Candidate Backgrounds and Online Behaviours in the French 2022 Legislative Elections
Funder: Digital Society Project
Principal investigator: Dr William Daniel
Duration: May 2022-July 2023
The identities of politicians tell us a lot about how they behave in political life. And knowledge of politicians’ identities on social media can help to verify authenticity of campaigns – particularly in a world of fake accounts and disinformation – or simply help political scientists to observe the fingerprints of political behaviour in close to real time.
This project explores how the professional experiences and personal backgrounds of candidates for the 2022 National Assembly elections impacted their online campaign strategies. It generates a complete set of publicly available biographical information on each of the more than 6000 candidates that contested the legislative elections and aligns these data with campaign behaviour on the popular Twitter social media platform.
Data collection is generously funded by the Digital Society Project and the resulting dataset is part of a cross-national study of online campaigns from nine different countries around the world. Research outputs from the project relate to several topics in comparative elections, including party discipline in campaign messaging under semi-presidentialism, the shifting rhetoric of French radical and extremist parties, and the impact of local place on national campaigning.
The project is supported by postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Max-Valentin Robert and a team of postgraduate and advanced undergraduate research assistants (Laurence Rowley-Abel, Elise Frelin, Jake Dennis, Ellen Partington, Jack Templeton, James McGrath, and Kirtana Gopakumar).