Measuring the impact of candidates’ tweets on their electoral results

ABSTRACT As politicians are increasingly using Twitter for campaigning, a question has been raised over its effectiveness in political communication. The aim of this paper is to study the influence of Twitter on candidates’ electoral performance, in the context of the 2019 Greek Parliamentary election. We are particularly interested in candidates’ Twitter activity and visibility. We apply an innovative method of analysis of each candidate’s potential reach, taking into account the followers and the followers of retweeters for each candidate and the number of tweets they were able to see. In this way, we explore whether the visibility of a candidate on Twitter is related to his/her electoral performance. We also control for other factors, such as intra-party competition, previous political experience, candidates’ name recognition, and so on. Findings suggest that among other factors (e.g. previous parliamentary experience), Twitter visibility has a significant positive effect on candidates’ electoral performance, especially when the candidates are already recognizable by the public.