Cultivating Personal Votes on Social Networking Sites

• In Event: Analyzing Political Campaign Strategies across Platforms

Abstract

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are where citizens get news updates and information about political parties and candidates. Therefore, social network- ing sites have become an essential strategic communication instrument for parties and election campaigns to spread information and activate potential voters. Previous theoretical and empirical work suggests that candidates’ campaign strategies are influenced by the electoral rules in which they compete because these rules incentivise either seeking personal votes or votes for the party. Consequently, there should be a connection between the electoral rules and the messaging behaviour of political candidates on social networking sites. This paper moves beyond analysing the frequency to consider the style of campaign messages on social networking sites. Starting from Twitter messages during the 2019 European Parliament Elections, a state-of-the-art multilingual classification algorithm based on recent innovations in large language models classifies Tweets into engaging and broadcasting styles. The findings show that electoral system incentives do not influence the frequency of Tweets. However, they relate to messaging style where systems favouring personal vote-seeking are associated with more engaging Tweets.

Author

• Christian Mueller, University of Bern