Forever Campaigning on Social Media: A Longitudinal Analysis of German Parties & Politicians

Analyses of party actors’ communication on social media have largely focused on election campaigning, often restricted to a single election or platform. In this paper, we instead analyze elite political communication on Facebook and Twitter over a thirteen-year timespan which covers forty-three election periods (forty Bundesland elections, three national elections ). Our data, gathered through the Twitter academic API and Crowdtangle, include posts by the seven largest German federal and state parties, Bundestagsfraktionen, and Bundestag members, between 2010 and 2022. Our goal is to better understand how election campaigning influences communication by formal political actors outside of election periods, where our data enable us to sequence and systematically analyze elite political communication over more than a decade. We first consider the supply side, comparing politicians’ and parties’ patterns of social media communication during national and state elections to their communication at other times. We find a consistent trend that communication strategies adopted during campaign periods have a long-lasting effect, influencing how parties continue to post on social media well beyond the election. We demonstrate that parties are greater adopters of new affordances (including videos, hashtags, mentions, and quotes) during campaign periods, the use of which do not then subside once the election is concluded. This pattern is more prominent in national than state elections. Our data also allow us to consider temporal trends. We find a steady increase in the quantity of social media posting by parties between 2010 and early 2019, followed by a sharp decline—even during the 2021 national election. This decline may indicate that parties have become more targeted or sophisticated in their use of social media, more conscious of the limitations of these ‘traditional’ platforms, or more concerned about saturation or contamination of messages. For individual politicians, this recent decline is not present, and we instead observe that the volume of social media content increased throughout the period of study. Finally, we analyze variation on the demand side from politically-attentive publics, examining political actors’ success at garnering interactions from social media posts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find that parties and politicians receive more attention and interaction with their social media posts during campaign periods than at non-election times. This relationship suggests that an important (though likely small) sub-section of German voters are engaging with political social media content when they perceive it is their time to ‘do politics’. Though we find a consistent increase in engagement over time, campaign periods also provide parties with the opportunity to increase their ongoing interactions beyond the election cycle. These findings help us understand the adoption and use of social media platforms by key political actors over a sustained period. They also demonstrate the central role of campaigns in shaping the ongoing communication of political actors and their engagement with supporters. We discuss these results in application to theories of campaigning, including ‘permanent campaigning’ and the personalization of campaigning, and apply our findings temporally to consider how parties’ and politicians’ campaign experiences and election outcomes affect their communication in future campaigns.