New Technologies and Political Competition: the Impact of Social Media Communication on Political Contributions

Abstract

Campaign finance plays a significant role in democracies across the world (Bekkouche et al. 2022). Incumbent politicians hold a favourable position in raising resources for electoral races. It has been the case, especially in the US, that incumbents receive more media attention and endorsements compared to newer candidates (Prior 2006). Incumbents can also leverage their proximity to the office they hold to access resources that can lead to greater name recognition among the electorate. Resource constraints can prevent lesser-known and newer candidates from buying ad space in mainstream media, which is often expensive. This can create a vicious cycle giving an advantage to incumbents: barriers to enter into politics prevent newcomers from competing, and incumbency further erects barriers protecting the incumbents themselves. Given these advantages, incumbent politicians running for re-election in the US have about a 90% chance of winning (Levitt and Wolfram 1997).

The spread of the internet has led to the rise of digital platforms and new mass communication technologies, such as online social networks. Politicians have been increasingly embracing these new technologies and use them to communicate with their constituencies and hold political campaigns. There are a number of unique characteristics of social media that separate it from other communication technologies. Social media has a low cost of use and reduces barriers to entry for mass communication. It disseminates information in a real-time or fast fashion, working over networks of individuals. It can interact with other communication channels –substituting or amplifying the message sent through them (Enikolopov et al. 2022, Garcia-Jimeno et al. 2022). These unique characteristics of social media allow it to make an impact on public communication in general, and political communication in particular.

Motivated by these observations, we studied whether political communication on online social networks such as Twitter alter political outcomes, focusing on their effects on political competition. It is not uncommon for new technologies to alter competition among firms (Athey and Gans 2010). In politics, too, new technologies can alter the dynamics and outcomes of electoral competition. The low cost of communication and the reduced barriers to reach out to the masses may allow social media to intensify political competition, compared to the periods and markets where traditional media are the only available communication technologies. Any individual is permitted, in theory, to set up a social media account and voice their opinions. This gives new politicians who lack resources an inexpensive alternative tool to compete against the incumbents and to raise funds for an electoral campaign.

Keywords: Social media, political campaigns, Twitter

JEL Classification: M,H