Unravelling gender, party and politics in 280 characters : an exploration of British Politicians’ tweets during and between election campaigns

Abstract

Twitter research at the intersection of gender, party, and politics is burgeoning, but limited by an overreliance on quantitative-only approaches, North American conditions, and election campaigns. This thesis aims to confront these deficiencies by exploring how gender and party shape British politicians’ Twitter communication, both within and outside an election campaign, by means of a mixed-methods approach. I collected all tweets from Labour and Conservative MPs active on Twitter during three periods: the campaign period for the 2017 UK General Election (8 May – 8 June 2017), and two subsequent non-election periods (8 November – 8 December 2017; 8 May – 8 June 2018). This resulted in a total of 159,115 tweets, of which 82,467 were original (that is, not re-tweets), and I focused my analyses on original tweets only. I conducted a content analysis by hand-coding a 12,000-tweet sample and performed thematic analyses on three smaller sub-samples (each comprising approximately 400 tweets). The results showed that gender and party, individually and together, shaped politicians’ tweets in terms of general tweet content, political issues, and personal topics, but that these differences varied across the chosen time periods. Conservatives in general emphasised their Party’s superiority in handling a wider range of issues than Labour politicians, including those typically associated with the left. Subtle differences arose in the manner in which politicians personalised their tweets, but women and men politicians from both parties seemed to strategically blend personal and political elements within single tweets, arguably to present themselves as ‘ordinary’ people. My research demonstrated the importance of mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, analysing gender and party both apart and jointly, and looking at Twitter communication both during and between general election contexts.