Abstract

Much as with the Internet during the 1990s, it is often suggested that social media services such as Twitter provide novel arenas for communication about political issues, in addition to contact between citizens and politicians (e.g. Chadwick, 2008). Indeed, a great deal of scholarship has examined the supposed parliamentary-political potentials of Twitter, and most research has been fashioned as single country or election case studies. While these foci can certainly provide the level of in-depth results necessary to grasp the initial tendencies of the adoption new media platforms, the need for comparative work across political elections is apparent (e.g. Bruns and Stieglitz, 2012).