Portuguese political party leaders on Twitter: purpose, narrative style, content, and structure of published tweets.

In this article we describe how Portuguese political party leaders use Twitter as a communication tool, in a longitudinal perspective, in several moments of the political calendar, including the precampaign and election campaign periods of the 2022 parliamentary elections. The main goal is to understand how intense the use of Twitter is and identify communication patterns of use of this tool. The data is made up from a sample of 1571 tweets, published by Portuguese political party leaders of PS and PSD (traditional parties that have run the government) and BE and Chega (more recent parties, on the left and right, of the party landscape), collected in specific periods throughout 2021 and 2022. The tweets were subsequently submitted to the content analysis method and worked informatically through the MAXQDA program. The results reveal that Twitter is part of the communicative strategies of the Portuguese political party leaders throughout the year but in the pre-campaign and electoral campaign periods. They show that Twitter is used for the dissemination of the party leaders' daily agendas, becoming a self-referential communication mechanism. For the opposition party leaders, Twitter is a new arena for political confrontation and is used to criticize or respond to political opponents. With few exceptions, Twitter is not used to present dimensions of the personal life of party leaders. The structure of the tweets tends to be complex, aggregating text and images or video, which shows a care in the way party leaders communicate through Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]