Loved by Politicians; Irrelevant at the Ballot Box? The Rise of Social Media and its Impact on Preference Voting in the Dutch General Elections of 2010 and 2012

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook boomed during the last years. Many pundits and politicians feel that social media are a powerful campaign tool. However, research outside the US so far has found at best a small correlation between online campaign activities and the number of votes a candidate gets. In fact, typically traditional media exposure seems to be far more important. Yet most of the available research was done when social media were still on their way of gaining prominence. As social media are becoming ever more integrated in everyday life, it may well be that the balance between the two types of media is shifting. This paper wishes to add to the literature on the impact of social media during campaigns by examining how this impact has changed over the last years. It wishes to address the question whether more widespread usage of social media implies a bigger impact of social media. We first wish to study whether the few candidates who do not use social media suffer from not using them. Additionally, we want to examine whether the impact of traditional media changes when social media are widespread. To do so we use two datasets including information on all the candidates of the most important parties in the Dutch general elections of 2010 and 2012. Even though the elections were only two years apart, social media usage by the candidates skyrocketed. In 2010 for instance, less than 35% of the candidates used Twitter, while in 2012 more than 80% of them did so. Clearly somewhere along the road candidates became convinced that Twitter and Facebook mattered to attract voters. This study will examine whether this was actually the case.