Politicians in this country rarely tweet about private matters. With good reason: Personal is more likely to be rejected, as a study in Germany and Switzerland showed. On the other hand, those who mainly inform about politics on Twitter can capture votes even among voters from other parties.
The team around political scientist Nathalie Giger from the University of Geneva collected Twitter contributions from more than 1,700 parliamentary members in Germany and Switzerland. Here and there it was only in almost five percent of the tweets about private things, for example a personal hobby. In Germany, almost every fourth contribution revolved around politics, in Switzerland every third. The other tweets acted on other topics, for example newspaper articles Retweeted or party events were announced.
On the basis of this preliminary study, the researchers developed tweets from fictitious politicians. Via an online platform, they then recruited more than 4300 adult test subjects in Germany and Switzerland, who used Twitter in everyday life, and presented them with the tweets. Sometimes it was about private matters, sometimes about health or pension policy in general and sometimes about concrete political positions on the topics of health and pensions.
The more detailed and more specific the political content, the better the tweet arrived, regardless of the level of education of the respondents. It didn't matter whether the tweeters were a woman or a man. However, a photo and a suitable party preference contributed to a favor. On average, the respondents wanted to choose the fictional person with a probability of 57 percent if they made concrete political statements and 42 percent when they expressed themselves about private things.
Politics are more important in Switzerland, while parties are more important in Germany.
In Switzerland, the political content of tweets was even more important than the question of whether the party affiliation of the fictional person fit his own preferences. In Germany, however, not, as the research group reports. The German respondents assessed the tweeting person more about their party affiliation than the content of their tweets.
But regardless of the party, political content was better received than private statements. The situation is different in the USA, where elections are more personalized, and private tweets are rated better. Whether the decision at the ballot box is actually influenced by the choice of topic, however, is still unclear, as is the question of whether the observed effect occurs similarly in other social media.
