Not every day is Election Day : a comparative analysis of eighteen election campaigns on Facebook

This article shows how the presence of an election campaign affects the way in which the main political leaders of 18 countries communicate on Facebook. Findings indicate the presence of robust qualitative and quantitative differences between campaign and peace-time periods. More specifically, this comparative analysis points out that election campaigns have a positive effect on the frequency with which political leaders update their Facebook pages and on the personalization of political communication, while a negative effect is associated with the publication of posts about policy issues and with a negative rhetorical strategy. No effect has been discovered concerning the privatization of political communication on Facebook. Finally, independent t-test analyses and bivariate correlations denote a generalized process of homogenization, whereby there is no single main impulse which governs the different communicative choices taken by political leaders on Facebook as an Election Day approaches.