The Great Leveller? Comparing Citizen-Politician Engagement via Twitter in Three Countries

Social media are the great social leveler—or so some commentators would have us believe (cf. Shirky, 2011). Social media put the power of communication and information-sharing directly into the average person’s hands. They allow the common man and woman to reach out, to share ideas, to express desires and disappointments directly with those in power. At the same time, social media present opportunities for those in power, and especially for politicians, to improve their contacts with the common person—to both directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns and opinions of their constituents, free from the interference of intermediaries. This paper explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen-politician engagement and exchange is actually being fulfilled. Deploying an original dataset of all tweets from members of the lower legislative houses in three countries—the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States—as well as all tweets (from any actor, anywhere) that mention these politicians during October 2013, this paper addresses two sets of research questions in comparative perspective: (1) How likely are politicians to engage tweets from average citizens? Do politicians in these three countries use Twitter to engage such citizens more than they would in offline interactions? Or do they primarily engage elite actors (other politicians, lobbyists, journalists, etc.)? (2) When politicians and average citizens do engage one another via Twitter, what are the characteristics of these exchanges in terms of length, content (personalized vs. policy-oriented content), and tone? Do the characteristics of politicians’ exchanges with average citizens differ from those they hold with more elite actors? Finally, the paper adds tweet data for members of the US House of Representatives who ran for re-election in October 2014 in order to explore whether any of these dynamics vary between election and non-election periods.