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ABSTRACT
Politicians’ use of Twitter has been well documented over the past decade but few studies have incorporated an explicitly comparative dimension. To explore how political and social context impacts upon tweet content, we analysed the substance and tone of 400 tweets from women MPs during the United Kingdom 2015 and New Zealand 2014 general election campaigns. Across our study, web links, visuals, and references to own campaign were common, though with some notable inter-party differences. A neutral tone prevailed, with positivity more present than negativity. NZ women MPs, particularly from the centre-right, demonstrated a broadcast and highly managed approach to Twitter. UK MPs were more interactive with both citizens and other MPs, shared more personal content, and largely ignored the media agenda. These comparative findings at least partly map onto the concentrated and diffuse personalisation approaches within the equalisation versus normalisation framework of social media.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Susan Fountaine
Susan Fountaine is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing at Massey University, NZ. She has a longstanding interest in mediated gender politics and has recently published a study of Jacinda Ardern’s self-framing on Twitter during the 2014 General Election.
Karen Ross
Karen Ross is professor of Gender and Media at Newcastle University, UK. She has written extensively on the tricky relationship between gender and news and particularly, between gender, news and politics. Her recent books include Gender, Politics, News: A Game of Three Sides (2017) Wiley-Blackwell and Gender Equality and the Media: A Challenge for Europe (2016) edited with Claudia Padovani, Routledge/ECREA.
Margie Comrie
Margie Comrie is a retired associate professor from Massey University, NZ, where she taught and researched political communication and journalism for many years.