Tweeting the Campaign: Candidates’ use of Twitter in the June 2015 Turkish General Election

This article aims to analyze how current members of Turkish Parliament used Twitter to reach their constituents during the June 2015 general election campaign. Even though several studies have examined the role of Twitter in political campaigning of candidates in various countries, there has been no study that examined Twitter texts of Turkish representatives. The June 2015 Turkish General Elections, however, is an interesting case since it allows us to understand how social media is used in a semi-democratic country in which political parties were challenging the ten per cent threshold and debating issues ranging from a transition to a presidential system to peace talks with the Kurdish movement. In this article, we examine 147,439 tweets from 461 current deputies who were running in the June 2015 election and were active twitter users during the campaign period between April 24 and June 6. We categorized their tweets into 12 groups according to their content. We examine how candidates’ gender, party affiliation and socio-demographic characteristics the and competition at the district level affect twitter campaigns. Preliminary findings show that while candidates of the incumbent party use Twitter to emphasize their parties’ past success and their image of public appearances, candidates of opposition parties are more likely to tweet to attack government, give information about their political activities and increase their interaction with their followers.