Old Rules for New Technologies: Institutional Responses to Social Media Use By Local Councillors

This paper explores the ways in which elected councillors in England are using social media communication platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to reframe their roles as representatives largely outside the formal local government structures. A detailed study of practice in four local authorities, urban and rural, shows that although local councillors are traditionally ‘institutionally embedded agents’ (Bell 2011), the challenging external context created by the rapid rise of social media use by citizens means that some politicians are developing new ways of working which are outside the institutional environment. The paper calls attention to the failure of the current institutional responses to political social media use at the local level and asks whether new informal rules in use (Lowndes 2006) are beginning to emerge. The current formal constitutional arrangements which shape and constrain councillors’ public behaviour, it is argued, have not provided a clear set of rules for social media use and in the subsequent uncertainty new forms of policy development have arisen, driven by the politicians themselves rather than by managers. Through case study analysis this paper shows how councillors’ social media use is largely decoupled from institutional arrangements and it adds to our understanding of how technological change is influencing councillors and local democracy.