Personalisation, Social Media and Electoral Success

Abstract

With the decline of traditional partisan loyalties and cleavage-based voting, short-term factors, including candidates, issues and strategic party positioning, have gained importance for electoral outcomes. This panel brings together research on such short-term factors, focusing on both parties and candidates. On the party level, it discusses position blurring and appeals to a solid existing ideology as strategies to connect with voters and win elections. On the candidate level, it examines the weight that personal characteristics, such as socio-demographic characteristics or personality, carry for voting behavior and addresses the role of social media in establishing candidate-voter interactions. It analyses populist and anti-establishment rhetoric of leaders and parties, but also (gendered) reactions from followers. Studies are based on country case studies, including Belgium, Finland, Spain and Peru, but also from cross-national comparisons.