The Impact Of Political Candidates' Social Media On Election Outcomes In The 2016 Taiwan Legislative Election

The impact of social media on election campaign communication is increasingly significant.Social media simulates the real-world social networks,which gives the users a sense of intimacy.The sense of intimacy,powerful interactive features and the virality of information,these characteristics of social media are changing the traditional pattern of election campaign communication.In addition,37%of voters in Taiwan are young adults,they are the main users of online social networks.Consequently the apply of social media offers candidates an effective way to touch and attract young voters.Nevertheless the research about political candidates' social media accounts is too hard to be found.Such studies are more common overseas.Most of these studies are focus on the content of political candidates' social network sites and the factors that impact the candidates to apply social media.Less researchers pay attention to the communication effect of candidates' social media account.This study is guided by these foreign researches,which tries to explore the linkage between the use of Twitter by candidates and effects on election outcomes in the changing era of electoral pattern of Taiwan region.The current study is conducted in the 2016 Taiwan legislative election,examines the effect of candidates'use(versus no use)of Facebook and levels of use(activity of use/number of followers/users' reaction)on votes and election victory to understand the relationship between them.Manual search are conducted to find candidates' social media account,and quantitative data of levels of use are collected by a self-exploitation crawler software.The data of election outcomes derive from Taiwan Central Election Commission's website.Results indicate that using Facebook has positive consequences for political candidates' percentage of votes.Additionally this effect is more remarkable in competitive electoral district.However candidates'Facebook use didn't increase their odds of winning,which means using social network sites have positive effect on votes but it's unrelated to victory in current Taiwan.The findings also show that number of followers of candidates' social media has strong positive influence on election outcomes(votes,victory)relatively,it's a credible predictor in some degree.There is a weak positive correlation between users' reaction and votes partly.Candidates' active use on Facebook has no relationship to election outcomes.