Chapter 9
Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2016 Austrian presidential
campaign
This paper explores the Twitter use by the candidates of the
2016 Austrian presidential campaign which lasted for almost one year and required
three ballots in sequence. The data corpus consists of all Twitter messages the
candidates posted during the campaign. Drawing on theoretical considerations
regarding politicians’ and political parties’ use of internet communication
technologies (esp. the innovation vs. the normalization hypotheses), the paper
explores the content level, the use of rhetorical actions, and selected aspects of
the interpersonal level of the data. Results show that the candidates’ communication
strategies cannot fully be explained by either of the two hypotheses and hence that
none of them can predict electoral success in this specific political campaign. It
is concluded that the two proposed hypotheses concerning the use of internet
communication technologies in the field of politics are too broad and that they have
to be modified to account for contextual aspects of specific political communication
situations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The use of ICTs in political communication
- 3.Methodological approach
- 4.The 2016 Austrian presidential campaign: Details and data
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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