Using social media to communicate competence, ordinariness, and authenticity in political leadership

Abstract

Understanding how political leaders use social media during election campaigns is a growing area of research, with existing literature focussing on single-election examinations of platform usage (Smith 2021). This paper instead conducts a longitudinal examination of political leadership on Twitter/X at the 2015, 2017, and 2019 UK general elections, focussing on the different ways in which leaders portray their competence, ordinariness, and authenticity. In analysing 2,694 posts during the short campaign period by the various leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party, enables the examination of both changing social media behaviours and individual constructions of leadership under the same party label.