How MPs Strategically Use Twitter to Signal Localness When it Matters for Their Career

Social media are a useful tool for politicians to signal to voters what they care about. Without the intermediary of the media politicians can directly communicate to voters how constituency-oriented they are. We argue that politicians use social media to strategically signal localness especially in election times and when the electoral system offers incentives to cultivate a personal vote. We use a newly collected population sample of 1.37 million tweets of elected national MPs in two parliamentary systems (Germany and Switzerland) over a time period of 10 years (2009-2019). We analyse these historical Twitter data with a detailed registry of geographical names and combine this with detailed biographical information on these politicians and their career stages. This design allows us to analyze the use of local cues over the whole parliamentary career. Our findings suggest that politicians indeed strategically use local cues at crucial stages in their careers and that this has implications on how we see the democratic value of social media.