No better place than social media: Georgian Party Politics and Networked Rivalry

Abstract

The academic literature has extensively discussed the increasing role of traditional media in polarisation as well as different social media strategies pursued by political parties. However, this literature tends to ignore the timeframe for parties' social media use, which could inform academic debate on the contextual conditionings of social media's effects on polarisation. Similarly, this literature often disregards the role of other political factors, which have followed a similar upwards trend over the last years. This research addresses both the time trend and the role of personalisation by examining Facebook use of the two biggest Georgian parties between 2016 and 2020 Parliamentary Elections. Relying on qualitative content analysis of 564 Facebook posts and in-depth interviews with relevant experts, the upward trend of rising polarisation and negative tone in social media communication were confirmed. As for the personalisation, the upward trend in parallel with polarisation was only partially confirmed. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)