What is it about?

This study examines the relationship between Twitter presence and electoral success in Turkey’s 2014 local elections. It focuses on provincial municipality mayoral candidates from the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (RPP). The analysis asks whether candidates who had a Twitter account were more likely to win, while also considering other candidate and political factors such as age, gender, education level, and whether the previous mayor was from the same party. The findings show that Twitter presence was significantly associated with higher odds of winning, suggesting that social media visibility may have become a meaningful element of local election campaigns.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Social media is now a central part of political communication, yet its actual relationship with electoral success remains difficult to assess. Much of the debate focuses on national campaigns or on how politicians use digital platforms, while local elections receive less attention. This study contributes to that gap by offering empirical evidence from Turkish local elections and by estimating the association between Twitter presence and election results in a systematic way. Its findings suggest that digital presence may matter in local democratic competition, but also underline that electoral outcomes cannot be explained by social media alone. Political context, party strength, candidate characteristics and offline campaign dynamics remain important.

Perspectives

From my perspective, this work is valuable because it moves beyond general claims about social media and politics. Rather than simply asking whether politicians use Twitter, it examines whether Twitter use is connected to actual electoral outcomes. The Turkish local election context also makes the study useful for understanding digital campaigning beyond the most commonly studied national and Western election cases.

İbrahim Hatipoğlu
Bursa Uludag University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Net Effect of Social Media on Election Results: The Case of Twitter in 2014 Turkish Local Elections, January 2016, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-17722-9_14.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page