%0 Journal Article
%T Authoritarian communication on social media: The relationship between democracy and leaders¡¯ digital communicative practices
%A Andrew Bulovsky
%J International Communication Gazette
%@ 1748-0493
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1748048518767798
%X 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¡ªa stylistic difference partially attributable to stronger incentives from political power structures in general and competitive elections in particular in democratic regimes
%K Authoritarianism
%K democracy
%K political communication
%K social media
%K Twitter
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1748048518767798