Campaigning on Twitter: Towards the “Personal Style” Campaign to Activate the Political Engagement During the 2011 Spanish General Elections

Abstract

Politicians have been quick to adopt and leverage social media to engage voters. Micro-blogging on Twitter is a campaign tool that helps a political candidate directly interact with citizens through a shared conversation. It also allows the candidate to use a personal campaigning style based on a more everyday (versus an institutionalized) style of speech. The aim of this article is to analyse the extent to which the candidates for the presidency of the two leading parties in Spain deployed this personal strategy on Twitter during 2011 General-Election campaign. In order to achieve our goal, we have designed and used a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2.274 tweets put out by both candidates’ accounts: @conRubalcaba and @marianorajoy.