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One of political marketing's theoretical tenets is the translation of commercial advertising techniques to politics. This paper focuses on celebrity endorsement as a commercial technique which is translated into political campaigning. Celebrity endorsement relates directly to celebrity politics, that is, the result of celebrity culture getting in touch with politics, as a way of revitalizing the offering of parties and candidates. In this context, our study analyzes the representation and use of celebrity politicians in Spain by the conservative Popular Party (PP) during the April 2019 national election. In order to shed light on the way celebrities were used in the PP's social media campaign, we content-analyze 1,117 Twitter messages taken from the party's profile, as well as conservative presidential candidate Pablo Casado's profile. Analytical variables include frequency of mentions, the strategic axis (rational/emotional) with which celebrities were depicted, the features which were highlighted, and the type of endorsement performed by the celebrities. Message topics and functions were also added to the analysis. Results indicate a weak and flawed strategic use of celebrities, who were scarcely mentioned, and depicted in a non-innovative, traditional fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent and spread of social networking sites have been the object of study of most of the research performed on political communication over the past 25 years. However, more recent inquiries have indicated that the political establishment still has not fully exploited the interactive potential of these media. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the results of a systematic study of the communication between the main political parties in Andalusia (the most populous region in Spain) and the citizenry on Twitter, with the aim of confirming whether or not it is really interactive and participatory. To this end, the spotlight is placed here on those parties most active online and on the way in which they foster interactivity, the subjects that they broach and the functions of their messages. The data were obtained from a content analysis of the tweets (n = 10,729) posted on the official profiles of the main Andalusian parties in 2020. The results indicate that there was no interactive communication with the citizenry, despite the fact that they were in much need of reassurance owing to the unprecedented situation to which the COVID-19 pandemic had given rise. The Andalusian political parties still use social networking sites for the one-way dissemination of information, which shows that they are not, in practice, horizontal and participatory spaces of communication, as the cyber-optimists, defending the innovation hypothesis, predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]