Personal things don’t go down so well


Politicians rarely tweet about private matters here in this country. With good reason: Personal things are more likely to be rejected, as a study in Germany and Switzerland showed. On the other hand, those who primarily provide information on political issues on Twitter can use it to capture the voices of voters from other parties.

The team led by political scientist Nathalie Giger from the University of Geneva collected Twitter posts from more than 1,700 members of parliament in Germany and Switzerland. Here and there, just under 5 percent of the tweets were about private matters, for example a personal hobby. In Germany, almost every fourth post was about politics, in Switzerland every third. The remaining tweets dealt with other topics, for example newspaper articles were retweeted or party events announced.

Based on this preliminary study, the researchers developed tweets from fictitious politicians. Using an online platform, they then recruited more than 4,300 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 specific political positions on the topics of health and pensions.

The more detailed and specific the political content, the better the tweet was received, regardless of the respondents’ level of education. It also didn’t matter whether the tweeter was a woman or a man. A photo and a matching party preference, on the other hand, added to the favor. On average, respondents wanted to choose the fictitious person with a probability of 57 percent if they made concrete political statements and 42 percent if they made statements about private things.



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