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

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Exploring Innovation in a Digital World

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 51))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Popolo della Famiglia party is not included in our sample since it has no official Facebook FanPage.

  2. 2.

    To build the variable Party_Engagement in the case of the two coalitions (centre-right and centre-left) we sum the posts published and shared by the parties of the coalition.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ACRI, Rome, Italy

    Benedetta Gesuele

  2. University “Parthenope” of Naples, Naples, Italy

    Concetta Metallo

  3. University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    María-Dolores Guillamón & Ana-María Ríos

Authors
  1. Benedetta Gesuele
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  2. Concetta Metallo
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  3. María-Dolores Guillamón
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  4. Ana-María Ríos
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Business Administration, University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy

    Federica Ceci

  2. Department of Business and Management, Luiss Guido Carli University, Roma, Italy

    Andrea Prencipe

  3. Department of Business and Management, Luiss Guido Carli University, Roma, Italy

    Paolo Spagnoletti

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Gesuele, B., Metallo, C., Guillamón, MD., Ríos, AM. (2021). The Use of Social Media for Electoral Purposes. The Case of the Italian Election in 2018. In: Ceci, F., Prencipe, A., Spagnoletti, P. (eds) Exploring Innovation in a Digital World. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 51. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87842-9_17

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