Nested Incentives to Campaign Online: Institutional, National, Party, and Individual Determinants of Candidate Facebook Use Across Democracies

Social media has transformed political campaigning around the globe, with significant implications for democratic representation and for research that increasingly relies on social media data to study political elites. Understanding which candidates choose to campaign online and why is therefore crucial. Yet existing research relies primarily on single-country studies or contexts with limited institutional variation. Using a novel dataset of candidates’ Facebook pages across 82 elections in 68 democracies, we examine how national contexts, electoral institutions, party characteristics, and individual attributes shape social media adoption. We find that factors at all levels matter: national internet infrastructure, electoral system incentives for personalistic campaigning, party organizational structures, and candidate demographics all significantly predict Facebook presence. These patterns hold broadly across diverse democratic contexts but do not always align with findings from single-country studies. Our results demonstrate that institutional and political contexts fundamentally shape who campaigns online, with important implications for understanding digital politics and for the validity of research relying on social media data from political elites.

2026