oa Mapping Digital Campaign Strategies: How Political Candidates Use Social Media to Communicate Constituency Connection and Policy Stance

Social media have become a crucial tool for candidates seeking election, allowing them to build a public profile by posting curated content to appeal to potential voters. Focusing on the 2020 Irish General Election, this study investigates how candidates used Twitter to signal their campaign efforts and policy positions, and how their communicative priorities varied based on their gender, competitiveness, and political experience. To do so, we first demonstrate that a transformer-based machine-learning approach based on sentence embeddings can successfully identify social media posts that contain policy and electioneering content. Our findings show that experienced candidates are more likely to emphasise policy-related content than less experienced ones. This pattern also holds for electioneering content when we account for previous engagement with such posts. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we find no meaningful differences in the emphasis on electioneering or policy content based on candidates' gender or electoral competitiveness. Overall, our results demonstrate how candidates strategically use social media to shape their public personas during election campaigns in Ireland's candidate-centred electoral system, with multi-member constituencies and strict campaign spending limits.