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In this article, we analyze the use of social media by the members of the European Parliament. More specially, we examined whether members of the European Parliament use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. To reach our goal, we contacted all 705 members of the European Parliament by email. The vast majority of members of the European Parliament who decided to participate in our survey replied that they use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. One of the main differences most often mentioned was that Twitter is used for an international audience, and Facebook, for a national audience. Therefore, we decided to examine Facebook and Twitter posts on the accounts of all members of the European Parliament to see what languages predominate in their communication. We analyzed 253,660 Facebook posts and 485,862 tweets. We found that members of the European Parliament use their national languages almost exclusively on Facebook. On Twitter, the use of English significantly varies from country to country, and in some countries, members of the European Parliament only rarely use their national languages, as they aim for an international audience.

This study analyzes the use of Twitter by Colombian political elites during the Covid‐19 pandemic, employing qualitative and quantitative methods and techniques. We collected Twitter data on the Colombian president, the mayor of Bogota, and all the members of the Congress of Colombia. We then analyzed qualitatively the content of the most popular tweets sent by President Iván Duque, Mayor Claudia López, and Gustavo Petro, the leader of the opposition. We also analyzed the growth in the number of their followers during the pandemic. We found that the most popular tweets from Colombian opposition politicians were often related to criticism of the government. López also informed her constituency about the state of the capital. President Duque's most popular tweets were primarily informative. During the pandemic, all three politicians gained a significant number of Twitter followers.

In this article, we explore a phenomenon we call attendance-buying. Specifically, we investigate the case of buying the attendance of voters at political rallies. Politicians and political parties promise voters certain rewards if they come to listen to them at political meetings. Often, these rewards can be food or valuable prizes. We conducted a survey experiment to discover what effect this form of attendance-buying has in Czech municipalities with up to 1000 inhabitants. We focused on small municipalities, where such a strategy can be effective because of the small number of candidates compared to large towns. We found that the effect of promising free food and drinks for attending a rally surprisingly did not manifest. With this finding, we contribute to and extend upon the theme of vote-buying. Our research also has practical implications, as local-level candidates do not have to make these food and drink expenditures because interested citizens will attend political rallies regardless of these offers.

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