Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections

TL;DR

This study analyzes UK political Twitter activity during the 2015 and 2017 elections, providing empirical evidence that social media campaigning can influence voting outcomes, with effects comparable to campaign spending.

Contribution

It offers the first panel dataset analysis of social media's impact on elections, addressing prior cross-sectional limitations and demonstrating Twitter's role in vote-winning.

Findings

Twitter campaigning helps win votes

Effects are mediated through other communication channels

Impact size is comparable to campaign spending

Abstract

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a variety of different model specifications including a first difference regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion.