Authoritarian communication on social media: The relationship between democracy and leaders’ digital communicative practices

Abstract

This research considers authoritarian leaders’ communicative practices on Twitter relative to their democratic counterparts. After a quantitative analysis of 144 world leaders’ Twitter accounts, this study identifies a positive and statistically significant relationship between a country’s level of democracy and its leader’s (1) average number of tweets per day and (2) proportion of tweets that are replies to other users. Additionally, qualitative case studies of Russia, Turkey, and Estonia reveal that authoritarian leaders’ accounts are of a relatively lower quality. Namely, they follow a less diverse set of accounts, have a higher proportion of inactive followers, and tend to tweet projections of power over policy statements. Ultimately, these results reveal an authoritarian preference for uni-directional communication and a democratic preference for multi-directional communication—a stylistic difference partially attributable to stronger incentives from political power structures in general and competitive elections in particular in democratic regimes.