ABSTRACT
The internet and its different forms of communication has been hailed as providing enhanced opportunities for reshaping political communication by some authors, whereas others have been less optimistic. This chapter reviews research on social-media platforms' affordances for the key players of political communication and how these players use social media when they engage in political communication. Under a linguistic perspective, genres are abstractions derived from the analysis of texts which are used in a certain type of communicative situation for achieving the same communicative purpose. Most studies of the use of social media in political communication so far have not been conducted within an explicitly linguistic, discourse-analytic or pragmatic framework, but rather, in the fields of political science and communication studies. In political science, the use of Web 2.0 communication tools in politician-citizen communication has been studied almost exclusively in the context of Western liberal democracies.
