الملخص الإنجليزي
This study sought to achieve a major goal which is revealing the political
marketing strategies followed by candidates - through Twitter - in the
elections to the Kuwaiti National Assembly in 2020. After Covid-19
pandemic had spread and affected the Kuwaiti community, the Kuwaiti
Council of Ministers issued a decision stipulating the prohibition of
gatherings in all its forms, including groupings related to electoral
campaigns. Such decision prompted candidates to use social media to
market their electoral campaigns instead of communicating directly with
voters. The study aimed to analyze the elements of political marketing: the
political institution, the political product, the means of political
communication, and the public. Such goal contains sub-goals which are:
analyzing and interpreting how candidates plan their communication
strategies on Twitter during their electoral campaigns, identifying the
characteristics of candidates' programs in their Twitter accounts during
their electoral campaigns, as well as identifying the priorities that
candidates marketed in their accounts during their electoral campaigns,
detecting and analyzing the characteristics of communication messages in
candidates' Twitter accounts during their electoral campaigns, and
analyzing the level of public interaction with the candidates'
communication messages during their electoral campaigns. This study falls
within the framework of descriptive exploratory studies, and it relied on the
media survey approach and the two research tools: the content analysis
form to calculate 16 candidates from the 2020 elections to the National
Assembly, and the standardized interviews with 6 candidates.
The study concluded with several results, the most important of which
are: that the year 2020 witnessed an unexpected turnout of candidates; with
the aim of marketing and promoting electoral campaigns, and Twitter
played an important role in the 2020 Elections to the National Assembly.
The candidates made use of Twitter by getting ready for electoral
campaigns and starting tweeting about the elections before the date of
opening the candidacy registration, even though the percentage of tweets
was varying and few; but it made a difference in the Kuwaiti electoral
process. The candidates also adopted four communication strategies,
foremost of which is the media strategy based on one-way communication
by 36.05%, then the joint strategies that combine the media and persuasion
strategy by 31.77%, followed by the persuasion strategy by 4.43%, the
dialogue strategy by 0.49%, and finally the consensus- building strategy by
a small percentage of 0.25%. The study also found that the tweets of the
study sample received a high percentage of interaction from the public, as
the retweet rate reached 75.66% of the total interaction, followed by
favoriting or liking by 19.36%, and finally the category of replies and
comments by 4.99%.
The results of the standardized interviews indicated that the
candidates' approach to use Twitter during the electoral campaigns was
well-considered and standardized, as they made advance plans to use this
network except for one candidate, and that using Twitter served their
intended purpose except for one candidate
