Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections

Politicians all over the world are investing considerable time and effort in both creating and curating social media profiles, with many sending hundreds or even thousands of messages over social platforms during election time, often with the help of trained and professional staff. However, there have been only a handful of papers that have sought to test whether active campaigning on social media actually makes a positive difference to vote share outcomes. All of these studies are based on cross-sectional datasets from one election period that make separating true relationships from unobserved variables problematic. Hence empirical evidence on the actual impact of social media campaigning is thin. We analyse data from the first panel study of candidate social media use during elections, based on Twitter use in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find support for the idea that Twitter based campaigning is associated with voting outcomes, a finding which is robust to a variety of different model specifications and a strong empirical test using a two wave panel design. Furthermore, we show that while the impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, it is nevertheless comparable with that of increased campaign spending, and could conceivably make a difference in a close electoral race. We use our results to advance theory around the impact of social media use on voter behaviour. 1 Many people provided invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. We would like to thank in particular Rebecca Eynon, Leticia Bode, and participants at the Reuters-OII Seminar of June 2017. The Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission supported Andrew Bulovsky’s participation in the project. We are also grateful for support from Meedan (http://meedan.com/) in facilitating collection of the 2017 data