Do the Parties Share What Their Fans Want? An Analysis of Facebook Pages of Polish Political Parties During Parliamentary Election Campaign

The usage of Facebook by Polish parties and their fans increased between 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections. The average number of posts during 4 weeks before elections rose from 85 to 113 and the average number of fans’ reactions (a sum of likes, comments and shares) to one post grew even more significantly from 135 to 928. In 2015 only one party paid less attention to Facebook. As the role of Facebook in campaigns had increased, it became more important for political science to be concerned with that. Social media give parties their own platform to mobilize their supporters, to interact or to communicate with them and to present their political programme and attitudes. Facebook enables parties to address the potential electorate extensively. Moreover, parties can actually communicate with their supporters and not only inform them in one-way communication. The goal of this paper is to describe what types of content Polish political parties shared on Facebook during last two parliamentary elections campaigns and which of them got the biggest response from parties’ fans. While using content analysis and 6 modified version of Larsson’s categories of posts (campaign reports, political programme posts, critique, mobilization and interaction, acknowledgements, introduction of candidates), I have found that Polish parties used Facebook mostly to inform about campaign events, appearances of party representatives in media, party slogans etc. – nearly two thirds of posts contained campaign reports. They used their Facebook pages rather occasionally as a tool to mobilize their supporters or to gain support for political programme. The share of posts criticizing other public actors increased from about 15 % to 23 %, similarly as the share of political programme posts (ca. 11-16 %). The share of posts attempting to mobilize supporters or to interact with them dropped from ca. 10 % to 3 %. The shares of posts containing acknowledgements and introductions of candidates remained negligible and relatively stable. This means that parties do not fully exploit the opportunities, which Facebook gives them. Although campaign reports were the most frequently shared type of posts, they were not the most appreciated ones among political parties’ Facebook fans. In 2011 their median was the third lowest after the medians of political programme and introductions of candidates posts, in 2015 it was the second lowest. The most popular categories were the two, which are intended to trigger emotions – critique and acknowledgements. Political programme posts were the least favourite in 2011, but 4 years later they were third. However, the difference between political programme, mobilization and interaction, and campaign reports was not so significant in 2015. Fans of new parties engaged most frequently with political programme posts. These results confirm previous findings that parties mostly share posts which do not attract attention of their fans. However, contrary to previous findings the second most shared are the criticizing posts, which are also among the most popular types. Acknowledgements are provided by Polish parties only occasionally, even though they are popular.