Political communication strategies in European Parliament and youth vote.
What is it about?
The use of social media, especially Twitter, has become part of the political communication strategies of parties and candidates. Reaching young voters and reducing their historical abstention has become a challenge, even more for candidates standing for the European Parliament, elections that have traditionally witnessed a much smaller turnout. To find out if the main six candidates in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign (10-26 May), called to occupy the presidency of the European Commission, connected with younger voters, this research applies the multiple-case study based on the analysis of their Twitter posts.
Why is it important?
This research helps highlight a little studied, yet significant, topic in the field of political communication in the European Union: how candidates in European Parliament elections address the younger public on social media. Focusing on Twitter, the results reveal that the candidates in the 2019 election: (1) did not use the network’s full potential to address younger voters, as they did not discuss issues of interest to them; (2) the topics they most mentioned were mainly their campaign events; (3) they did not use Twitter’s potential for connecting with voters, as (3a) did not take the opportunity to tweet in different languages or communicate mostly in English (thereby limiting their reach, as it is the official European Union language and widely spoken by young people); (3b) did not apply a humanization strategy to reach younger voters (few candidates tweeted about personal matters); and (3c) did not use shared hashtags to establish online dialogues. However, they did (3d) make use of the greater impact of accompanying tweets with audiovisual content. These results have both theoretical and practical implications, as they contribute to the study of political communication online and to defining future electoral communication strategies on Twitter as a way to contribute to improving the quality of democracies.