Social media have impacted political life in many ways; one of which is the development of an extended public arena (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2022), where actors are faced with many new and older challenges. This evolution lead to the development of various strands of research addressing the way actors adapted to the new hybridized context of political communication (Dutton, 2020).
In this research, I am focusing on political parties on social media platforms: how do they make use of the newer tools at their disposal to push their strategic goals? What differences can be observed between parties? To answer these questions, I have developed a theoretical framework at the crossroads between party studies, political action studies and Internet research.
In practice, I used the concept of repertoires of action (Tilly, 1993), in order to capture the repetitive and strategic uses of the platforms, thus bringing political parties closer to other types of actors. In the framework, social media posts are considered as traces of political action, which give insight into the parties’ political strategies. The project sees social media as one of the places where political action happens, and social media as a place where these can be observed.
Empirically, I have thus built an original coding scheme based on the literature on repertoires of action, on social media research and on negative campaigning. The framework was used to qualitatively code and analyze a total of 5553 social media posts of twelve Belgian parties, over a period of three months (from March to June 2023, one year prior the general elections). Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok accounts of all Belgian parties represented in Parliament, are included in this research.
In this paper, I present the intermediary results of this research, including comparative data on the parties included in the study. I also elaborate on hypotheses that can explain the differences that could be observed.
Note: this paper is a summary of my PhD research, to be finalized in 2025.