Self- and other-representation in political campaigns on Twitter

In this paper, we focus on the strategies used by politicians to represent themselves and fellow politicians on Twitter during political campaigns Through a combined method of longitudinal observation of corpus data and ethnographic interviews with relevant stakeholders, we will analyze how politicians represent themselves and others on the microblogging platform Twitter. We will particularly focus on French, Spanish and UK candidates for the 2014 European elections. Our hypotheses are that: (i) given the fact that Twitter is mainly used for professional communication, the professional identity will prevail; (ii) that they activate different strategies to profile themselves as active campaigners, relying on the affordances of Twitter; (iii) that they highlight different characteristics of their political identity, such as that of a campaigner, of a professional of politics… Our analysis takes into account not only the text content of the tweets produced in the campaign period but also looks into how Twitter users reappropriate other users’s words through retweets as a means to spread self-praise without appearing as the person who utters this self-praise