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This study examines the impact of gender on Facebook campaign strategies and the reception of these strategies during the 2018 Israeli municipal elections.

The authors analyzed all the messages posted on 48 politicians' official Facebook pages during the week leading up to the elections. They analyzed messages posted by 152 candidates running for the position of head of a municipality, 68 of whom were women (48 had an active Facebook account), examining the amount of engagement they had created. The authors also analyzed the candidates' use of rhetoric and use of negative campaigning and the engagement it created.

Analysis of the overall engagement of Facebook users in respect to men versus women politicians showed that men politicians' posts were significantly more engaging in terms of the number of likes and shares they generated, although the multilevel analysis found no significant differences between engagement in the posts of men and women politicians. The Aristotelian rhetoric analysis revealed no significant differences between women and men contenders; however, in line with the role incongruity theory, the engagement analysis found that male candidates' logic-based posts attracted significantly more shares. The negative campaigning analysis found that, contrary to the study’s hypothesis, female candidates posted twice as many messages, attacking their opponents as their men counterparts. However, in line with the hypothesis based on the role incongruity theory, these posts gained significantly less engagement than those of their men counterparts.

The study highlights that female candidates do not conform to their perceived gender role as soft, emotional, and gentle in their social media campaigning. However, in line with role incongruity theory, they were not rewarded for this “unwomanly” behavior because they gained significantly less engagement with their logic-based posts and their attacks against other candidates than their men counterparts. Despite the fact that prior studies have indicated the potential of social networks service (SNS) to empower women leaders, the findings of the study highlight the continued gender discrimination and the validity of role incongruity theory during social media campaigning, particularly at the municipal elections level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between interactive and personal campaigning on social media and political involvement, and the mechanisms that explain the effects. Specifically, this study examines whether personal and interactive communication on Twitter increases political involvement among citizens through social presence and perceived expertise.

An experimental design – a 2 (low vs high interactivity)×3 (depersonalized vs individualized vs privatized communication) between-subjects design – is used.

The findings show that interactive communication leads to a stronger sense of social presence and source expertise, which positively affect involvement. The effects of personal campaigning differ. Individualized communication positively affects involvement via source expertise. Interestingly, privatized communication positively affects involvement via social presence, but negatively via source expertise.

Although a growing body of work examines the political consequences of social media, there is still very little understanding why social media affect citizens. The current study fills this void by investigating how the use of social media affects political involvement among citizens.

Despite the growing use of social media by politicians, especially during election campaigns, research on the integration of these media into broader campaign communication strategies remains rare. The purpose of this paper is to ask what the consequences of the transition to social media may be, specifically considering how Senate candidates’ use of a popular social network, Twitter, is related to their messaging via broadcast media in the form of campaign advertising, in terms of content and tone.

To address this research question, a unique data set combining every tweet (10,303) and every television ad aired (576,933 ad airings) by candidate campaigns for the US Senate during the 2010 campaign is created. Using these data, tweets and ads are analyzed for their references to issues as well as their overall tone.

Findings demonstrate that social messaging often resembles broadcast advertising, but that Twitter nonetheless occupies a unique place in modern campaigns in that its tone tends to be quite different than that of advertisements.

This sheds light on a larger debate about whether online campaigning has produced a fundamental change in election practices or whether new media simply extend “campaigning as usual.”

This study uses a novel data set, encompassing the complete universe of ads and tweets distributed by candidates for Senate in 2010.

This chapter explains how SYRIZA managed to build international support up to the January 2015 election with very limited resources, and against mainstream coverage, by relying essentially on grassroots movements and social media. It also shows how, approaching to power, SYRIZA's political, but also communication strategy, became more institutionalised and relied less on grassroots campaigning. Methodologically, our research is based on the following research techniques: First, interviews with activists and members of the party as well as observations inside its social media team. Second, the study of online content and data from 2006 to 2015. Overall, this chapter shows that SYRIZA's campaign on the Internet relied mainly on alternative media activists who acquired a specific savoir faire and developed international networks during the intense antiausterity social movement that took place in Greece between 2010 and 2013. The campaign was also supported by young experts from the private sector that contributed on a voluntary basis. Nevertheless, its success was mainly due to the European political context and the opportunities it offered to the radical Left, rather than the communication strategy, which in any case suffered from a lack of means and from a somewhat chaotic (non) organisation.

Early information technology scholarship centered on the internet’s potential to be a democratizing force was often framed using an equalization/normalization lens arguing that either the internet was going to be an equalizing force bringing power to the masses, or it was going to be normalized into the existing power structure. The purpose of this paper is to argue that considered over time the equalization/normalization lens still sheds light on our understanding of how social media (SM) strategy can shape electoral success asking if SM are an equalizing force balancing the resource gap between candidates or are being normalized into the modern campaign.

SM metrics and electoral data were collected for US congressional candidates in 2012 and 2016. A series of additive and interactive models are employed to test whether the effects of SM reach on electoral success are conditional on levels of campaign spending.

The results suggest that those candidates who spend more actually get more utility for their SM campaign than those who spend less in 2012. However, by 2016, spending inversely correlates with SM campaign utility.

The findings indicate that SM appeared to be normalizing into the modern congressional campaign in 2012. However, with higher rates of penetration and greater levels of usage in 2016, the SM campaign utility was not a result of higher spending. SM may be a greater equalizing force now.

Campaigns that initially integrate digital and traditional strategies increase the effectiveness of the SM campaign because the non-digital strategy both complements and draws attention to the SM campaign. However, by 2016 the SM campaign was not driven by its relation to traditional campaign spending.

This is the first large N study to examine the interactive effects of SM reach and campaign spending on electoral success.

Despite the COVID-19 recession, the collection of zakat (almsgiving) managed by the National Board of Zakat Republic of Indonesia (BAZNAS RI) has increased, especially during Ramaḍān 1441 Hijra. Previous works show a positive relationship between digital zakat campaign and zakat collection. This paper aims to study the means of digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak. This topic is theoretically and practically important in the emerging debate of Islamic marketing, notably in Islamic social finance field.

This paper uses a qualitative research approach. A case study is engaged in the selection of BAZNAS RI for a detailed discussion of a zakat organisation. Meanwhile, a netnographic approach is used to analyse the number of 549 posts from BAZNAS RI’s social media, which are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Furthermore, a qualitative software analysis of NVivo 12 Plus is used in performing the analytical procedures.

This work explains the means of digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak with a case of BAZNAS RI. It is identified the number of 6 parent nodes and 64 child nodes from the analysis using NVivo 12 Plus. The authors’ parent nodes are “donation”, “infaq” (Islamic spending for charities), “Ramaḍān matters”, “ṣadaqah” (voluntary charity), “virtual events” and “zakat”. These nodes detail digital campaign of BAZNAS RI posted in its social media during COVID-19 period in Ramaḍān. A theoretical implication of inclusive marketing is derived from the analysis. It explains that the inclusiveness of digital contents is practically significant in campaigning zakat as a religious obligation that contributes to social and financial benefits.

This paper does not claim a positivist perspective on the relationship between digital zakat campaign and zakat collection. Instead, this paper explores in-depth the practice of digital zakat campaign, which the previous study confirms its association with a muzakki’s (Muslims who are obliged to pay zakat) decision to pay zakat.

This paper establishes the Islamic marketing theory that is derived from industrial practices. The inclusiveness of digital contents in zakat campaign is critical in activating zakat as a religious obligation that authentically shapes the social and economic processes of a Muslim community. This theory is practically important for 'amils (employees) of zakat institution who work in the marketing division, chiefly to create such contents to post in social media.

The authors’ node of zakat distribution for COVID-19 relief indicates the importance of a formalised zakat institution to actualise zakat’s role in handling socioeconomic problems. Thus, paying zakat formally in an authorised organisation may contribute to a greater social contribution and maṣlaḥah (public interest) than paying it informally without any effective measurement.

This study contributes to the novelty in the Islamic marketing debate within two folds. First, this paper is among the pioneers in studying digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak by using a netnographic approach. Therefore, a theoretical implication derived from industrial practices is contributed. Second, this paper details the steps in using NVivo 12 Plus to analyse the unstructured data sampled from the internet. The future studies may thus refer to this work to understand the application of netnography and the procedures in analysing data from social media using this software.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the use of social media by citizens has impacted the traditional conceptualization and operationalization of political participation in the society.

This study is based on Teorell et al.’s (2007) classification of political participation which is modified to suit the current context of social media. The authors classified 15,460 tweets along three parameters suggested in the framework with help of supervised text classification algorithms.

The analysis reveals that Activism is the most prominent form of political participation undertaken by people on Twitter. Other activities that were undertaken include Formal Political participation and Consumer participation. The analysis also reveals that identity of participant does not play a classifying role as expected from the theoretical framework. It was found that the social media as a platform facilitates new forms of participation which are not feasible offline.

The current work considers only the microblogging platform of Twitter as the data source. For a more comprehensive insight, analysis of other social media platforms is also required.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few analyses where such a large database covering multiple social media events has been created and analysed using supervised text classification algorithms. A large proportion of previous studies on social media have been based on case study and have limited analysis to only a particular event on social media. Although there exist a few works that have studied a vast and varied collection of social media data (Gaby and Caren, 2012; Shirazi, 2013; Rane and Salem, 2012), such efforts are few in number. This study aims to add to that stream of work where a wider and more generalized set of social media data is studied.

Facebook “likes” are often used as a proxy of users’ attention and an affirmation of what is posted on Facebook (Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). To determine what factors predict “likes,” the authors analyzed Facebook posts made by the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the top three candidates from the 2016 US primary election. Several possible factors were considered, such as the types of posts, the use of pronouns and emotions, the inclusion of slogans and hashtags, references made to opponents, as well as candidate’s mentions on national television. The results of an ordinary least-squared regression analysis showed that the use of highly charged (positive or negative) emotions and personalized posts (first-person singular pronouns) increased “likes” across all three candidates’ Facebook pages, whereas visual posts (posts containing either videos or photos) and the use of past tenses were liked more often by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ followers than by Trump’s followers. Television mentions boosted likes on Clinton and Sanders’ posts but had a negative effect on Trump’s. The study contributes to the growing literature on digitally networked participation (Theocharis, 2015) and supports the emerging notion of the new “hybrid media” system (Chadwick, 2013) for political communication. The study also raises questions as to the relevance of platforms such as Facebook to deliberative democratic processes since Facebook users are not necessarily engaging with the content in an organic way, but instead might be guided to specific content by the Facebook timeline algorithm and targeted ads.

The purpose of this study was to examine the information needs and sources of electorates in Nigeria and identify challenges electorates faced when obtaining electoral information and news.

The study adopts the description survey design and hypothesized the information needs and sources on demographic variables such as age, sex and academic qualification. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used. A quantitative approach used based on a questionnaire completed by 236 respondents and a snow ball nonprobability sampling technique was used in this study. The research adapted Wilson 1999 theory of information seeking behavior.

The findings identified five information needs that are of interest to the electorates: registration of voter, level of security, right as a voter, manifestoes and candidate profile. It was discovered that WhatsApp, Facebook and friends were sources electorates used most in obtaining election-related news and information. The research went further to streamline the number of times such election-related news and information items were sought in a day and week; it was discovered that the manual system still dominated with the print newspaper rather than Twitter, WhatsApp, friends and colleagues and Facebook. The young person used social media most as source of information compared to aged respondents in Nigeria. Thekre is increasing in women participating in political and electoral information. Formal education does not have significant impact on the usage of election information and news. Language barrier, erratic power supply, expensive network service and no knowledge of where to source for information proved to be challenges electorates faced when seeking election-related news and information.

This research will help to keep abreast of the information electorate needs and how they get such information. This research is limited to small group of electorates.

This paper includes more information about the electorates and political parties information needs.

The finding was drawn from limited respondents that were ready to participate in the research by responding to various questions in the questionnaire. Therefore, there is need for further study to consider a wider population scope on information-related research of electorate in Nigeria.

This research was carried out by Ayinde Lateef; Keriafe D.E. and Fatima Ghayen.