Vying for votes: a comparison of off- and online election campaign strategies

Elections are a fundamental part of the political process. Today, election campaigns not only focus on traditional strategies to attract voters but also use social media as a tool. I analyse and compare campaign strategies from three different angles in this thesis. The first paper examines how Get Out The Vote (GOTV) leaflets can influence turnout for the neighbours of households which receive flyers. Focusing on a GOTV campaign during a UK election, I show that spillover effects for party supporters are lower when the share of rival party supporters is high. At the same time, turnout spills over to rival party supporters in mixed partisan neighbourhoods. Turning to online election campaigns, the second paper analyses social media usage from the lens of parties in Switzerland. Using data from party-affiliated Twitter accounts during the 2015 Federal Election, I study how cohesively parties organise their members and how coherent parties’ programmatic messaging is. The results show that smaller-sized and newer parties have higher organisational cohesion and that most parties exhibit low levels of programmatic coherence. Switching the lens to candidates, I analyse social media use by candidates during the 2019 European Parliament elections. The third paper introduces a comprehensive dataset of parties, candidates, and their Facebook and Twitter accounts and describes how the data was collated. To show the range of potential applications of the dataset, I outline an analysis of social media adoption and discuss other research areas in which this data could be useful. The final paper studies whether electoral systems guide if and how individual candidates use social media. The results show that when the electoral system favours person- over party-based campaigning, candidates do not use Twitter more but adapt their communication style to engage voters instead of broadcasting information.