Saturation or maturation? The diffusion of Twitter and its impact on preference voting in the Dutch general elections of 2010 and 2012

Abstract

Does social-media usage (e.g. Twitter) influence candidates' number of votes? Recent studies have shown that a modest impact might exist. However, these studies used data on elections in which only a limited group of politicians used Twitter. In such a context it was easy for a candidate to stand out. It remains to be seen whether the effect holds in times of widespread usage. This study compares a low-usage with a widespread-usage election, the Dutch 2010 and 2012 national elections respectively. It utilizes unique data on all 1024 candidates of the 'large' parties. Interestingly, even in the context of widespread Twitter usage we still find a positive association between Twitter use and preference votes.

Post Shared, Vote Shared: Investigating the Link Between Facebook Performance and Electoral Success During the Hungarian General Election Campaign of 2014

“…Apparently, the two leading broadsheets alone do not fully represent candidates' media presence, but it can be considered as a proxy. Finally, Jacobs and Spierings (2016a) show that the number of posts candidates posted can also have an effect on electoral performance, thus it was also controlled for (ranging between 1 and 157, M = 37.98, SD = 25.15) 10 .…”

“…Even less attention has been devoted to the effects of social media use on electoral performance, moreover the few works we have concentrate mostly on Twitter (Spierings & Jacobs, 2014;Kruikemeier, 2014;Jacobs & Spierings, 2016a;Sobaci et al, 2016) or some aggregated measures of web 2.0 campaign tools (Gibson & McAllister, 2011Effing et al, 2016) rather than the most popular social media site, Facebook. Nonetheless, the research on electoral effects has given more mixed results for adopting social media than for web sites.…”

“…Furthermore, Hungary is one of the most partisan biased and polarized countries in Europe (see Patkós, 2017;Enyedi & Tóka, 2007) and has the smallest electoral volatility among postcommunist countries (Powell & Tucker, 2014) 1 . According to Jacobs and Spierings (2016a), effects of social media campaigning on electoral performance are expected to be the strongest in contexts where parties are weak and party identification is low, as a setting like that puts a stronger emphasis on candidates who can take advantage of personalized campaign tools like social media. This idea implies that the Hungarian context is a least likely case when it comes to effects of social media on electoral performance: getting personal votes from inter-party competition owing to social media activities in a party-centred system with highly partisan, committed voters seems to be highly unlikely.…”

“…In the new two-tier electoral system, voters have two votes: one for the single-member district (SMD) representative and one for a national party list (for more detail about the new system and the changes, seeIlonszki & Várnagy, 2016). Previous research on the effects of ICT campaign tools on electoral performance focused on either proportional systems allowing preference vote on the list (e.g Jacobs & Spierings, 2016a;Sudulich, 2010). or majoritarian systems (e.g.…”

Brute force effects of mass media presence and social media activity on electoral outcome

“…Other studies do find an effect, but a rather modest one, in that the relevant question is not so much how active candidates are on social media, but rather whether they are present on social media at all (Gibson and McAllister 2011;Kruikemeier 2014). A number of studies report that the degree of activity on social media, either directly by candidates themselves or indirectly through other users reacting to candidates, matters (Spierings and Jacobs 2014;Jacobs and Spierings 2016;DiGrazia et al 2013).…”