Abstract
The chapter examines the Twitter campaigning of parliamentary political parties and their influential members during the 2011 preterm national election campaign. We examine the rationales behind the adoption and appropriation of Twitter in the Slovenian political arena. Content analysis of 4,610 Tweets and conducted interviews with campaign managers of seven lists of candidates allowed us to revisit three perennial hypotheses about political communication on the web: the copycat, revolution and normalisation hypotheses. While the examined parties’ move into the Twittersphere confirmed the copycat hypothesis, their utilisation of the tool revealed mixed evidence for the revolution vs. normalisation dilemma. Party campaigning did show signs of ‘politics as usual’, with political powerhouses taking the lead on Twitter as well. However, it also demonstrated a substantial degree of genuine direct political interaction between politicians and citizens.
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Notes
- 1.
E.g. ‘@strankaSDS: Government coalition is occupied with itself and stalls pre-term elections http://t.co/tXxJ17nV 6:50 p.m. Sep 17th, 2011’.
- 2.
E.g. ‘@strankaSDS: @PGantar During Pahor’s government you increased the public debt from 8.2 to 16.4 billion euros (source SURS). You know SURS [Statistical office of Slovenia], right? 10:22 a.m. Sep 22nd, 2011’.
- 3.
With deputies in the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia or the European Parliament.
- 4.
The nature of communication is analysed on the basis of a framework for the analysis of the content of microblogs. See the following section.
- 5.
A sample of 100 randomly-selected tweets was coded by two independent coders before the coding process (inter-coder reliability) as well as after the coding process (intra-coder reliability). The inter-coder reliability analysis was performed using Krippendorf's Alpha to determine consistency among and within coders. The inter-coder reliability for two coders for all utilized variables was found to be at least Krippendorf”s Alpha (nominal) = 0.83, while the intra-coder reliability for all utilized variables did not drop below Krippendorf”s Alpha (nominal) = 0.93.
- 6.
We selected up to one visible party member with at least one thousand followers per political party.
- 7.
All tweets written in Slovenian language are directly translated.
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Deželan, T., Vobič, I., Maksuti, A. (2014). Twitter Campaigning in the 2011 National Election in Slovenia. In: Pătruţ, B., Pătruţ, M. (eds) Social Media in Politics. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04666-2_9
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