IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/lnichp/978-3-030-87842-9_17.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Use of Social Media for Electoral Purposes. The Case of the Italian Election in 2018

In: Exploring Innovation in a Digital World

Author

Listed:
  • Benedetta Gesuele

    (ACRI)

  • Concetta Metallo

    (University “Parthenope” of Naples)

  • María-Dolores Guillamón

    (University of Murcia)

  • Ana-María Ríos

    (University of Murcia)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the role of social media in political communication and their possible influence on electoral results. For this purpose, we analyze the parties’ Facebook Fan pages in the last general election in Italy (March 2018) over two periods: from 1st February to 4th March 2018 (Election Day); and, from 5th March to 31st March 2018. Our results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between the effort of the parties to inform citizens thorough the use of Facebook before the elections and their electoral outcomes in the congress. Specifically, we find that the higher the parties’ engagement, the better their electoral results. Nevertheless, we do not find any evidence that a higher engagement of citizens on a party’s Facebook Fan page before the election leads to this party having better electoral results. Finally, we explore if the parties change their political discourse before and after the election on their Facebook Fan pages, and find that there are, indeed, differences.

Suggested Citation

  • Benedetta Gesuele & Concetta Metallo & María-Dolores Guillamón & Ana-María Ríos, 2021. "The Use of Social Media for Electoral Purposes. The Case of the Italian Election in 2018," Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organization, in: Federica Ceci & Andrea Prencipe & Paolo Spagnoletti (ed.), Exploring Innovation in a Digital World, pages 249-263, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-030-87842-9_17
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-87842-9_17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-030-87842-9_17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.