Overcoming incumbency advantage: the importance of social media on- and offline in Zambia’s 2021 elections

Abstract

President Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) used a range of incumbency advantages to tilt the playing field in their favour in the run-up to Zambia’s 2021 elections and, as a result, were more visible offline than the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) and its flagbearer, Hakainde Hichilema. In this paper, we draw on an original survey of party officials and activists and semi-structured interviews to consider the role of social media in the UPND’s victory. We show how the two dominant political parties invested heavily in social media, but how the UPND’s online messaging proved more persuasive and spread offline, and how social media facilitated the UPND’s political mobilisation and vote protection efforts in the face of a highly uneven playing field. Social media thus played an important role in unseating the incumbent, but not because the election was won online, or because social media provided a uniquely “social” form of communication. Instead, social media helped to facilitate the flow of information across a heavily controlled media ecosystem in which face-to-face communication remained key. In making this argument, we highlight the significant impact of social media on users and non-users alike, even in a context of relatively low internet penetration.