'Follow me, I Want to be Your President'! Analysing the Czech Presidential Election Campaign on Facebook and Twitter

In this paper we present selected results from a comprehensive analysis of the role of social networking sites Facebook and Twitter in the Czech presidential election campaign, which took place between December 2012 and January 2013. The analysis examined communication strategies of the nine candidates who competed in the first-ever direct presidential elections in the Czech Republic, focusing primarily on the intensity, form and content of messages transmitted via these networks, on a sample of over one thousand Facebook posts and six hundred “tweets”. Building up on the growing body of scholarship which stresses the role of new media as vital instruments in democratizing the access to the electoral process, this study was driven by the main research question whether there is a difference in the use of social media between candidates nominated by an established political party (“party candidates”) and by those who have been nominated by non-mainstream political movements and/or the civil society (“civic candidates”). Apart from revealing the still relatively marginal importance of Twitter as a campaign tool, as opposed to Facebook, the preliminary results show that civic candidates have generally been more active and have used more engaging communication strategies on both Facebook and Twitter than the party candidates. However, by far the most intense campaign was carried on Facebook by the team of one of the party candidates, Karel Schwarzenberg, for whom this social network became a crucial platform for addressing and mobilizing young voters. Taking a closer look at Mr Schwarzenberg’s Facebook campaign, which evolved into a proper online phenomenon regularly setting agenda for other types of communication channels, this paper also discusses the contribution of Schwarzenberg’s use of social networking sites to his spectacular success in the first round of elections, in which he surpassed several candidates previously favoured by the opinion polls.