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Social Media Adoption and Popularity of Members of the European Parliament

Published: 16 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The present study 1 examines the usage of social media (i.e., Facebook and Twitter) by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) of the current legislative term. Specifically, it tests the impact of several predictors on MEPs' social media adoption and popularity as measured by the number of social media supporters. Differences in social media usage of MEPs were found to be explained by variables such as parliamentarians' gender, Europarty affiliation, and country-of-origin. Moreover, results suggest that social media popularity of MEPs could be predicted by the European region form which political actors originate, the ideology of their Euro-party affiliation, and the type of committee in which MEPs are assigned. In addition, the study sheds light on how the two platforms (Facebook and Twitter) differ in regards to the factors that impact MEPs' social media popularity.

References

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Vergeer, M., Hermans, L., & Cunha, C. 2013. Web campaigning in the 2009 European Parliament elections: A cross-national comparative analysis. New Media & Society, 15(1), 128--148.
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Nulty, P., Theocharis, Y., Popa, S. A., Parnet, O., and Benoit, K. 2016. Social media and political communication in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. Electoral studies, 44, 429--444.
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Wilde, P., Michailidou, A., and Trenz, H. J. 2014. Converging on Euroscepticism: Online polity contestation during European Parliament elections. European Journal of Political Research, 53(4), 766--783.
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Larsson, A.O. 2015. The EU Parliament on Twitter---Assessing the permanent online practices of parliamentarians. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 12(2), 149--166.
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Karantzeni, D. and G. Gouscos, D. (2013). eParticipation in the EU: Refocusing on social media and young citizens for reinforcing European identity. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 7(4), 477--500.
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Vaccari, C., & Nielsen, R. K. 2013. What drives politicians' online popularity? An analysis of the 2010 US midterm elections. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10(2), 208--222.
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Vergeer, M., Hermans, L., and Sams, S. 2013. Online social networks and micro--blogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign style. Party Politics, 19(3), 477--501.
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Obholzer, L., and Daniel, W. T. 2016. An online electoral connection? How electoral systems condition representatives' social media use. European Union Politics, 17(3), 387--407.
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Williams, C.B. and Gulati, G.J. 2010. Communicating with constituents in 140 characters or less: Twitter and the diffusion of technology innovation in the United States Congress. SSRN, http://ssrn.com/paper=1817053.
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Nielsen, R. K., & Vaccari, C. 2013. Do people "like" politicians on Facebook? Not really. Large--scale direct candidate-to-voter online communication as an outlier phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 7: 2333--2356.
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Whitaker, R. 2011. The European Parliament's Committees: National party influence and legislative empowerment, London: Routledge.
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Yordanova, N. 2009. The rationale behind committee assignment in the European Parliament: Distributive, informational and partisan perspectives. European Union Politics, 10(2), 253--280.

Cited By

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  • (2023)Political communication on social media in Latin America: unequal use of Twitter by members of parliamentEl Profesional de la información10.3145/epi.2023.may.16Online publication date: 3-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Members of the European Parliament on Social Media: Why Do They Use Facebook and Twitter?Political Studies Review10.1177/1478929922108244421:2(412-421)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MISNC '18: Proceedings of the 5th Multidisciplinary International Social Networks Conference
July 2018
177 pages
ISBN:9781450364652
DOI:10.1145/3227696
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 July 2018

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Author Tags

  1. ACM proceedings
  2. European Parliament
  3. MEP
  4. committees
  5. social media adoption
  6. social media popularity

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MISNC '18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 97 submissions, 59%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Political communication on social media in Latin America: unequal use of Twitter by members of parliamentEl Profesional de la información10.3145/epi.2023.may.16Online publication date: 3-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Members of the European Parliament on Social Media: Why Do They Use Facebook and Twitter?Political Studies Review10.1177/1478929922108244421:2(412-421)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022

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