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Bridging Streets and Screens: Party Action Repertoires and Social Media Use in Belgian Politics

par Claessens, Pauline
Président du jury Van Haute, Emilie
Promoteur Brack, Nathalie
Publication Non publié, 2026-08-25

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

Social media have impacted political life in many ways; one of which is the development of an extended public arena (Jungherr and Schroeder 2022), where actors are faced with many challenges. This evolution led to the development of various strands of research addressing theway actors adapted to the new hybridized context of political communication (Dutton 2020). In this research, I am focusing on political parties and social media platforms: how do they make use of the newer tools at their disposal to push their strategic goals? What differences can be observed between parties? To answer these questions, I have developed a theoretical framework at the crossroads between party studies, political action studies and Internet research. In practice, I used the concept of repertoires of action (Tilly 1993), to capture the repetitive and strategic uses of platforms. In the framework, social media posts are considered as traces of political action, which give insight into the parties’ political strategies. The project sees social media as one of the places where political action happens, where they can be observed. Empirically, I have built an original coding scheme based on the literature on repertoires of action, social media research and negative campaigning. The framework was used to qualitatively code and analyse a total of 5531 social media posts of twelve Belgian parties, over a period of three months (from March to June 2023, one year prior the general elections). Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok accounts of all Belgian parties represented in Parliament, are included in this research.Three ideal-typic uses of social media to promote partisan have been identified, based on an original typology of repertoires. I show how ideological and competitive positioning both have an impact on the type of actions parties perform online. The research also includes a deeper dive in specific topics and events, in a qualitative fashion.