Liderazgo y comunicación en la era del blogging político:Aproximación teórica, evidencia empírica y propuesta analítica.

Abstract

This article inquires into the particularities of the recent but crescent political instrumentation of the blogging phenomenon within the frame of the electoral campaigning in the Spanish local political system. The proposed theoretical framework considers the impact of the development and diffusion of the new ICTs and the Internet in the evolving model of political communication in the liberal democracies. In this line, it discusses the transformative potential of the electoral blogging practice and its capacity to alter the classic pattern of political interaction between political leaders and the citizenry. From this starting point, this article suggests the assumption of the electoral blog as an analytical category for the study of virtual communicative behaviour of the blogger-political leader when campaigning for the revalidation of his/her leadership. In so doing, it clarifies the dimensions, variables and indicators that facilitate the analysis of this subject.