What Comes First? The Tweet, the Initiative or the Article?

Traditionally, politicians had roughly two ways via which they could promote their own issue agenda. First, by taking certain initiatives in parliament or government. Second, by getting into the news and attracting public attention with their preferred issues. During the past decennium, social media have given politicians a new way to directly interact with citizens and have allowed for a much more personal approach to political communication. In other words, individual politicians themselves can broadcast their own messages to a wide audience. Previous studies have shown that these three agendas are closely related. However, the question that remains is which agenda comes first? Do politicians get into the news because of their tweets or do they tweet about their appearance in the news media? Do politicians try to turn their tweets into action in parliament or do they simply tweet about their parliamentary work? In this paper we will try to understand the dynamics between three different individual political agendas by using a time series approach. We will use Twitter, parliamentary and media data from over 200 Dutch speaking Belgian politicians collected over a time period of several months. We hope to gain a better understanding of the personal communication strategies of individual politicians. Overall we expect Twitter to be at the centre of the communication strategies of politicians, by both influencing and strengthening the messages of the other two agendas.