Online Platforms and Political Voices: An Examination of Political Representation Practices through the Social Media Pages of Women Politicians in Kenya

This study investigates the utilization of social media platforms, specifically Facebook and Twitter, by women politicians in Kenya as avenues for political communication and representation.
Highlighting the significance of women’s voices in fostering a robust representative democracy, the study adopts a constructivist approach to explore political representation practice. It scrutinizes the representative assertions made by these women leaders on their social media platforms, analyzing the strategies they employ, and the identities they project. Furthermore, the underlying ontological foundations upon which this practice is based are examined, alongside the challenges that these women leaders encounter in online engagements. Ultimately, the study concludes with an examination of the political representation modes that emerge out of this inquiry.
The study integrates diverse data sources to explore the landscape of political representation in Kenya. Specifically, it leverages social media data retrieved from the Facebook and Twitter (Currently known as platform X) pages of 20 women politicians through web scraping. This data is complemented with semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 10 women politicians, 12 citizens and 5 social media administrators. Additionally, the study conducts 3 FGDs involving 25 citizens from distinct locales: an urban setting, a peri-urban area, and a rural setting, for the purpose of capturing the varied perspectives of Kenya’s citizenry regarding political representation in the country.
Subsequently, the study employs a combination of discourse and thematic analyses to scrutinize the data. Discourse analysis is leveraged to examine social media data, scouting for underlying meaning within the texts and analyzing the meaning of these texts in the Kenyan context. Thematic analysis, on the other hand, is employed to explore patterns and overarching themes that emerge out of the interviews and FGDs.
The findings of this study reveal a complex and multifaceted online political representation practice. Notably, the study reveals that women leaders in Kenya engage with an array of representative issues on these platforms including infrastructure and development, sustainability, and governance. Moreover, the study notes that these leaders employ a spectrum of strategies in political representation including performative self-representation strategies, clientelism, and evidence-based politics. The study also unveils communal undertakings and spiritualism as fundamental ontologies that shape the practice of political representation in Kenya. Ultimately, it is evident that while digital platforms offer a liberating avenue for the expression of women’s voices in Kenya, they also impose significant constraints stemming from cultural norms.