Politicians’ Communication Networks in the Dutch Election Campaign of 2012

This study will focus on how politicians use social media to communicate amongst each other during the campaign by using Twitter. Twitter as a social medium platform allows politicians to connect by setting up follower and following relations resulting in a social network that can be perceived as the infrastructure for the flow of information between politicians. This flow of information takes the form of the communication of messages (tweets). To understand the communication structure in these networks we will test two opposing ideas as to why candidates would communicate with candidates from certain other parties. The first idea - issue related - is that the degree of communication between parties is higher for those parties that are more dissimilar ideologically. By doing so the candidates have an opportunity to present their views in a conflict setting by presenting their views opposing the views of other parties. The second idea is derived from campaign strategy: the competition for the votes is not between very dissimilar parties, because the likelihood of voters switching between two very dissimilar parties is very low. There for the electoral gain is to be found through competing with similar parties. Research questions: To what extent do politicians communicate amongst each other? To what extent is the degree of communication is correlated to the distances of parties in the ideological space? To test these conflicting expectations we will also refine the analysis for nine political issues discussed by the candidates. Method: network analysis Data: tweets of all politicians using Twitter during the campaign for four weeks prior to Election Day (September 12, 2012).