Do the Parties Share What Their Fans Want? An Analysis of Facebook Pages of Polish Political Parties During Parliamentary Election Campaign
Abstract
The usage of Facebook by Polish parties and their fans increased between 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections. The average number of posts during 4 weeks before elections rose from 85 to 113 and the average number of fans' reactions (a sum of likes, comments and shares) to one post grew even more significantly from 135 to 928.
In 2015 only one party paid less attention to Facebook. As the role of Facebook in campaigns had increased, it became more important for political science to be concerned with that.
Social media give parties their own platform to mobilize their supporters, to interact or to communicate with them and to present their political programme and attitudes. Facebook enables parties to address the potential electorate extensively.
Moreover, parties can actually communicate with their supporters and not only inform them in one-way communication. The goal of this paper is to describe what types of content Polish political parties shared on Facebook during last two parliamentary elections campaigns and which of them got the biggest response from parties' fans.
While using content analysis and 6 modified version of Larsson's categories of posts (campaign reports, political programme posts, critique, mobilization and interaction, acknowledgements, introduction of candidates), I have found that Polish parties used Facebook mostly to inform about campaign events, appearances of party representatives in media, party slogans etc. - nearly two thirds of posts contained campaign reports. They used their Facebook pages rather occasionally as a tool to mobilize their supporters or to gain support for political programme.
The share of posts criticizing other public actors increased from about 15 % to 23 %, similarly as the share of political programme posts (ca. 11-16 %). The share of posts attempting to mobilize supporters or to interact with them dropped from ca. 10 % to 3 %.