What to do with local digital publics? Attitudes of local councillors towards social media use in Hungary

While the emergence of social media is clearly shaping global communication networks, it also plays a crucial role in the development of local public spaces through the creation of densely connected local communities. Local politicians are drivers of the development of local digital publics as they play an important role in the political mobilisation of the local population. However, to date we know little about the role of social media use in local politics, while global trends and the impact of social media on national party politics have been widely researched. This paper aims to examine the factors that influence why and how local politicians use social media. We examine the attitudes of Hungarian local councillors towards social media use utilizing survey data of "Return of the Councillors" project and a large-scale data collection conducted to map the Facebook-based public sphere in each municipality of Hungary. The survey captured what practices councillors use on social media platforms and how they think about the role of these platforms in their political work, while the data collection focused on politically relevant pages and groups and their audience metrics (e.g. followers, membership). We argue that councillors’ social media behaviour and their attitudes towards the role of these platforms in their political work are shaped by municipal characteristics, structures of the local publics (e.g., channels of communication, activity of the population) as well as the personal characteristics of local politicians (e.g. party affiliation, role perception).