Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines.

Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting withTwitter particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n=26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n=416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, we show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication.However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract