Abstract
The study aimed to establish the main issues/themes addressed by the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), Democratic Alliance (DA), and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in their campaign speeches as well as the issues/themes raised by the respective leaders and their parties on social media (Facebook and Twitter) during the 2014 election period, 7 February to 10 May 2014. A total of 53 speeches by Zuma, Zille and Malema were collected, while 906 Facebook posts uploaded by the ANC, DA (and Zille) as well as the EFF were retrieved. Lastly, a total of 6,945 tweets released by the DA and the EFF as well as their respective party leaders (Zille and Malema) and the ANC were collected (Zuma did not tweet in the above-mentioned period). The party manifestos of the ANC, DA and EFF respectively, served as the analytical framework for analysing the speeches and social media contents of the three parties.
In establishing the issues that the ANC chose to prioritise during its election campaign, Zuma’s 21 speeches, 127 messages uploaded on the party’s Facebook page and 343 of its tweets, were analysed. The DA’s campaign messages that were analysed, consisted of 23 speeches made by Helen Zille, 129 DA Facebook messages, 1,690 tweets by the DA and 880 by Zille. On the other hand, Malema only delivered nine speeches, while the EFF posted 182 Facebook messages and the party and Malema uploaded 1,295 and 126 tweets, respectively. It should be noted, that across all the social media accounts of all three parties, the majority of these messages contained general announcements such as encouraging people to register, to vote and to vote for the respective party and also announcing campaign events. Given that a large part of the population have access to social media and also the fact that manifestos are not likely to be widely read as a result of their rather tedious nature, social media can be more efficiently used for conveying party policies in a more concise manner.
Although this was not a comparative study, it is evident that the ANC and DA used traditional methods of campaigning (speeches in this study) and modern forms of political communication (social media) more extensively than the EFF. Nevertheless, all three parties were consistent in terms of the issues they prioritised in their various methods of communication, which suggests a coordinated campaign strategy, especially in terms of the ANC and DA. The ANC strongly focused on its past...
M.A. (Politics)