Follow the Leader: Examining the Use of Heuristics in Political Social Media Advertising During the 2019 UK General Election

Following the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, the role that social media advertising can play in the outcomes of major elections is increasingly evident. While existing political advertising research has examined the influence of such adverts in contemporary election campaigns, there has been comparatively less research on the actual elements that make these adverts successful. The current study considers the extent to which different aspects of the political brand contribute to this success, particularly the use of the party leader as a heuristic device for voters and the strategic use of the “doppelgänger brand” phenomenon to undermine the opponent party’s campaign. By examining the adverts published on Facebook by the Conservative party and the Labour party in three key phases of the 2019 UK General Election, the importance of these two branding aspects in political social media advertising is investigated. The results show that the party that won the election, the Conservatives, made far greater use of both the leader heuristic and the doppelgänger brand phenomenon in their election adverts, and subtleties within the results reveal a novel finding for the use of the leader heuristic against the opponent party leader. The results are discussed in the context of election news coverage from 2019, and the ethical implications of treating deceptive campaigning techniques as successful are considered. The potential for the heuristics to be more powerful on alternative social media platforms with shorter-length content is also discussed as an avenue for future research to pursue.