Hailed by many as a game-changer in political communication, Twitter has made its way into election campaigns all around the world. The European Parliamentary elections, taking place simultaneously in 28 countries, give us a unique comparative vision of the way the tool is used by candidates in different national contexts. This volume is the fruit of a research project bringing together scholars from 6 countries, specialised in communication science, media studies, linguistics and computer science. It seeks to characterise the way Twitter was used during the 2014 European election campaign, providing insights into communication styles and strategies observed in different languages and outlining methodological solutions for collecting and analysing political tweets in an electoral context.

Alex Frame, Arnaud Mercier, Gilles Brachotte & Caja Timm: "General Introduction" 7 // Éric Leclercq, Marinette Savonnet, Tierry Grison, Sergey Kirgizov & Ian Basaille: "SNFreezer: a Platform for Harvesting and Storing Tweets in a Big Data Context" 19 // Dario Compagno: "Families of Practices. A Bottom-up Approach to Differentiate How French Candidates Made Use of Twitter during the 2014 European Campaign" 33 // Tatiana Kondrashova & Alex Frame: "Exploring the Dialogical Dimension of Political Tweets: A Qualitative Analysis of ‘Twitter Styles’ of UK Candidates during the 2014 EU Parliamentary Elections" 53 // Nanta Novello Paglianti: "Twitter et la politique : stratégies de communication de candidats et espace public" 75 // Arnaud Mercier: "Les figures de l’ennemi dans les tweets- polémiques des forces protestataires françaises durant la campagne de mai 2014" 101 // Marina Villa: "Les discours sur l’Europe dans la tweet- campagne en Italie" 121 // Elena Albu: "Love Britain? Vote UKIP! The Pragmatics of Electoral Tweets during the European Elections 2014" 145 // Frédéric Junger & Gilles Brachotte: "Élections européennes de mai 2014 : étude des données du corpus français de TEE 2014 afin d’appréhender les usages des candidats et la circulation de l’information sur Twitter"173 // Caja Timm, Jessica Einspänner-Pfock & Mario Anastasiadis: "Twitter during the 2014 European Elections in Germany – Analyzing Politicians’ Campaigning Strategies" 197 // Vittorio Cobianchi, Maria Francesca Murru & Marina Villa: "Twitter and Double Screen in Italy during the 2014 European Elections" 223 // Fernando Bonete Vizcaino, Elena Cebrián Guinovart & Tamara Vázquez Barrio: "Pablo Iglesias’ Tweeting Style: Unsuccessfully Aspiring to Renew Spanish Political Discourse" 251 //