Local Representation and Campaign on Facebook. Do Legislators use Social Media to Foster Accountability?

There is extensive research on how legislative candidates use electoral campaigns to make promises for future behaviour. The mandate theory of representation looks at campaigns as opportunities to make pledges, and help citizens decide if the given candidates are likely to be ‘good’ representatives. Nevertheless, there is little knowledge about whether candidates use election campaigns to foster accountability related to their previous terms as Members of Parliament. Our paper looks at the relationship between what MPs do in office and how their campaign from the latter perspective within the context of Hungary. Our main questions is if single member district candidates who ask a larger amount of locally oriented questions in parliament during their time as MPs advertise local issues more frequently on Facebook. We use questioning data from 2010-2014 and correlate local orientation with campaign data from the 2014 wave of the Comparative Candidates Survey and a unique dataset recording candidate posts on Facebook.