Who is Leading the Campaign Charts? Comparing Individual Popularity on Old and New Media

Traditionally, modern election campaigns are won in the mass media. Candidates that can attract plenty of journalistic attention and appear most on television and in newspapers are mostly also those that perform well on Election Day. The central query of this paper is whether this common knowledge still holds, when social media outlets are becoming ever more popular. Are candidates who are more active on social media also the ones that lead the traditional media charts? Or do we witness rather a tradeoff, in which candidates that invest more in digital campaigning are less prominent in the mass media? We test these conflicting hypotheses using data from the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We compare the attention every individual candidate gets in the news media (TV, newspapers) to their activities and popularity on Twitter.