Political communication and social media: state of art from 2008 to 2018

This paper seeks to present the state of the art of research on political communication regarding social media from 2008 to 2018. To this end, 357 articles published in four academic Communication journals of the first quartile of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR-WoS) were analysed. In search of clarity, the paper follows the structure of Woltons triangle and explains the main effects that social media have over politicians, media and citizens. In general, the results show that current research is empirical and rarely focuses on comparative approaches. In addition, it puts emphasis on new technologies, placing them at the very core of the academic debate.