Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 25th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. e-Government Author(s) Nicolae Urs Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca Romania Title Is Communication Through Social Media Influenced By Election Campaigns? Case Study: Romanian Cities, National Elections File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Nicolae Urs Abstract There is a general consensus among researchers that governments, both central and local are more and more interested in using social media tools to connect with citizens. As a consequence, they are investing more and more resources into it and so are becoming more and more adept at this type of communication. Our interest in this research is to see if, in election time, their messages differ somehow from the usual pattern. This is interesting for us because, in Romania’s case, the local elected representatives are in most cases the best electoral agents of the political parties. The research is further aided by the fact that local elections happen before general elections (for example, this year the local election were in spring, the general election in autumn). A difference in the way social media tools are used in an election campaign time could show us how much local government’s official accounts are used as a part of the political parties’ election toolbox. To achieve this we will analyze the official Facebook accounts of 6 cities in Romania, whose mayors are members of the most important Romanian political parties, both in election campaign period, as well as before and after.
