Abstract
British parties campaign on Facebook through two kinds of page: the party's own page and the page of its leader. Do the two do the same job? I compare 1,208 hand-coded posts from the Labour and Conservative party pages and the pages of Ed Miliband, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May in the month before the 2015 and 2017 general elections, giving four pairs of pages.The division of labour was consistent. Party pages were the campaign machine: almost all their posts carried political information (97% against 78% on leader pages), and they were far more likely to ask people to share (59% against 8%) and to vote (55% against 35%) and to use the party slogan. Leader pages were the personal voice: more first-person language (53% against 32%), personal messages (14% against 4%) and plain text posts (17% against 3%). Each of these differences points the same way in all four pairs. Attack was not consistently given to either kind of page: in three pairs the party page criticised the opposing leader more often, but in 2017 Corbyn's page did so more than Labour's own (26% against 11%).The record includes counts of posts carrying each code, by page. The posts themselves are not shared, in line with the terms under which they were collected.Provenance and AI use. The data were collected with Netvizz for my doctoral research, before Netvizz closed in 2019. This paper builds on my doctoral thesis (Hotham 2021, University of Bath). An earlier version was presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Nottingham in 2019 ("Is it party leader pages or party pages that matter most on UK Facebook?"), and the analysis develops Chapter 6 of the thesis. The analysis and writing were completed in 2026. The analysis code and drafts of the text were prepared with the assistance of an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic), which was also used to review drafts. I checked the analysis and the text and take responsibility for both. Version 2 added this statement to the paper, and version 3 changes only the date on the title page; the findings are unchanged.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Follow the Leader? How British Parties Divided the Work between Leader Pages and Party Pages on Facebook at the 2015 and 2017 General Elections. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23280204