Gender, politics and the tweeted campaign: tweeting about issues during the UK’s 2017 General Election campaign

Studies of political news and gender suggest that women and men are interested in different political issues, so we explore the extent to which politicians demonstrate such issue preferences in their tweet content. We captured 82,890 tweets sent by Labour and Conservative politicians during the 2017 British General Election campaign, analysed 38,255 original tweets and using an automated content analysis, identified 7,651 tweets which mentioned an issue with a policy focus, eg education, health, transport and so on. We also explored a sub-sample of tweets (210) in some depth in order to better understand content, tone and orientation of tweet content. We suggest that gender and party, both together and separately, and in different ways, exert some influence on which issues politicians choose to tweet about. However, we also suggest that the particular interests of individual politicians play a role in determining the focus of their issue-based tweets.