Social media campaigning at the 2020 New Zealand general election

Abstract

High use of social media by voters and by political parties, which is quantified by this article for the 2020 New Zealand general election, raises the question of how informative parties’ social media posts are compared to other policy statements. Text scraped from Facebook posts and from the two main parties’ video advertisements was coded using the Manifesto Project’s methodology. The positions of parties on the two main dimensions of political competition were broadly similar using social media text and text from manifestos, webpages and opening campaign speeches. However, parties were sometimes more focussed on their core topics on social media than in longer documents, which may make it easier for voters to understand their key priorities. The results also show that coding social media data using the Manifesto Project’s methods produces better data about parties’ policies than the broader Campaign for Strasbourg (CamforS) categories previously used for New Zealand and many other countries.