This research project aims to find out whether Politicians in the UK use Twitter as a genuine campaign tool or simply as an extension of their own personality. As noted by Moon and Grant (2010) “Much has been made of the impact of social media on the modern political landscape (p. 579).” Social network tools such as Twitter, Facebook and blogging sites allow citizens to engage with groups, or people, like never before. Many companies ranging from the Nandos restaurant chain (@NandosUK) to the Eurostar train service (@eurostar) have a dedicated presence on social media sites such as Twitter which allow customers to leave feedback and interact with the company. This can be both a positive and negative with Nandos recently being criticized for “flirting” with one of their customers (Horton, 2015). Similarly politicians in democracies are increasingly taking advantage of this new tool to interact with their constituents and again this can be positive and negative (Perkins, 2014).
The question is, are politicians genuinely interacting and being influenced by these interactions or do they continue to practice the traditional “top- down” approach and simply use Twitter to broadcast their party message? This research project will help to answer this question and will sit within the wider research field of political engagement. It will also examine how technology is influencing the way politics is conducted in a well-established democratic state system.
This research will begin by collecting a sample of each politicians Tweets over the course of 1 year. These sample Tweets will then be analysed in terms of their content to find out what the sample group of politicians are actually tweeting about. This will involve breaking each tweet down into three broad categories.
1. Who the tweets were addressing, was it other politicians, members of the public, journalists or was it an undirected tweet?
2. What function the tweet served, was it a call for input on a specific topic, an update on the campaign or a personal tweet?
3. What was the main subject of the tweet, such as immigration or health care?
This data will then be coded and this coded data will then be analysed statistically to check for any usage patterns. This analysis will enable me to determine what each politician was mainly Tweeting about. If, for example, a statistically significant amount of the tweets are highly personal in content this will suggest that the subject is using Twitter as an extension of their own personality. If, on the other hand, the analysis shows a high proportion of party political tweets it may be inferred that this subject is utilising Twitter in a more professional, or campaign orientated, manner.
