Campaigning on Twitter: continuity and change in European election campaigns. A comparative and longitudinal study

In May 2019, citizens in the European Union elected 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from over 15,000 candidates. According to the European Commission, these were “the most digital European Parliamentary elections (…) giving political actors unprecedented opportunities to get their message across” . This presentation analyzes the messages that those political actors produced on a specific social media platform, i.e. Twitter, which has become an important tool for political campaigns “because it gives candidates a platform for conversing with both journalists and constituents” (Meganck et al., 2019). Because this presentation is part of a research which adopts a longitudinal approach to the study of Twitter uses by MEPs, it allows for comparison between the 2014 and 2019 European campaigns, focusing on the 93 Belgian, British and French MEPs who ran for their re-election in 2019. The study does so by discourse and content analysis of Twitter messages posted by candidates as well as interviews. Theoretically, the research is situated at the intersection of communication studies, sociology and political sociology. In that respect, the study mobilizes the concepts of role, impression management and mobilization repertoire, in order to show how campaigning on Twitter allows MEPs to give a higher profile to various activities that take place in separate arenas. Therefore exploring the content which is produced by MEPs on Twitter makes it possible to analyze how MEPs perform their roles (Navarro, 2008) while running elections at the same time and whether this performance is country dependent. The concept of role is particularly heuristic because “it guides analysis to discovering the institutions – i.e. relatively stabilized sets of rules, norms and expectations” which shape roles (Smith, 2019). The presentation also investigates how, halfway between mediatization and older mobilization repertoires, MEPs’ use of Twitter are in line with the media and political context in which they operate. To do so, it pays attention to the discursive elements of framing and campaign messaging on the platform, as well as impression management. Ultimately, this submission aims at examining similarities and differences between the 2014 and the 2019 European campaigns, in order to assess trends in election campaigning (panel #1) in a comparative perspective.