‘This Is Me’: Spanish Politicians’ Self-Presentation on X/Twitter Bios

Following Goffman’s (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, 1959) framework on self-presentation and his distinction between front- and backstage, this chapter studies how Spanish members of parliament (MPs) perform self-presentation on their X/Twitter bios. More specifically, we aim to answer these research questions: to what extent does the politicians’ gender affect self-presentation strategies on their X/Twitter bio? And to what extent does the politician’s ascription (left wing vs. right wing) influence their self-presentation strategies on their X/Twitter bio? To that purpose, the whole census of the Spanish Parliament was considered and the X/Twitter bios of its 350 MPs manually collected. The analysis followed a mixed-methods approach, where all the bios were first analysed following a thematic analysis with the aid of NVivo. Results were then quantified, and statistical tests were used to determine whether the two variables under scrutiny rendered significant results. Results show that both variables (political ascription and gender) play a statistically significant role in the way Spanish MPs present themselves. Thus, it was observed that political male right-wing MPs’ behaviours seem to parallel those of female left-wing MPs, regarding the use of emoji and other strategies such as the use of inspirational quotes or the references to their families.