Issue communication and party competition across communication channels

My thesis explores how parties and candidates compete on issues across communication platforms. Diverging channel characteristics raise questions about whether candidates adapt their issue communication accordingly or whether parties maintain discipline in their candidates’ social media messaging. My study employs different methods for categorising texts and similarity analysis to determine the issue overlap between party manifestos and candidate tweets of several recent Western European elections. The first chapter establishes the extent to which issues overlap in party manifestos and candidate tweets to determine the similarity. Having established the fairly extensive overlap, the second paper seeks to understand who the candidates who diverge are and why they do it, examining factors identified in previous literature including incumbency, seniority, age, and gender through a multi-level modelling strategy. Knowing that some candidates diverge more from their parties than others, the last chapter explores the issue framing employed by these "renegades" to understand how they diverge from their parties on salient issues.