Journal
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY
Volume 18, Issue 9, Pages 1935-1955Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/1461444815571915
Keywords
Clientelism; e-campaigning; electoral campaign; electoral forecast; negative campaign; online mobilization; positive campaign; sentiment analysis; social media; Twitter
Categories
Funding
- Italian Ministry for Research and Higher Education (Prin) [2009TPW4NL_002]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recent studies investigated the effect of e-campaigning on the electoral performance. However, little attention has been paid to the content of e-campaigning. Given that political parties broadcast minute-by-minute the campaign messages on social media, this comprehensive and unmediated information can be useful to evaluate the impact of different electoral strategies. Accordingly, this article examines the electoral campaign for the 2013 Italian general election to assess the effectiveness of positive and negative campaigning messages, measured through content analysis of information published on the official Twitter accounts of Italian parties. We evaluate their impact on the share of unsolicited voting intentions expressed on Twitter, measured through an innovative technique of sentiment analysis. Our results show that negative campaign has positive effects and its impact is stronger when the attacker is meanwhile under attack. Conversely, we only find a circumstantial effect of positive campaign related to clientelistic and distributive appeals.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available