Recent studies have found an effect between political candidates being active on the social media platform Twitter and the amount of preference votes they receive in elections. These papers all use...Show moreRecent studies have found an effect between political candidates being active on the social media platform Twitter and the amount of preference votes they receive in elections. These papers all use the same candidate-based approach, where they research whether the use of Twitter and other Twitter features have an impact on the amount of votes each candidate receives. This paper will use a new party-based approach and seeks to find out wether the content political parties post on their Twitter accounts has an effect on the amount of preference votes the party together receives. To do so 5.114 tweets, sent during the campaign for the Dutch national elections of 2021 from 34 different political parties, have been analyzed and categorized. These tweets formed the independent variabele ‘share of personalized tweets’. A tweet is considered ‘personalized’ when the content of the tweets is about one or more candidates, who are not the list puller of the party. The share of personalized tweets has been analyzed together with the share of preference votes the parties received. No significant effect was found between these two variables.Show less
Conventional wisdom holds that the quantity of media coverage primarily affects the electoral support for political parties. This study focuses on the supposed electoral effects of media coverage...Show moreConventional wisdom holds that the quantity of media coverage primarily affects the electoral support for political parties. This study focuses on the supposed electoral effects of media coverage of political parties, by examining both the quantity and quality of media coverage. A longitudinal content analysis of more than three thousand articles in three major Dutch newspapers was combined with opinion polls from the Dutch Kantar/TNS NIPO to measure the electoral support for parties. The results show no evidence to support the conventional wisdom; it is the content of the media that affects electoral support for Dutch political parties, not the quantity. Furthermore, the results show support for the issue ownership theory.Show less
