Keeping an Eye on the People: Who Has Access to MPs on Twitter?

Abstract

Twitter is credited for allowing ordinary citizens to communicate with politicians directly. Yet few studies show who has access to politicians and whom politicians engage with, particularly outside campaign times. Here, we analyze the connection between the public and members of parliament (MPs) on Twitter in the Netherlands in-between elections in 2016. We examine over 60,000 accounts that MPs themselves befriended or that @-mentioned MPs. This shows that many lay citizens contact MPs via Twitter, yet MPs respond more to elite accounts (media, other politicians, organized interests,. . .), populist MPs are @-mentioned most but seem least interested in connecting and engaging with "the" people, and top MPs draw more attention but hardly engagebackbenchers are less contacted but engage more.

Twitter and Facebook: Populists’ double-barreled gun?

“… 10. The number of media accounts is similar to the one reported by Spierings et al (2018), who use a different sample of data. …”

“…First, to establish whether the @-mentioned account was a media account, we followed the procedure developed by Spierings et al (2018). We applied an automated search in the accounts’ screen names and self-given descriptions using identifier words, such as “journalist” (in German, Dutch, and Swedish), “political reporter” (Spierings et al, 2018) as well as the labels of important news venues for each country (e.g. NPO, RTL, Der Standard, Riksmedia, Sveriges Radio).…”

“…This has been particularly the case with interactivity. While one can expect that “members of populist parties may be particularly likely to use social media to engage the public” (Tromble, 2018b: 696), in practice studies found them to engage less , both in general (Jacobs and Spierings, 2018; Tromble, 2018b; Waisbord and Amado, 2017) and specifically with ordinary citizens (Spierings et al, 2018). 4…”

“…Moreover, and second, even though Facebook has a far broader user base, the focus of the existing studies is on Twitter (e.g. Jacobs and Spierings, 2018; Spierings et al, 2018; Tromble, 2018a, 2018b; Waisbord and Amado, 2017; Wells et al, 2016). And the few studies that do examine Facebook, highlight a third limitation of the existing literature: they only examine to what extent all types of political actors use a populist communication style (Engesser et al, 2017b; Ernst et al, 2017; Zulianello et al, 2018).…”

Legislators, organizations and ties: Understanding interest group recognition in the European Parliament

“…Politicians are no exception. In addition to its important role as a communication-tool with voters (Daniel et al 2019), Twitter's relevance as a social network for politicians is suggested by analyses showing they mostly follow other elite actors: particularly other politicians, but also interest groups (Spierings et al 2019). We argue MEPs (and/or their assistants) follow organizations whom they consider as relevant in their professional/social networks and with whom they may have even engaged previously.…”