Social media and local elections: A study of city councilors’ reelection campaigns on Twitter

Abstract

This article adopts a qualitative approach to examine the content of the tweets posted by Fortaleza’s city councilors that ran for reelection in 2012. The goal is to understand in which way factors such as sociability influence how candidates use digital media. The corpus is composed by 1.852 tweets published in the profiles of the city councilors who served in the period 2009-2012. The messages were classified in the following categories: Promotion of ideas; Negative Campaign; Mobilization and Engagement; Promoting events with the candidate; Tweets unrelated to politics or with no specific classification. Results point out that Twitter is mainly used with an electoral emphasis: Mobilization and Engagement is responsible for 45,08% of the tweets posted by the candidates. Interviews with city councilors or their staff complements our findings. As the main conclusion, we can say that Twitter use is determined not only by technological factors, but by cultural, social and political ones.

Keywords: communication, Internet, social media, Twitter, elections.