Capturing Political Capital: The relationship between candidate appearance on MPs' social media and party leader election outcomes

Party leader candidates feature prominently on social media. As potential figureheads of their party, they are often depicted by party members. While the literature extensively covers the selection processes and the democratization of these elections, actual appearance of candidates in images is still under-explored. This paper seeks to fill this gap by arguing that party leader candidate appearance is an indicator of internal political capital by providing analyses of 51560 Instagram images from Canadian, German and British MPs posted in 14 party leader elections between 2019 and 2022. We utilize a face recognition classifier that measures how often party leaders are depicted on MPs’ social media. We hypothesize that party leader appearance is driven by intra-party support rather than general public support. Our results contribute to literature on political capital in general, and on the relationship between internal and external political capital specifically.