Abstract:
2014 marked Romania’s first new media presidential campaign, resulting in the unexpected victory of the candidate who had previously been presented by polls and media as the runner-up. Through the same electoral event, we could observe, for the first time, a presidential result favoured by the “citizen-camera witnessing” phenomenon, generated by the Facebook civic engagement of the Romanian voters from abroad. In the present paper, we aim to weigh the impact of the campaign which was carried out on Facebook on the runoff voting days, on the election results. By using the content analysis method, we are going to assess the voting dealignment generated by the first web 2.0 presidential campaign in Romania.
