [at] hertie-school.org