The use of Twitter for political purposes in Slovenia

The Slovenian political arena has been marked with historically based polarization, relative inefficiency in achieving consensus and a positive contribution to socioeconomic development and stability in the country. The present article examines the reflection of these trends in political communication over the web and via Twitter. Using qualitative data analysis and content analysis we first show that Twitter is used primarily to inform and not to promote political ideas. Secondly, the sentiments in tweets differ from one political party to another; generally, the opposition is expectedly more negative. The article provides the first comprehensive analysis of political communication via Twitter in Slovenia and thereby supplements the existing political communication and political economics literature. The analysis additionally relies on several innovative IT tools used for data collection and sentiment analysis.