E-Thesis 165 views
Local Champions: The Personalisation of Liberal Democrat Social Media Campaigning in the 2024 UK General Election / ADAM BURNS
Swansea University Author: ADAM BURNS
Abstract
Although there has been a growing amount of research into the role of social media in elections across the globe over the past few decades, the field is still relatively nascent in comparison to the analysis of election campaigning in more traditional formats. This thesis builds on this growing lite...
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Swansea
2025
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Master of Research |
| Degree name: | MA by Research |
| Supervisor: | Wall, M. and Tudor, J. |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa70603 |
| Abstract: |
Although there has been a growing amount of research into the role of social media in elections across the globe over the past few decades, the field is still relatively nascent in comparison to the analysis of election campaigning in more traditional formats. This thesis builds on this growing literature, offering a sustained theoretical and empirical focus on the personalisation of social media campaign messaging. Furthermore, this thesis sheds light on this aspect of campaigning as it relates to one of the smaller parties in UK politics, the Liberal Democrats, rather than focusing primarily on the Conservative and Labour parties. It explores this activity over the course of the 2024UK General Election campaign, which the party centred around the idea of electing local champions in seats where the Conservatives were previously dominant – the so-called “Blue Wall”.In order to analyse the level and nature of personalisation, a typology of four different characteristics was created. These characteristics, alongside other factors that arose in the literature, were then used to code the Twitter/X campaigns of eight Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs). Using statistical methods to identify outliers, the thesis moves to a qualitative analysis to illustrate the core finding that personalisation in all candidates’ Twitter/X profiles was extensive. Beyond this, the analysis reveals that personalisation varied significantly in tone, with some candidates consistently preferring to overtly politicise their messaging, while others preferred a mix of overtly and non-overtly political personalisation. Despite expectations that PPCs running in more marginal constituencies might make increased use of personalisation compared with those in safer Conservative seats, the findings here suggest that candidates across different types of constituencies all used extensive personalisation in line with the party’s strategy of electing local champions, rather than primarily focusing on the party and its leadership more generally. |
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| Item Description: |
Due to Embargo and/or Third Party Copyright restrictions, this thesis is not available via this service.ORCiD identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1792-7665 |
| Keywords: |
Liberal Democrats, social media, personalisation, 2024 UK General Election, online campaigning |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |