Playing (Parliamentary) Roles Online: Individual Characteristics of MPs and Twitter Activity

The model of partisan parliamentary representation that has been characteristic for the relationships between citizens and legislators for most of the post-war period in Europe has arguably declined with partisan dealignment. With the erosion of linkages between parties and their traditional clienteles, legislators cannot claim to represent their constituents solely based on their party affiliation and the corresponding party platforms. This has led research to look at individualized parliamentary behavior and to evaluate whether it contributes to re-connect legislators to their constituents. While research on “classic” parliamentary behavior has evaluated the potential for individualized activities such as speech making (Bäck et al. 2019) or the use of parliamentary questions (Däubler 2019), relatively little attention has been devoted to how MPs use social media for the same purposes. This gap is surprising since individual legislators are comparatively unconstrained in using social media and their habits may therefore provide information on how MPs signal their political agendas, how they promote their parliamentary activities or how and why they interact with other politicians and parties. With this paper, we aim to contribute in closing this gap by investigating whether MPs of different backgrounds in terms of parliamentary roles, mandate type, career stages or biographical features use social media differently. More specifically, we focus on MPs’ activity on Twitter as it presents several advantages compared to other social media sites: First, communication is publicly available even in cases when MPs interact with voters or with other political actors. Second, adoption rates among MPs are high and politicians use Twitter to broadcast in concise messages their day-to-day political work (Ecker 2017), and third, Twitter data allows us to cover the entire legislative term. Building on the literature about individualized legislative behavior and parliamentary roles, we argue that the thematic focus and the tone of individual MPs’ behavior in social networks is determined by an interplay of his/her position within the party hierarchy and the partisanness of the role he/she holds in parliament (e.g., Dolezal et al. 2017). This way, we theorize about the extent to which different types of MPs use social media to build individual reputations and how social media might have reshaped the division of labor concerning party communication. We test our theoretical expectations by combining information on individual MP characteristics with Twitter text data for the current, 19th Bundestag. Besides having a high adoption rate for Twitter, the German parliament serves as a particularly interesting test case for our theory since institutional differences – most importantly the mixed-member electoral system – create a complex repertoire of legislators’ role behaviors (Zittel et al. 2019). Our empirical analyses assess how MPs differ in thematic focus as well as in the tone they use to engage with their competitors. First results indicate that these differences follow our theoretical expectations.