The proposed paper focuses on how the candidates have used these new communication medias and particularly the social media tools during the last 2010 electoral campaign in Belgium. Some of candidates and elected officials (60) do not hesitate to create accounts/personal pages on social medias (Facebook, Twitter, …) while others have continued to campaign with old tools (websites, public markets, leaflets, ...). We can hypothesize that those “new medias” should lead to a more personalized campaign. So, we can expect that candidates are running a campaign for themselves. But, in the same survey, we can find that 60 of the candidates are mainly campaigning for the party as first objective during the campaign. So, in this proposal, we want to understand who (age, gender, region, ... ?) are the candidates using the social medias and how the social medias are interacting with this objective during the campaign (party verses themselves) ?
The data used come from the 2010 Belgian Candidate Survey (based on the questionnaire of Comparative Candidate Project). Regional comparisons (Flemish vs Francophone) will be also part of the analysis.
