Not quite my tempo: Measuring and explaining the professionalization of governments’ social media usage in multiple EU countries

In the last decade, the Social Media platforms have become important channels of instructional communication, for multiple levels of government, in modern democracies. These tools have allowed those governments to bypass the traditional media and, not only inform a large amount of citizens, but also interact and collaborate with them. While the results of that communication, and interactions, may vary considerably between countries and institutional actors, it is undeniable that the Social Media have become invaluable instruments to increase administrative transparency and promote public engagement. It is therefore important to study the adoption and use of Social Media in governance as those applications can, under certain conditions, bolster the quality of our democratic institutions. In recent years, the literature has been paying increasingly more attention to governments’ use of Social Media, primarily relying on quantitative metrics to analyze the determinants of its usage/engagement, as well as the characteristics of the participants of those networks. This paper contributes to this growing literature by combining quantitative metrics with automated content analyses of a popular Social Media, the Twitter, to create two novel measure of Social Media i) professionalization and ii) centralization, based, respectively, on assessments of content quality and lexical similarity in social media posts. Moreover, this paper applies that original method to the official Twitter accounts of national government cabinets, from multiple EU countries, to achieve three main research goals. The first one is to assess, within the EU, the variation in national governments’ levels of Social Media usage, professionalization, and centralization. The second one is to thoroughly explore the relationships between those variables. We are interested in testing whether high levels of centralization are associated with higher levels of professionalization and users’ levels of interaction with those official accounts. Finally, the third objective of this paper is to explore whether certain characteristics of governments (i.e., being a coalition), political parties (i.e., ideological leaning, government experience) and government officials (i.e., age and gender) affect, to some extent, the levels of Social Media professionalization, centralization and users’ engagement with the official accounts and their respective content. By developing an automated method to assess levels of professionalization and centralization in governments’ online communication, and mapping multiple EU countries with those indicators, this paper aims at giving both a theoretical and methodological contribution to the ongoing study of Government’s use of social media. On the one hand, this study will allow us to know more about cross-country variation, regional divides, and important determinants of governments’ professionalization and centralization online strategies. This contribute is particularly important considering the literature’s major focus on single-country case studies. On the other hand, this new method can be easily applied, in future studies, to other countries, government levels, and social media platforms. This possibility will not only expand our knowledge about government’s use of new communication technologies, but it will also open another door to the study of the effects of online institutional communication.