How political candidates use Twitter and the impact on votes by Sanne Kruikemeier
By Amirmasoud
An article by Sanne Kruikemeier from Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR that has been published on Elsevier Journal 2014. View Article
Goal
The paper aims to find out how much using a social platform; in this case, Twitter would affect a politician preferential votes. Their presence on Twitter includes interacting with their potential voters and sharing their private persona. Further, it investigates the effect of candidates’ personalized communication on the number of preferential votes they receive.
Data
They have collected all political tweets by candidates in the period leading up to the Dutch national elections on June 9, 2010, and 2 months after. Aggregated data contained 40,957 tweets, posted by 177 politicians from 8 political parties. They have analyzed the collected dataset using both computer-assisted and manual analysis.