Irish Parties Online in the 2011 General Election

Reykjavík.
The next presenter at ECPR 2011 is Matthew Wall, whose interest is on the 2011 Irish general election – with a specific focus on Sinn Féin. The 2011 elections reshaped the Irish party system (in response to the global financial crisis), and meant a further step for SF away from its close associations with the nationalist ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and towards becoming a mainstream party in the Republic of Ireland.

SF has a mixed history in terms of online initiatives: they were the first Irish party to launch a Website, and had presences in Bebo and MySpace, but also still struggle to manage their message in conventional media as they’re regularly confronted with their terrorist links. Their candidates traditionally have poor individual Web presence (5% of candidates as opposed to 32% of other parties’ candidates had their own sites), and remain somewhat elusive to the media in general.

In 2011, SF had a relatively staid Website, but the ‘Join Up’ campaign through the site was quite successful (with 50-100 new members joining by month); they were also active on Twitter and YouTube. However, the Labour party launched its Twitter account much earlier (in 2007, as opposed to 2009 for SF and the other parties), while SF seemed to have a preference for Facebook, where they have a disproportionally large following.

SF’s YouTube presence was also important – a video of a speech by one of its MPs went viral, gaining some 30,000 views. In response, SF directed all of its advertising spend in the 2011 election to online advertising; 85% of its candidates had Facebook and 44% had Twitter profiles. Matt and his team examined the Twitter presence in more detail, examining how old the profiles were, how many tweets were sent, how many followers candidates had, and what their Klout score was.

Most candidates were recent adopters (joining around January 2011) – contrasting with the Greens, for example, whose candidates had been on Twitter the longest, on average. Twitter activity (for all parties) was widely distributed, ranging from a handful to a large number of tweets. The Greens also had the largest number of followers, by far, but SF ranked second behind them in terms of how widely their messages were passed along and retweeted.

SF had fewer candidates on Twitter than other parties, then, but those who were there seemed to get it (and the party performed even better on Facebook) – however, even though the benefits of online presence were clearly understood, they didn’t do as well as they could have.