Leader or Party? Personalization in Twitter Political Campaigns during the 2019 Indian Elections

Personality-centric politics has been a significant part of discussions on social media’s impact on electoral politics. In this study, we quantified personalization in mainstream politics by studying the extent to which parliamentary candidates referred to the key leader of their party as opposed to the party itself in their Twitter political campaigns. We found that the candidates of the incumbent right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, led by a popular and widely approved leader, Narendra Modi, were significantly more likely to run a leader-centric campaign than the candidates of the main opposition party, the INC. Smaller, state and regionalist parties showed mixed results – while candidates of some parties centralized their discourse significantly in their key leaders, in other parties’ campaigns, the party was more prominent than its leader in candidate campaigns. We also found that BJP candidates, rather than uniformly running campaigns coat tailing on their hugely popular leader, were strategic in the extent to which they ran Modi centric campaigns. For BJP candidates, their followers count, the type of constituency and Modi’s own approval rating in the region were closely associated with running Modi-centric campaigns. We found no discernible patterns in how INC candidates personalized their social media campaigns.