Political Leadership Styles: The Main Political Leaders of 31 Countries on Facebook

Although monthly active users are more than 1.5 billion on Facebook, the literature still lacks a broad analysis on how political leaders are communicating on this specific social media, in particular in comparative perspective. The aim of this paper is to overcome this scientific gap by conducting a comparative analysis on the Facebook pages of the main political leaders of 31 countries. More in detail, the Facebook pages of 127 leaders have been analyzed from September 2012 to October 2014. A Facebook application called “Netvizz” has been used to download the posts published by these 127 leaders in the time period under consideration. Thanks to Netvizz, 99.234 posts have been found out. Among these 99.234 posts, a sample of 25.151 posts have been manually coded and analyzed. The paper researches on: i) whether all the main leaders of contemporary liberal democracies use Facebook to communicate with citizens; ii) whether leaders are more followed than parties; iii) how often leaders update their Facebook pages; iv) how much leaders personalize their political communication, publish posts about policy issues and with the aim of attacking political opponents; v) how much they share Facebook posts with an explicit and direct reference to their private life and the celebrity sphere. Beyond descriptive aims, quantitative and qualitative analyses have been conducted with the aim of highlighting the main factors predicting politicians’ use of Facebook. The main findings indicate that: i) Facebook fosters the personalization of political communication; ii) leaders promote a political communication pivoted around the publication of policy proposals; iii) the presence of a presidential system, and the executive or oppositional role played by the leaders, represent the most significant factors in order to explain different leaders’ way of communicating with citizens on Facebook; iv) gender does not play a relevant role.