Prove your leadership if you can! Digital impression management in political leadership

This article examines how political leaders construct leadership through digital impression management during electoral campaigns and how these strategies are associated with audience engagement. Drawing on leadership theory, we distinguish between universal, or generalised role-based, prototypicality and group prototypicality, and conceptualise negative opponent-focused communication as contrastive leadership construction. We analyse Facebook posts published by incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and challenger Péter Márki-Zay during the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election. Using quantitative content analysis and negative binomial regression models, we assess how different signalling strategies are associated with total reactions and Love reactions, interpreted as indicators of engagement and affective resonance rather than direct impression formation. The findings reveal no uniform pattern of audience response. Positive universal prototypicality was associated with higher engagement in Márki-Zay’s communication but with lower engagement in Orbán’s. Group-based signalling was central to both campaigns but showed more limited and uneven associations, with positive group representation linked to stronger affective engagement in Orbán’s communication. Negative opponent-focused strategies were associated with increased overall engagement, particularly for Márki-Zay, but were less effective in eliciting positive affect. The study contributes to leadership theory by conceptualising digital impression management as a relational process in which leadership claims acquire significance through their reception within particular leader–follower contexts.